Reporters interviewing reporters
The flow of news that journalism is reporting has wandered from the actual flow of news. We've run out of time to wait for them to change.
by Dave Winer Sunday, January 1, 2017

On my walk today I tried to listen to the Face The Nation podcast, but I couldn't make it more than five minutes in because the entire cast of the show were other reporters or writers. The amount of insight per sentence is low. Lots of repetition of themes. As if we haven't been listening since 9/11. I hit the same wall listening the Dickerson interview with Colbert from last week's show. I found Colbert has no wisdom to offer other than Whoops! some big shit happened that we weren't expecting. We need much more.

They are all about normalizing everything, staying within the guidelines of their idea of how the political process works. Think of a road that has wandered away from the river it was following and is heading off into the desert. That's how I see what the news people are doing.

I think they mostly are historians, I think that's the path they are on, trying to fit our current situation into a historic context. And the politicians they generally cover hire lots of other history majors, so they have stuff to talk about and it's kind of relevant.

But the new administration is hiring from the pool of the people who stood at the podiums in the Republican debates, the worst of them. The croniest of the crones. These are not people who are steeped in history. So knowing history and talking to only other history majors is just going to throw you further off-course.

A new news flow has to boot up, and it certainly isn't coming from the world of professional journalism. We don't have a lot of time to get our shit together, btw.