How many of you knew that today was International Women's Day? Me either until I read a memo from a reporter who is leaving the Newsday newspaper. Anyways, that is all irrelevant. I don't know what International Women's Day is all about, and I don't have the time to find out tonight, sorry ladies, nothing against you, but the memo is what I really want to talk about.

This reporter officially separates from Newsday today. I didn't know much about her before reading this memo, but what she has to say in this memo is worth mentioning here, as the original goal of this blog was to hold the media up to a magnifying glass and see what we can see.

Ok this memo was largely ignored by the mainstream press and soon enough you will know why. Having said that, the only place where I could find this memo in its entirety is here. However you will have to scroll down to the heading: "Laurie Garrett's memo to Newsday colleagues".

Please forgive me, as I am going to quote mostly verbatim, and it will be lengthy.

" Dear Newsday Friends and Colleagues, On March 8th -- International Women's Day -- my leave of absence from Newsday ends... ...I don't want to disappear from the Newsday scene without saying a few words. Indulge me.

Ever since the Chandler Family plucked Mark Willes from General Foods, placing him at the helm of Times Mirror with a mandate to destroy the institutions in ways that would boost dividends, journalism has suffered at Newsday. The pain of the last year actually began a decade ago: the sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom. The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships. In 1996 I personally confronted Willes on that point, and he publicly confirmed that the new regime was one in which even the number of newspapers sold was irrelevant, so long as stock returns continued to rise.

The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique. All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity.[Emphasis added] When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way."

Ok, breather. I know its alot of long paragraphs. The point I want to highlight is that stock prices and corporate profits have become more important than actual journalism, or even newspaper circulation. And the idea of a 4th Estate of government is gone. And this should alarm us all. Right, left, Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, smurf, etc.

"Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The 'His Girl Friday' romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story...

...Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of 'snappy news', sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner...

...This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, 'If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.') fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking."

Ok, that is enough, read the rest if you want. I of course strongly agree that our media is broken, and it needs to be fixed if we are going to preserve our democracy as we know it. Yes you may think I am being dramatic, but I really think this is what is happening. We need to wake up as a society and deal with this. Enough said, this post is already way too long.