JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

In my sixth decade of human existence and my fifth working for newspapers, I'm entitled to this official passage into fuddy-duddyness.

I hereby declare myself disgusted with the modern media of which I am a dinosaur.

In my tyro reporting days, the premium was on what we called "news judgment." It was a barometer measuring professionalism not necessarily by what you published, but also by what you had the good taste and good sense not to.

I earned favor with senior superiors by manning a weekend desk at a midsized daily newspaper and round-filing articles such as the one that moved across the wire about a gubernatorial candidate's teenage son getting a DWI.

Sadly, a teenager driving drunk was not news. That this kid's father was running for governor was no reason to single him out. My boss praised me for this judgment and told me he was going to put me in for a raise.

He said to keep an eye on the case, of course. If the youngster got any special treatment, then there'd be a story, you see. But it would be a story not so much about the boy as his daddy and the integrity of the public servants of his judicial district.

Nowadays you have the Internet where raw, blind partisanship finds its outlet for unfiltered "free expression." You have newspapers regurgitating the partisan, anonymous and libelous outrages of the Internet. You have a television network hiring a right-winger to make up a movie that it airs as solemn fact about 9-11. You have another television network culminating the transformation from somber news to trivial celebrity by making a perky woman the nightly news anchorperson and having her flash a little leg while she invites viewers to come up with a signature sign-off for her.

Then a network executive compares her brave pioneering -- she is, after all, the first woman to sit alone full-time at a desk and read a TelePrompTer for 22 minutes a day on one of the original major networks -- to that of Jackie Robinson.

Some will call these criticisms of Katie Couric sexist. But I saw the other day that the big news at the New York fashion shows was the advent of men wearing shorts with matching suit coats and ties. So, let me say this: If Brian Williams leans against his anchor desk flashing low-thigh as he asks viewers to tell him what to say, I'll criticize that, too.

The cake was taken the other day. A right-wing Internet blog posted a link to an apparently homemade television commercial, one without any disclaimer or identifier, that featured women kissing women and men kissing men. Then it flashed the mug of a prominent Democratic politician. It alleged falsely that this Democrat wanted to allow people who behaved this way to get legally married.

Then a Republican columnist for several newspapers wrote about this sordid disgrace in vivid detail, without passing judgment. He ostensibly was seeking to illustrate seismic changes in modern political communication. But he had the effect, of course, of encouraging broader play for the disgusting lie and smear.

And now I seem to have fallen for the trap.

I may not be the dinosaur I thought, considering that I've managed to disgust myself.

Alas, it may be futile and anachronistic anymore to invoke "news judgment." The New York Times tried for weeks in the mid-90s not to mention an Arkansas woman who had been propped up at a partisan political gathering to unveil a he said/she said by which Bill Clinton supposedly had exposed himself to her years before.

Eventually the Times had to relent lest it be reduced to reporting without context that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that a sitting president could be sued, and that, in fact, this sitting president was about to get impeached.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.