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September 09, 2004
'Mainstream Media' says "we want no competition"
[hattip: Glenn Reynolds]
Poor MSM, they are feeling their exclusive control of the flow of information slipping and they are whining like the cliquish junior high school girl who finds her popularity slipping after she and her friends have pulled one too many mean-spirited practical jokes on the less popular kids.
Editor John Carroll of the LA Times snarled about "pseudo-journalists." Walter Cronkite only likes the internet as a "reseach tool" and adds he is "dumbfounded" that "there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future." Now moving into the rarified ivory towers of Priestly Professorship of Journalism, we can now see just why so many of us rubes are having a hard time with Professional Journalists dedicated to Bringing the Truth. Can I hear a Hallelujah, Brothers and Sisters!
Writes Edward Wasserman today [site requires registration ... visit bugmenot.com]
News is a messy and elusive form of information. Journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, always involving compromise, and there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process.
But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And that commitment is now under assault.
I don't want "The Truth", thank you very much. If I want to listen to lectures about "The Truth" I'll go to church and listen to my pastor. What I want is facts presented as completely and as dispassionately as possible. "The Truth" belongs on the Editorial/Opinion page.
I guess I take for granted I grew up in a home with a father that started his business career working for newspapers in Los Angeles. Citizen News in the 50's, the Examiner before it merged with the Herald. Then he moved into corporate advertising. I grew up well-educated on mass communications and the difference between reporters and editorial writers. What I know is that "professional journalists" with a college degree in same are a relatively new phenomenon. Most reporters then came up through the ranks apprentices, men who may have started as paperboys, who eventually honed their instinct in ferreting out the facts of a story. They didn't look down on the great unwashed masses, they knew they were part of the masses and they didn't suppose it was up to them to pre-digest and selectively present a story so their readership would be spared the strain of coming to their own conclusion. Wasserman easily presents the basic contempt Professional Journalists have for their audience.
It's hard now even to write for publication without being aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.
Oooo! Forget "gadfly," forget "fact-checking"... The Priests of Journalistic Truth are under assault by warriors! And just so the rubes know who these scary people are, they are a cadre of rightists!
If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And - here it gets interesting - will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to play softball?
Now, both stories may well be integral to the news. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the pressure to tell the softball story comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.
Hey, Ed. Why don't you ask yourself why the audience (and it's just a tad more than a "fragment") is "hostile and suspicious." Couldn't have anything to do with Journalists presenting their own Truth instead of the facts would it?
News then becomes a negotiation - not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience.
Damn, it's that audience thing again. Can't we just get rid of 'em, have the Government (the correctly installed Leftist government of course) fork up our paycheck and we can then completely ignore the audience?
Resisting undue outside influence is part of what news professionals do. But it's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is.
Yes, Ed, it's really messy that some people, who have decided they don't have to fork over tens of thousands of dollars to pay your salary to Ordain them as Professional Journalists committed to The Truth [hallelujah!], may use the information readily available to write and present their own stories and some of those stories will expose your acolytes as being less than truthful or factual. It's really messy that the AP was caught lying, that the stories of US military committing acts of good only comes about through the "bullys" and "rightist warriors" outside the pale of your Church of Journalistic Truth.
Heavens, you might actually need to retrain to teach a real subject, like science, math or business!
(also posted at redstate.org)
Posted by Darleen at September 9, 2004 10:15 AM
Comments
An interesting read! I'll consider what you said over my christmas holidays. I want Grand good Theft Auto: San Andreas for Christmas!
Posted by: Guys And Dolls [1955] at December 12, 2004 01:21 PM