I do have power, but not in the fashion you describe. I realized that while working as the entertainment editor of a daily newspaper, I received hundreds of complaints when the world series was stopped because of an earthquake (my TV listings said the game should be on the air), or when "Leave it to Beaver" was preempted because of Operation Desert Storm. I also came to realize that most people take what they read in newspapers and books as carved in stone. That meant I had the responsibility to ensure that what put out was as accurate and fair as I could make it.
People count words. They measure pictures and compare square inches. They note what you put on the first page and on Page three or four. They attack when a misspelled appears in 36 point type across the top of the page.
The broadcast people have it much harder because they are often trying to do all this in real-time, often presenting the stories on the spot. When they misprodounce a word, or stumble over a phrase or clause, people see it immediately.
I have read quite a bit recently on FreeRepublic and other sites on why the bloggers or forums such as these are making broadcast news and newspapers irrelevant. What I, in fact, see are gross generalizations, continually perpetuated by journalism and the media's version of the Monday morning quarterback. Having written that, let me say that yes, what Dan Rather did was wrong, and he should be fired. He certainly would not still be working for me after that.
You see, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokow, and that ilk are not broadcast journalism any more than all '60s music was the Beatles. Broadcast journalism is the lone sports reporter for the local TV station who showed up at the middle school girls basketball game Tuesday night to capture on film forever an eighth-grade standout scoring her 1,000th point or her middle school career. He then shared that with the world...or should I say, our world, those of use living within 100 miles of that station who saw the broadcast. My 14-year-old son, who had witnessed the event said, "that's neat, she got on TV."
Local broadcasters are not the problem. Most of them work hard at covering their world as best they can. Only once in a great while do I see a broadcast reporter mugging for the camera, trying to stretch a simple traffic accident into a job in a bigger market. Those individuals usually find themselves in different markets, but not bigger ones.
And if Broadcast journalism is so irrelevent, then why are so many threads on this site and others geared specifically toward discussions of live TV events?
You can consider my writing to be "friendly fire." I make a distinction, first of all, between daily journalism and monthly reporting. Even with the monthly deadline, you will be under pressure to get your report finished - get it right, but get it finished - before the next deadline. That deadline starts to loom, in your perception, probably a week after you put the previous issue to bed. What must it be like, then, to face a new deadline not a month after you just met one, but a scant day?I have read quite a bit recently on FreeRepublic and other sites on why the bloggers or forums such as these are making broadcast news and newspapers irrelevant. What I, in fact, see are gross generalizations, continually perpetuated by journalism and the media's version of the Monday morning quarterback. Having written that, let me say that yes, what Dan Rather did was wrong, and he should be fired. He certainly would not still be working for me after that.You think you have deadline pressure, and you do - but it is nothing like what the daily journalist faces. And the broadcast journalist's deadline comes every hour, with provision for "breaking news" even faster than that. Nobody held a gun to their heads and said, "You have to write copy to a five minute deadline," but some people do it. It seems to me that any person with an ounce of conservatism in their perspective would rebel at the thought of slinging out stuff that fast, and claiming that they were broadcasting "in the public interest."
You have experience in daily journalism, so you know that what I'm saying has some truth in it. The stories that are put out on a daily paper are usually forgetable because of the need to fill the space, on deadline. When the daily journalist takes the most interesting story of the day, because it is new that day rather than because it was enduringly significant over a longer period of time, s/he is making a compromise that s/he would not do if writing a book. And the accuracy and completeness of the story cannot be as thorough as would be the case in even the most topical of books.
Well enough, if the daily journalist properly disclaims the fact that the story is written to deadline and is incomplete and possibly inaccurate - but how often does that happen? Generally the journalist is boasting of his/her objectivity and saying - as Dan Rather actually did (IIRC) in the early evening of election day 2000 - that you can take his word to the bank.
But the point, surely, is that in an organization which actually seeks the truth Mary Mapes wouldn't have been on a five-year jihad to try to prove something counter to all the evidence she had at the start. The fundamental premise of the TANG stories was that there was a waiting list for entry into the program for which Bush signed up, and that political influence enabled him to jump the line. But in fact when Mapes pitched the story to management five years ago she already had paper in her file indicating that in fact recruiting enough people physically and mentally qualified for, and willing to volunteer for, fighter pilot training and service required effort on the part of TANG.if Broadcast journalism is so irrelevent, then why are so many threads on this site and others geared specifically toward discussions of live TV events?You serve the industy you cover, and the insiders of that industry would sniff out favoritism among its members rather quickly - and your audience would cancel out on you. You have an incentive to get it right, and you don't have peers who are willing to cover for you if you will cover for them. The problem we-the-people face is that Big Journalism has learned to go along and get along in exactly that way; the big journalism outlets (Fox News Channel excepted, at least partly) simply will not attack a member of their herd as they would Fox News Channel, or Ford, or your local water company if they had sold bad product, and stonewalled in the aftermath of it.
There is a difference between what interests the public, and what is in the public interest. Unless it is a traffic or weather report, breaking news rarely is actionable information. 911 was an exception, but the rule is otherwise pretty hard and fast. So the public may be interested in the outcome of the election, but it is not in the public interest that an uncertain outcome be broadcast in the name of the government - as is ultimately the case of FCC-licensed broadcasting.
The great weakness of postings on forums is that you don't know the writer; any given post could be a spoof. But that is also a strength of the internet; I shouldn't be so gulible as to think I'm entitled to only the truth. If I'm "entitled to the truth" I don't have to think for myself and should exclusively believe the truth that I am told. That is exactly what you as a journalists are trained to not do; if you are tempted to go to press with something on the internet you need to fact check first.The internet is just a little boy pointing out that the emperor doesn't have any clothes on. The first reaction is, "you're only a little boy, what do you know about anything?" The second reaction is, "Wait a minute, he's only a little boy, he doesn't have a position to not be worthy of!" We can see with our own eyes that he must be right!
In the old (pre-Reagan) days, there wouldn't have been any effective public review of those CBS forgeries on any timely basis. The truth might have come out, after the election was over. Now, we have talk radio and the internet. The internet brings a diffuse popular intelligence to bear on things, and a Buckhead claims something is fishy. Others take a look, and in hours a large fraction of the truth has been sniffed out. But it's still just on the web, and not everyone even has a computer. That's where talk radio comes in, and after that Fox News Channel.
The Fairness Doctrine suppressed open on-air partisanship. If in fact there were no inherent political tendency in the news business, the end of the Fairness doctrine would have produced openly left and openly right political discussion in roughly equal measure, serving left and right niche audiences. But that is not what happened; "right wing talk radio" is all one word, and we see such phenomena as politically sponsored Air America in a lame attempt to find significant audience for which neither arrogant (excuse me, "objective") journalism nor PBS nor NPR is sufficiently leftist.
The truth is that "objective" journalism is an Establishment which polices its membership by condemning as "not objective" (meaning, "not wise") anyone who states out loud the obvious truth that journalism about politics - journalism about anything with political implications - is politics. It's absurd to take someone's word for it when they say that they are not selling anything. But that is exactly what Big Journalism says, backed by our government's claim that they have given CBS its broadcast licenses because they broadcast "in the public interest."