Posted on 09/09/2004 7:31:10 AM PDT by ZGuy
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.
The attack doesn't come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact, the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.
The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. These are the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations, and they're losing their nerve.
I understand why. 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.
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.
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. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news become offerings - payments really - in a kind of intellectual extortion.
The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, when independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.
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.
Awwww. Maybe we should send him some cheese to go with his whine...
It feels so good to see Old Media squirm as it dies a slow, painful and well-deserved death...
Outstanding post! Journalism isn't brain surgery. It turns out that pretty much anyone can be a decent blogger (read "news editor"), even working part time.
Some of my leftist friends are stymied by Fox News. They insist that they lie and just make stuff up. I tried to explain to them that media bias usually doesn't manifest itself by reporting fake news. Media bias is mostly a function of excluding real news that doesn't fit an agenda.
When Fox runs a story and then 3 days later, it shows up in the New York Times, that's not Fox's "bias". That's a SCOOP. It used to be considered a GOOD thing.
Right. It seems there aren't many reporters left who are capable of gathering facts and writing them down in plain english.
How easily he excuses the bias that has been the cause of the awakening of the masses to the bald face distortions and slanted reporting of the anti-American communist news agencies.
That segment of zealots contains the majority of main stream Americans who have switched to Fox News to sop up slivers of fair reporting.
It is the minority of zealots, that dare to claim majority status, that makes up the major news networks that hate patriotism, nationalism, and the American culture. Their day is ending, and one cannot help but take pleasure at their discomfort.
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"a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors"
This seems to be a step up from right-wing extremists, being a warrior is a good thing, no? Especially when one is right.
Once again the Left demonstrates that it expects a complete, unchallenged monopoly or it will whine about how unfair life is.
...But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news ...
...But it's hard enough to get the story right, without...
Literally, this is a case of bitch, bitch, bitch.
As a graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism (late 80s), I agree with you.
I think part of the visceral reaction we see from those who run the "mainstream" media nowadays centers on the fact that there are news consumers today who can make news judgments on their own - and are no longer afraid to sing out when they feel wronged.
Most consumers can't perform the tasks that you and I were trained to do (although some, especially bloggers, can and do), but the point of the matter is that at least from an editorial standpoint, there are people who know at least as much as the editors. That frightens them, and the result is the pablum we see quoted by this writer.
I lost my respect for CNN during the invasion of Iraq, when Eason Jordan EVP and Chief News Executive of CNN, wrote an OpEd piece in (as I recall) the NY Times, defending CNN's news coverage from Iraq over the years.
In that article, he admitted that CNN routinely withheld information and flattered Saddam (I don't think he mentioned it in the article, but CNN's puff piece on his birthday party was one egregious example) in order to protect its access to Iraq. CNN even went so far as to withhold information that could have saved the lives of Saddam's sons-in-law who returned to Iraq from Jordan and were killed by him. If even refused to report on threats and torture of its own people.
What was the point of maintaining this access, if the access wasn't used to report the news?
The punchline of the story is that the Times apparently didn't find anything objectionable in Jordan's news decisions. I have not watched CNN for years, so I can't comment about its current coverage. I do know that the NY Times has gone beyond all boundries of common decency, and has utterly failed to uphold the first principle, that news belongs in the news pages and opinion belongs in the opinion pages and news-analysis pieces.
The NY Times used to be my secular bible. Today, I don't even buy it at airports, even for the crossword puzzle.
40 Days of Abu Garib prison stories by the NYT ring any bells?
HHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM???????????????????
Isn't that the theme of the Kerry Campaign?
Just the facts, bub, give us the facts. We didn't ask you to interpret them for us.
If Fox made stuff up, we would see a spate of articles about Fox's sloppy reporting. I can't recall a single one.
Let me get thsi straight. The author thinks he shouldn't provide both good news and bad news because the right wing demands it ? Shouldn't it be a concept that is germaine to accurate reporting ?
Excellent post. Don't you just love it?!
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