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May 10, 2004
Gumshoeing
Journalists often lament the fact that the line between news and entertainment is blurring, so what's the answer? According to Maureen Orth, longtime Vanity Fair writer and author of The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex, doing proper journalism is the answer. According to Orth: While you can lament the idea that were living in this era of celebrity and personality, it also behooves the journalists here to get beyond the superficial and the spin and do the legwork and the research and the hard, hard work that takes to get the real story. A start might be if journalists made the effort "to critique celebrity foibles rather than just report them without question". She also said the media is "asleep at the wheel", and that opinion is increasingly masquerading as news. Fighting words. Orth made the comments to Berkeley graduate journalism students. The full report is at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2004/05/05_orth.shtml. Orth is a Berkeley alumna herself. Posted by belinda at May 10, 2004 02:20 PMEmail this