What are highly-paid, corporate journalists' responsibilities to the public?

After watching some highly-paid, broadcast "journalists" cover the Occupy Wall Street protests, I have this question: Just what is their responsibility to help the American public with issues that affect their everyday lives, help solve their problems and thus achieve a more equitable, sustainable society?

CNN recently launched a new show, "OutFront" by Erin Burnett, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs and CNBC, and is now engaged to marry a Citigroup executive. (Don't forget, Citigroup is one of the top 4 of 10 major banks that now control 54 percent of all assets).

CNN's Erin Burnett "took a look" at the protest movement on Wall Street, didn't do any research, didn't interview any of the organizers, talked to a few uninformed people there and said, "Seriously?":



Even The Hollywood Reporter and Forbes' Eric Jackson took her to task for her snarky, condescending attitude.

Besides ridiculing them, there's also the example of the American Spectator editor who creepily admits to wanting to discredit the Occupy Wall Street's otherwise nonviolent mass movement. He led a small group of protesters in a confrontation that turned into a pepper-spraying melee at the D.C. Air and Space Museum, not at all what was intended (in audio) by the organizers.

Burnett and others such as Bill O'Reilly, not only claim they don't understand what Occupy Wall Street is about, but in fact, ridicule and turn the blame on the masses themselves, a distraction from the real issues that contribute to their economic suffering.

It's as if they want the public to forget that this global economic crash of 2008 was caused by reckless, speculative, unregulated financial capers on Wall Street, which has steadily been deregulated since the Glass Steagall Act was repealed in 1999. Glass Steagall had been enacted in 1933, during the Great Depression, mandating separation between speculative investment firms and commercial banks, which are backed by depositors.

And, none of those responsible for the economic crash of 2008 have yet gone to prison. During the Savings and Loan scandal of 1980s and 1990s, thousands of bankers went to jail. The fact is, the crash of 2008 also exacerbated an underlying, growing stagnation of real wages and job creation for American citizens. Due to outsourcing, technology gains, tax cuts for the rich and corporate tax loopholes over the past 30 years, the top 1 percent got exponentially richer to the point where they have as much wealth as the bottom 250 million.

And it's not enough that these highly-paid journalists aren't doing their duty of helping ordinary American connect the dots. Why does it take Jon Stewart's "spoofing" of news journalism, the only way to effectively get important points across? Remember Stewart's piece with CNBC's Jim Kramer about its role in cheerleading the financial escapades of a high-stakes Wall Street casino gone amok?

Thank God, for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews for taking a much more responsible role of informing the public, counterbalancing the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Erin Burnett. But there aren't enough of those MSNBC hosts; and they don't dominate print and radio like O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity, and until recently -- Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh -- as well as a whole host of "dittoheads" across of hundreds of smaller radio stations owned by ClearChannel.

So many of my colleagues in the local news business are grossly underpaid to do their jobs. In my 12 years of working for the daily newspaper I work for, many reporters coming out of journalism school have often had to take second jobs just to keep on providing important news in their communities. Many of them leave to join corporate public relations for higher pay.

Journalists are public servants -- undergoing the rigors of bringing news that affects their communities, for such little pay. Thankfully, there are also nonprofit news organizations, which don't rely on advertising for their survival, and can thus focus on longer-range, more complex socioeconomic issues. But there aren't enough nonprofit news sites, either.

However, it is enthralling for me to see people who have done enough thinking and researching of their own respond intelligently when one of those would-be journalists comes around. Here's a Fox reporter with OWS supporter Jesse LaGreca, in an interview that apparently has never seen the light of day on the Fox News channel:

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It took the Occupy Wall Street's media team to capture this episode and make it public.