Media needs to be skeptical, not cynical: Skeptics were big in USA Today founder Al Neuharth's comments Wednesday.
Discussing the state of media matters in 2003, Neuharth noted there were skeptics when he founded USA Today in September 1982 and critics today are warning about the decline of newspaper readership.
Further, Neuharth said he likes seeing more skeptics in media positions these days -- people whose outlook is preferable to the cynics the profession drew in the muckraking days after the Watergate story was broken by Woodward and Bernstein.
Too many in the 1970s joined the profession inclined to ferret out wrongdoing by government -- whether it existed or not, Neuharth said. That has turned around in the last 10 to 15 years, much to his pleasure. "There is a new breed of journalists coming out who are skeptics instead of cynics," he said.
Too many cynics make for a public that begins to mistrust the journalistic output, he said. However, Neuharth added, "the vast majority of journalists, in print and broadcast, really strive to be accurate and fair, and the vast majority of them succeed."
There is no mistaking, Neuharth said, the public's thirst for knowledge. The question is what source is going to provide that. With new media forms like the Internet moving in, those in print journalism definitely have their work cut out for them.
He recalled when TV cut into the news pie, and "the television generation was not reading newspapers," Neuharth said. "Now I think the Internet generation is not reading newspapers."
