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
I guess, given the pool the school has to draw on - since the vast majority of universities in the country have been churning out liberal academics for generations - the faculty are bound to be liberal.
LOL! Great minds think alike! Check out my newest BLOG on the same subject!
We were talking about that earlier on another thread Media: From watchdog to lapdog.(The last line is Classic.)
What started out as a collection of on-line buddies looking for like-minded conversation has mushroomed into the only place I go for real news. FR has always been bleeding-edge when it comes to current issues. I'm not as surprised as I used to be when I hear "breaking news" reporting the same story I read here yesterday. What throws me now is hearing Rush Limbaugh say the exact same thing I read 30 minutes ago as a response on a thread (that's only happened twice, but it's been a deja vu moment both times -- "things that make you go hmmmmm").
Homo lobby.
Feminists.
Enviro wackos.
Rainbow Coalition.
Hand Gun Control Inc.
BINGO!
That really is the issue at hand. The main stream media helps the homosexual lobby paint the picture that homosexuals make up a much larger percentage of the population than they do. A disproportionate amount of movies, television programs, and other media are targeted toward this very small minority and those who advocate it, at the expense of those who believe such behavior is immoral.
The main stream media gives a lot of attention to feminists, almost completely overlooking women who have chosen a very noble and important task - raising our next generation. These women are often ridiculed and scorned for not being strong willed, and for allowing themselves to be abused by men.
Environmentalists are getting a huge amount of attention. I don't think I need to say more than "The Day After Tomorrow."
All it takes is a good look at the 2000 electoral college map to see the true makeup of the country. We need to work hard to make the media portray the truth, not what their homosexual, environmentalist, feminist, socialist activist staffs desire to push on the nation.
And the Consitution is a "living, breathing document," right?
5.56mm
If 90 percent of journalists are leftwing idealogues who cheat blatantly in our reporting, that's OK. People who want real news just have to allow for that.
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.
It's good, really.
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.
But we're coming under pressure to cut it out and just report facts. The Truth will suffer if we are bullied like this!
Not to mention outright lies.
The Associated Press, a powerful worldwide news source owned by its member daily newspapers, has perpetrated a vile and slanderous lie about President Bush and his supporters, and been caught read-handed. The smoking gun exists safe and sound in the cache memory of countless blog sites. The AP's reporter wrote a dispatch claiming that when President Bush told a rally of his supporters in West Allis, Wisconsin that President Clinton had been hospitalized,
“the audience "of thousands booed. Bush did nothing to stop them."
Within seconds, the AP dispatch went around the world, and the lie was repeated. In point of fact, eyewitnesses and listeners to radio and television reports could hear that there was no audible booing, but there was supportive applause when the President called on everyone to pray for ex-President Clinton’s recovery.
Unfortunately for the AP, we live in the age of the blogosphere. Almost as quickly as the lie was spread, bloggers started work documenting the report and its factual refutation. Recordings of the crowd's reaction, contradicting the AP, are avilable to anyone on the web, courtesy of America's blogforce.
Caught, the AP behaved disgracefully. They pulled the byline appearing on the report, one Tom Hays, who appears to work in New York, and issued a corrected report, changing “boos” to “oohs,” perhaps to protect itself and claim an innocent mistake. Of course, that would not explain the “Bush did nothing to stop them” slander.
Even more tellingly, AP moved to cover its tracks, pulling the original report from the Lexis/Nexis database, effectively throwing it into Orwell’s Memory Hole. Jonathan Last summarized its behavior as follows:
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
This was in the Miami Herald.
These people are under the delusion that they are actual journalists by being far left. They are pro-homosexual, pro-castro, and basically anything that is anti-american.
They have no competition and are now fearing the result of being faced with real competition. Eventually look for the three remaining papers of south florida to become one. The only thing that must keep these papers going is the fact there is no other way to distribute the sunday ad circulars and real estate listings.
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