Funding In-Depth, Investigative Reporting as a “Charitable Matter”??

It’s being talked about, according to Bruce Shapiro…on Radio Australia!!

I listen every *morning via shortwave radio to “Late Night Live” with Phllip Adams which features “ideas and opinions from around the world.” It is the best talk radio I have ever listened to.  Some reasons why from part of Adams’ ABC bio:

Phillip Adams is a prolific and sometimes controversial broadcaster, writer and film-maker. As presenter of Late Night Live, he has interviewed thousands of the world’s most influential politicians, historians, archaeologists, novelists, theologians, economists, philosophers and sundry conversationalists. ‘It’s a privilege to present Late Night Live,’ he says. ‘No radio program, anywhere on earth, casts a wider net.’ Phillip’s laid-back approach has become a trade-mark for Late Night Live, as has his humour, curiosity, his ability to flesh out rare insights from his guests, and his amazing store of anecdotal knowledge.

Largely self-educated (he left school in his mid-teens) he’s the author of over 20 books, including The Unspeakable Adams, Adams Versus God, Talkback, Retreat From Tolerance and A Billion Voices. His writing has appeared in many of Australia’s most influential publications and he has been a contributor to The Times and The Financial Times in London, and to the New York Times.

And that’s just part of his resume…

The guest on July 29 was Bruce Shapiro. Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and correspondent for Salon as well as the Executive Director of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington.

Shapiro began his career on the fertile journalistic and political terrain of Chicago in the 1970s, and was a founding editor of the radical magazine Haymarket. He’s been the director of The Nation Institute’s Supreme Court Watch, a civil liberties watchdog; teaches investigative journalism at Yale University and, as co-convenor of the Dart Foundation Fellowship in Trauma and Journalism, is leading efforts to reform news reporting on violence.

He also co-authored a book with Jesse Jackson entitled “Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future” in 2001 and, in 2003, published “Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America.”

Shapiro spent the full hour with Adams. If you listen to the show (Link to audio here), you’ll hear some of the usual Obama talk that we’re used.  See below for details…

Eventually, however,  the talk turned to the state of journalism with Adams noting the demise of the L. A. Times weekly book review magazine just this past week.  It was second only to the New York TImes book review in importance and now it’s gone.

This is where the conversation really got interesting.  The  talk turned to the future of high-quality journalism (Minute 36:00 on the audio).   Shapiro said that it’s been a “terrible couple of years” in the news business.  Many of Shapiro’s friend in the news business have left or are in “profound anxiety” about the possibility of losing their jobs. Debt, technology, and lowered ad revenues have created a period of “huge change” in the industry.