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.
“If you find yourself in a hole, dig twice as hard.”
The author's bias is showing. How would a story about teaching Iraqis to play softball offset a story on carnage? Or should any story be used to offset another? We just want the total picture. The media could place the story of carnage into context. How widespread is violence in Iraq? What has been done to improve the infrastructure, e.g., electrical system, roads, economy, oil production, etc? What has happened to the rebuilding of the Iraqi security apparatus, i.e., police and military?
We don't need the press to pick stories. Rather, we want the whole story.
Wheeeee!!!
News gathering itself is inherently subjective. Who do you talk to, and why? What do you ask him?
A reporter has to limit his sources and write within space and time constraints. As a consequence of this limitation, journalists have to inform themselves before covering a story.
Typically (at least before the internet), journalists prepared themselves by reading their own newspaper's previous coverage in the paper's "morgue", or file repository. Therefore, the paper's own biases become self-perpetuating.
In too many cases, a journalist will write his story before he covers it, knowing who will say what, and will simply look for people to give him the quotation (or selective information) that bolsters his own point of view. A rushed reporter will do this. A lazy one will as well. And, more to the point, a reporter with an agenda will do this.
Journalism is an art masquerading as a science. A science has data points, a specific methodology and repeatable results. Journalists get to make their own choices about whom to speak with, what to ask and how to structure their articles.
I think that the obvious bias of the news media was kept on a low burn for most of the 20th century, but it was there. The difference between now and then is that in the past (except for certain acute times, like the Nixon administration), the mainstream media believed that there were people of good will on both sides. Today, the mainstream media believes that this is a war of good versus evil -- and President Bush, his administration and his policies are evil. As a result, the media have gone beyond all balance (in my own cheap shot, I have taken to calling the mainstream media the "access of evil").
It's very interesting that the solution (the internet, the bloggers and Free Republic) came about just at the time when they are needed most keenly as a result of the meltdown of the meinstream media.
My B.S. meter is off the charts!
I think it goes even deeper than the matter of competing news interests. We're a threat to their power to control the flow of information. In the old days, the Swift Boat story would have not made an impact. In the old days, the AP could have lied about the booing at Bush's speech and there would have been no way to counter that story in realtime. Now, every time the media either lies directly or lies through omission, there are hundreds if not thousands of folks ready to jump on every single error. Their power to be kingmakers is slipping through their fingers, and they will become more and more vicious as their power wanes - which, ironically, will only hasten their demise.
yikes
I agree. Well said. This article itself is an example of their frustrated, impotent bitterness.
**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.**
Take heed -- ABCNNBCBS and nytlatwp!
I really liked your post. The last paragraph sums up the dilemma of the "mainstream media". I think that a great number of Freepers would join me in wishing them the very worst.
"No rest for the weary, no peace for the wicked."
Thank you.
Liberals alternate between bitching and whining and anger and being deeply saddened.
Thank God for computers and the internet.
And Thank God for Jim Robinson and Free Republic!
Bump
Ditto - We're the rightist and the tightist!
The "real story" about Iraq is that the US was able to take it with so little effort, in such little time. We are cleaning up the country faster than any such job has ever been done before (Germany & Japan in 1945). And we're surrounding an Islamic Facist state (Iran) on two sides (Iraq and Afghanistan), where we can direct insurgent actions against it.
Iraq and Afghanistan are quickly becoming democracies, where the people are sovereign.
The US military, under George Bush, has objectivly done a better job than has ever been done by any military in all of history.
THAT is the news. We the people are tired of the media telling us how bad this country is. We're proud of it. And we don't want to hear bash stories ANY MORE!
The media and Democrats lost Vietnam. We'll be d@med if we let them loose the middle east.
Translation: the media's only problem is not being left-wing enough, according to this writer. Gimme a break!
What a tangled web the MSM hath weaved.
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