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I am reminded on a daily basis that journalism is dead. Sure news stories are being reported, but more and more, the reporters are zombies who cannot distinguish reality from fiction. Just today on CNN, Jeanne Moos filed a “fluff” piece on recently divorced French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip to the United States. Moos quips, “The last time there was a bachelor President in the White House was probably when Michael Douglas wooed Annette Benning in The American President.”

Uh…hold on a second. The American President is a movie, right? It’s fiction. Michael Douglas is an actor and I bet not one frame of that film was shot in the White House. So, Michael Douglas was not a bachelor President. He was playing a bachelor President in a fictional movie. When I was watching I was sure she was going to say James Buchanan, who was the last (and only) bachelor to be President of the United States. I can’t believe there is an editor, even an editor of the “humorous” and “offbeat” pieces that would let that quote pass. Oh, but the distributor of The American President is Castle Rock Entertainment, a company that is owned by Time Warner, the same company that owns CNN. Now I see. It’s not only bogus reporting, it’s Time Warner’s version of cross-selling. Excuse me while I drape the black cloth over my picture of Edward R. Murrow and go puke.

Ah, now that feels better. I shouldn’t be surprised, really. These are the same fools who believed and reiterated all the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (and how about those great ratings they got in the early days of the war).

KYW “News” Radio 1060 AM is the #1 rated radio station in the Philadelphia market. Every day, they run “business reports” by the very people whom their journalists are supposed to be covering. Fred Sherman of Royal Bank and Susan Springsteen of Morgan Stanley, people who have a vested interest in the state of the financial markets, report to us about the state of the financial markets. They even have web pages on KYW’s web site. It’s like they’re bragging that they have no journalistic standards. They need to take the word “News” out of “KYW News Radio”. How can that be considered journalism? Would it have been OK if Jeffrey Skilling was given space on the front page of the New York Times to report about how Enron was doing? KYW also has the news anchor people reading ads during their own shows. I’m sure some people are confused about what is editorial content and what is advertising. So much for the Chinese wall.