MEDIA Ruminations on four decades in journalism BY BRIAN C. JONES

This is my 40th anniversary as a reporter. I began fresh out of college in 1964 at United Press International by mispronouncing my boss’s name. Next, I misspelled "Connecticut" — an especially grave error given how I was working in UPI’s Hartford bureau.

I have loved almost every minute of my career, including that rocky summer at UPI, where all the reporters were white men who wore white shirts and yelled into telephone headsets while churning out instant history on their typewriters. At lunch, they drank so much that they sometimes went missing for several days.

But lately, I have not been having a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings for journalism itself. It’s not that I would prefer the way it was done in UPI’s Hartford office. The writing was by formula and clichéd — one of the state’s leading politicians was always referred to as "the white-haired senator," as if that meant something. And the bureau’s list of daily stories expanded remarkably every noontime, after I’d been dispatched to buy early editions of the afternoon Hartford Times. The experienced writers would furiously rewrite the local stores and send them over the news wire as UPI’s own.

Journalism has learned much since then. It plunges into complex stories about science, technology, and business. Storytelling has become far more effective and compelling. Fewer subjects are off-limits simply because of the whim of newspaper owners or timidity about sexual and ethnic issues.

But there are plenty of disturbing developments, including the remarkable number of reporters who have been caught faking stories. This goes beyond headline-grabbing cheaters like Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley of USA Today. If you follow journalism Web sites, the national barrel has more than just a few bad apples. There is also the distressing turn toward stupid, pandering news about celebrities, and the conversion of ordinary people into celebrities because they’ve fallen victim to grisly murder and/or sex tragedies.

As corporations have swallowed up most newspapers, greed has replaced paternalism, and not only do too few owners control too many news outlets, most refuse to adequately finance their newsrooms. I’m appalled at national journalists at TV networks and flagship newspapers who have lost interest in even-handed reporting, piling criticism mercilessly on some politicians and letting others off too lightly.

I don’t immediately trust much of what I read or see or hear anymore — and that’s a change. My role models are only those journalists I know personally and can vouch for. Journalism has become a silly, unbalanced, shallow affair unworthy of anyone’s automatic confidence.

We should be moved, every day, that journalists give up their lives to get the news. So far this year, 17 journalists have been killed in Iraq, which compares to 13 such deaths there last year. For the most part, though, journalism — just like the church, sports, business, and government — has become a troubled affair. And I suspect that even those thieving drunks at UPI would be disturbed by what’s happening.