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Posted on 09/06/2004 7:08:55 AM PDT by 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
Wasserman needs to get a job, one that makes him a productive member of society.
...to a left-wing, commie, gun-grabbing, Bush-hating liar.
Pray for the students who have to sit through this pantload's classes. Fabrications are beauty, and beauty is fabrications.
I believe that is a Marine Kerry is speaking to!
So the press always gives in to the loudest most intimidating bully in any dispute. That explains why they always take up our enemies cause.
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LOL
Bullied by the conservative right wing in the news room, my putrified flat foot. News is directed by homosexuals and Communists with an adjenda. This campaign season should demonstrate to all how the press is only a propaganda machine for the left.
Speaking of manipulation, I think Wasserman must be talking about stories like the Kerry / Edwards team stopping by Wendys for a photo-op with Marines and Edwards' smarmy story about celebrating their aniversary there every year; then going back to have their "real" dinner.
Boy, howdy!
He has a lot to say about Fox News at his website EW
OXYMORON ALERT!!!!!
When will these people stop calling themselves professionals? Journalism is a trade, not a profession. When it becomes certified, then it will be a profession. Until licensing or certification testing becomes a reality, news whoring is mererly a trade.
"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 ofundesirable political tilttruth and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors."
Typical liberal has to make the argument one of emotion rather than facts. They wouldn't have reason to cower and fear the "rightest warriors" if the facts were on their side.
Thanks to the Internet these guys have lost their power, and they know it.
I'm a activist, not an extremist.
I would indeed agree with the notion that the big, leftist mainstream media is dead meat when it comes to their "support the big lie" mode of operation, either through the deliberate reporting of liberal lies and spin, or through deliberate omissions, which is classic of their style of news manipulation.
Kerry, like most far-leftists, left the real world behind a long time ago. Tell the lies -- they will become truth. Their self-serving wishes are their "truth". Psychotics and alot worse. Lying is the modus operandi of the day. The great change for America is that their lying now only feeds their locked-step voters, the YELLOW DOG DEMS.
Bizarre.
And say . . . hey kids! Ever see "road apples"?
Well here they are:
"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."
What a load of horse droppings, I tell you!
In other words, it is actually a GOOD thing that these so-called journalists have left wing biases. Amazing.
How stupid does the writer think people are?
What's signigicant about W&L is that the STUDENTS are conservative and remain so, despite the strong efforsts of (some of) the faculty.
The phenom of "students more conservative than faculty" is not unique to W&L, but our students are generally more conservative and our faculty less UNIFORMLY liberal.
All things considered, its a great school, IMO.
Yes, but it's pretty significant that he's also talking specifically about US! Meaning -- FreeRepublic! Meaning he's admitting -- we're winning and they are losing.
Now you should EXPECT him to mis-characterize and de-legitimize our version of fact ("reality"). But he's acknowledging that the internet has bullied them away from acting as if they are the ONLY voice, the priesthood as it were, with the right to interpret such "reality".
Journalism ethics? HA! That's like putting Bill Clinton in charge of teaching about heart healthy eating habits. I guess it would be "Do as I say and not as I do."
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