Adversarial Reporters

Journalists aren’t elected, and they shouldn’t be concerned with their ongoing relationship to the viewer at home. They are professionals with a very difficult and important job. Perhaps it’s people like Jay Rosen who are part of the current problem between the press and the people.

In these particularly jingoistic times, the general public doesn’t want to hear or believe bad news about America. Kill the messenger! Never mind Iran-Contra; it’s those anti-American journalists that are the problem.

Rosen’s examples of acceptable interrogators are all taken from that champion of unreality--TV. This man is a professor?

Rosen insults our intelligence when he proclaims that to us it seems that our journalists have no compassion. Rosen would have journalists train in acting schools so they could convey a sense of having suffered a tragic disappointment in the past; the way Bogart did so masterfully.

I suggest that if we aren’t able to differentiate between what seems to be the truth about journalists and that which is the truth, we do not deserve to know it.

LARRY GALIZIO

Los Angeles