"When You See News As a Product...It's Impossible To Really Serve Democracy"

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrett made headlines last week when she resigned from New York Newsday - where she had worked since 1988.

In a blistering memo to her colleagues at the paper, she ripped Newsday's parent company - the Tribune Company - for putting profit over quality journalism. In the memo announcing that she is going to work full time at the Council on Foreign Relations, she wrote that "All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations - and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions." She went on to write, "This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness."

She continues: "It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake."

Laurie Garrett joins us today in our studio. She is the author of "The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust." She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her reporting on the Ebola virus. She's also won a Polk Award and a Peabody and was finalist for another Pulitzer in 1998.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/151255