Posted on 07/25/2008 11:08:37 AM PDT by jwalburg
In the late 19th century, crusading journalists helped identify and correct some of the worst problems American society faced at that time. Newspapers like The New York Times and the New York World and journals like Harper's Weekly and Cosmopolitan (a very different kind of magazine than it is today) led campaigns that exposed and helped eliminate problems ranging from the sale of patent medicines to corruption in city government.
Newspaper and magazine sales soared - and publishers knew a good thing when they saw it. If stories exposing evil sold papers - why, give the public what it wants; and more. By the 1890s, leading publishers (including, especially, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) turned more and more to what came to be called “yellow journalism,” lurid, flamboyant stories designed less to inform than to stir up emotion.
Well, it worked - too well. The Hearst and Pulitzer papers pushed the country into the probably needless Spanish-American War. And both papers fanned to a flame hatred of President William McKinley. One particularly vitriolic anti-McKinley diatribe in Hearst's New York Journal concluded, “If bad institutions and bad men must be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” It's no wonder that when McKinley was actually assassinated a few months later, angry crowds burned Hearst in effigy.
Unfortunately, yellow journalism of the Hearst type seems to making a big comeback in some news organizations. Particularly worrisome is the trend to “accountability journalism,” a journalistic style pushed strongly by Ron Fournier, the new head of the Associated Press Washington bureau.
In a June 2007 article, “Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth,” Fournier describes his journalistic philosophy: “Why force the readers to read between carefully parsed lines when the facts are clear? Why not just get to the point? The president of the United States was wrong. The governor lied. The congressman broke his promise. The preacher, the CEO, the banker, the coach or whomever, failed. Don't mince words.”
Fournier cites approvingly this AP lead: “At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope.”
He likes also this: “The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides.”
Editorializing? Not at all, says Fournier, just “the conclusions of an impartial observer who understands the context that drives news events.”
Yet is this really so impartial? A much more sober analysis (published in Popular Mechanics some months after the hurricane) called the “slow response to Katrina” idea to be, in large part, a journalist-generated myth. It argued that, in actuality, local, state and national emergency workers responded amazingly quickly to the disaster, saving thousands of lives.
Unfortunately, stories of heroes and successes don't fit easily into the “accountability journalism” model. The reporter's job is to find problems and affix blame.
But isn't this exactly what a journalist should do? Isn't he supposed to be a muckraker? In part, yes. As Teddy Roosevelt noted a century ago, there's a lot of filth in the world and the man who rakes up the muck performs an invaluable and absolutely necessary service.
But, Roosevelt warned, “The man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muckrake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil.”
Roosevelt was right: The corrosive cynicism of journalists like Fournier may be as much a danger to American society as any of they evils they are trying to expose and correct.
Dang - I thought the answer was going to be Obama.
Today it is not “ yellow journalism” it is “RED journalism”
The Baltimore Sun after I piss on it?
I thought it was a Penguin fighting over a french fry...
LOL. Me too.
Barack Obama.
Obama's genealogy? (was that racist?)
-PJ
“What’s black and white and yellow all over?”
Can’t answer that, but I know the answer in order;
Obama, Obama’s enemies, and Obama’s spine.
So “accountability journalism” is what they are calling blatant bias nowadays?
The papers aren’t dying, they are killing themselves.
My thoughts exactly.
Yes, “accountablity journalism”=blatant bias. See Fournier’s article at the link below.
http://www.poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=12666
You beat me to the answer...good one.
I’m no Obama fan, but that image is way over the top. Its the kind of stuff that FR critics will love to use against us.
I would apply this standard to those in the marxist media today. If it was good enough to say about a President (who was later assassinated) then surely it's good enough to say about demons like Fournier and his ridiculously obvious propaganda machine.
Good link, and a nice idea, but I betcha the Associated Press never even considered writing a story that said the D.C. handgun ban was a disaster.
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