Cowardice in the Newsroom (crusading reporters bullied by Right-Wing extremists)

Miami Herald ^ | 9/6/04 | Wasserman

[pabianice]

News is a messy and elusive form of information.

Reporters don't just stroll through a meadow of stories in bloom and pluck a bouquet. What gets reported first depends on what journalists hear about. Then the story must seem interesting, significant or both. It has to be something that the journalists have the brains, will and resources to pursue. And they'll want to know what rival organizations make of it, what sources they routinely rely on say about it, and a multitude of other things.

Plus, news is a collaboration. It's a team effort, and regardless of how strictly the team is run, news reflects the collision of values, perspectives and passions of the people who create and produce it -- and their guesses as to what the reality they're chasing actually consists of.

That's a long way of saying that journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, that it always involves compromise and that there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process of producing it.

But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And I think 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. There's a transparency of motive here that, as long as they retain some minimal respect for fact, may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all of us.

The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. By that I mean those that aim to deliver a broadly informative report on current affairs to a demographically diverse audience that isn't defined by some overriding ideological predisposition. 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 uncomfortably 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 news of Iraq. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the softball story is nothing but a Pentagon publicist's brainstorm seized on by right-wing bloggers -- and the pressure to tell it 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. (emphasis added).

The underlying problem is that 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 reports become offerings -- payments really -- in a kind of intellectual extortion.

An angry, fearful time

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, and 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, even when that influence comes from the public they're honor-bound to serve. 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.

Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.

edward_wasserman@hotmail.com

[pabianice]

psychosis [sy.KO.sis] (n).

“The inability to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary. Psychosis is a term used to describe a severe mental illness. Psychotics are characterized by a variety of symptoms that most people consider abnormal. These include experiencing delusions, such as the notion that one is being persecuted or conspired against. Psychotics may see things which don't actually exist and hear Voices (i.e. God) when no one is around. They often exhibit compulsive, irrational, ritualized behavior, esp. when such behavior serves no purpose or is even harmful or disruptive to those around them. They show no concern for others but may exhibit total self-centered behavior. Includes sociopathy, schizophrenia.”

DSM-IV

“…and that’s MISTER Sh*thead to you, Airman!”

[Drango]

journalism ethics

Oxymoron. I wonder what he thinks about the AP making up boos?

[Semper Paratus]

He got his panties in a twist over a softball game?

[sauropod]

read later

[zeebob]

Hey, those are Marines! NOT AIRMEN

[EternalVigilance]

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.

This person is mentally ill, you're right.

But the struggle to not let it show is epic.

Alas for the author, the bias shows in the end, as it always does.

[pabianice]

Hey, those are Marines! NOT AIRMEN

Exactly.

[reformed_democrat]

The underlying problem is that 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.

Is this what I think he's saying -- News depends on what your truth is and how you tell it?

a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality

C'mon! This can't be a real article. It's from some freshman's Psych 101 term paper.

[TigersEye]

... but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience.

What comes to mind?

Homo lobby.
Feminists.
Enviro wackos.
Rainbow Coalition.
Hand Gun Control Inc.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

KERRYTHINK
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "Kerrythink" involved the use of Kerrythink.

[Brett66]

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.

It's obvious where Wasserman stands, now drop the pretense of being objective.

[AnAmericanMother]

Just D**N.

My daughter is looking at W&L (she wouldn't be majoring in journalism though.)

I had heard (from some pretty good sources, including recent graduates) that W&L was a conservative school. What gives?

Pinging the resident FR W&L guy . . .

[Steely Tom]

Oh my. Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.

Not just any old run of the mill professor, but the Knight professor of Journalism Ethics.

I'm in awe.

(steely)

[reformed_democrat]

We were just talking about this:

The underlying problem is that 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.[He's speaking of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy here] 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 reports become offerings -- payments really -- in a kind of intellectual extortion.

We always knew the MSM wrote opinion pieces, not facts. Now they're finally admitting it (and defending it -- LOL!) And they wonder why no one loves them anymore.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

"That's, Sergeant."

"Well if you were in the Navy, you'd be an airman."

"No, if I were in the Navy, I'd be an admiral."

Note: Yeah, I know he'd be a petty officer second class in the Navy, "airman" is an Air Force term, but why assume that Kerry knows that?

[Chipper]

This cannot be real. He must truly occupy the highest of the ivory towers to believe a word of what he wrote.

[Condor51]

This guy us a professor?!?!?
I think not. A stark raving mad leftist moon-bat is more like it.

[arasina]

This piece sounds a lot like F'n himself: blame the opposition for your incompetence. When the MSM has reached the point where they are attempting to explain their reasons for lying and spreading propaganda to the public, we know The New Media are making progress. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say we are WINNING...but then, TRUTH always wins.

[Grampa Dave]

What has this lunatic lib upset is simple. Thanks to the internet, Free Republic/Drudge and conservative blog sites, the maggots in charge of the media can't get by with the big lie any more.

A prime example was the homosexual activist, Tom Hays, who pretends to be a reporter for the Ass. Plicks, and his lies about the boos this weekend re GW and the crowd.

AP was forced to admit that the serial lying maggot, Hays, lied and got caught. At first the AP tried to hide the fact that their maggot activist wrote this hit piece against GW. That was shredded, quickly.

Now, the foundation of the lunatic left's pr wing for over 6 decades is being exposed.

This is the foundation of the lying lunatic left mediot arm of the DNC:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

-- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

Yo Wassermaggot, the lies of the mediot maggots will not fly any more. Those days are gone.

[DAC22]

My reply to Mr. Wasserman

The problem arises when the Clinton boo story is nothing but a Leftist AP reporters brainstorm seized on by Left-wing Main Stream Media -- and the pressure to tell it comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in USA politics, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base know as Democrats


I like your article a bit more with a few edits, hope you don't mind.

DC