Newsrooms under siege

Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | 9/9/04 | Edward Wasserman

[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.

[2Jedismom]

a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors

I LOVE IT! Better than "vast right wing conspiracy" even!

Jim, you oughta put this on the homepage somewhere!

Main Entry: cad·re
Pronunciation: 'ka-"drA, 'kä-, -drE; esp British 'kä-d&(r), 'kA-, -dr&
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Italian quadro, from Latin quadrum square -- more at QUARREL
1 : FRAME, FRAMEWORK
2 : a nucleus or core group especially of trained personnel able to assume control and to train others; broadly : a group of people having some unifying relationship <a cadre of lawyers>
3 : a cell of indoctrinated leaders active in promoting the interests of a revolutionary party
4 : a member of a cadre

[2Jedismom]

Moreover, where Free Republic stands head and shoulders over even the best of the webloggers, is that it has a democratic self-correcting mechanism -- the threads. People here have a real instinct for what is news. When an article is posted, other FReepers will read it carefully for bias and comment on any unfair word usage, prejudiced selection of information or other spin. If there is an outright inaccuracy in the article, FReepers will jump all over it to correct the mistakes. What we are doing here is a transparent collection and dissemination of the news in real time.

Amen. And guess what...I homeschool my jedis and I'm teaching them to do the same thing. We've already discussed the forgery situation at LENGTH this morning...even my five-year-old gets the gist.

[TomServo]

Dear MSM,

  You're now irrelevant.

  Deal with it.

 

Signed,

    John Q. Public

[haywoodwebb]

"If Fox made stuff up, we would see a spate of articles about Fox's sloppy reporting. I can't recall a single one."

Oh, they've tried to call Brit Hume on quite a few . . .

Everytime they do, he exposes their error and they quietly slink away.

[Leatherneck_MT]

Not a "Rightest Warrior"

But I am a Warrior for the Right.

[Richard Kimball]

Today, even if the media were to turn overnight into a fair and balanced vehicle, I think it is too late. By their failures, they have created a viable alternative to their closed system, and information flow will never be the same.

Well, to quote John Kerry, "I agreed with your statement before I disagreed with it." The collapse of the big media networks and newspapers was as predictable as the collapse of the buggy whip industry. It would have happened no matter how well they tried to do their job. When cable TV became popular, it became impossible for entertainment networks to dominate ratings, no matter how well they programmed. There were just too many other choices. Dittos for the news networks. Why do I need CBS to tell me what Al Jazeera is saying, when I can go to Al Jazeera's web site and find out for myself? Where I agree with you is that by shamelessly shilling for the Socialist/Marxist point of view, and trying to silence all voices that disagreed with them, they greatly accelerated the growth of alternative media. However, their decline and fall was inevitable, no matter how "fair and balanced" they were.