Bloggers and Mike Royko
I’m just finishing up a review of F. Richard Ciccone’s Royko biography “A Life in Print”.
In it, Ciccone describes Royko as having restored, temporarily, facts into the news media, especially newspapers. After World War II and before Royko, newspapers were shills for politicians and corporations.
Royko exposed the hypocrisy in politics and in news, and helped push the news revolution of the sixties and seventies.
Late in his life, Royko was disappointed (at best) with the turn the media took: away from facts, towards political correctness even when it benefited racists, and once again a willingness to regurgitate press releases as if they were news stories.
Anyway, I make the point in the review that bloggers are having the Royko effect on the media today. In his article at The Masthead, Phil Boas says similar things about how bloggers are a hope for modern news, not enemies of it.
- Bloggers: The light at the end of the newspaper’s tunnel
- “Engaged bloggers are voracious newspaper readers, too.”
- Mike Royko: A Life in Print
- Mike Royko, according to author and fellow newsman F. Richard Ciccone, was the heir to the Mencken responsibility of satirizing the powerful and protecting the weak. I believe he came close, but Ciccone’s book doesn’t show it.