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 Schadenfreude  |
This is the New York Times Schadenfreude Ping List. Freepmail me to be added or dropped.
Posted on 05/31/2003 11:11:56 PM PDT by LdSentinal
LOS ANGELES - When O.J. Simpson was ruled not guilty of murdering his wife, the United States discovered overnight the chasm of difference in perception between blacks (who found the verdict reasonable) and whites (who found it insane).
Something similar is going on with the fabrication scandals that have rocked The New York Times this month. Elite reporters and editors are reacting to the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg revelations with sorrow and anxiety, while the rest of us proles revel in the spectacle of a haughty institution being humbled and mocked.
Why are journalists so glum? Because The New York Times is their gold standard. It's the paper they all want to work for and, in the meantime, emulate.
"Its authority ... isn't just journalistic; it's downright ontological," The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a week after the Paper of Record published a 14,000-word exposé detailing Blair's history of barefaced lying. "It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the Times defines public reality."
This will certainly come as news to the "public," 99% of which doesn't read the paper.
Such top-down thinking -- with the Times up on the mountain, handing down stone tablets of truth to the throngs -- is typical of those lamenting the Times' fall.
"The Times sets the news agenda that everyone else follows," former Slate and New Republic editor Michael Kinsley wrote admiringly in The Washington Post last week. "Our basic awareness of what is going on in the world derives in large part from the Times."
In Kinsley's elitist world, a story isn't a story unless the Times (or The Washington Post) says so: "It's true that the journalistic food chain runs both ways: Big media like the Times often pick up stories and information from smaller fish, often with insufficient credit or none at all. But it is the imprimatur of the Times or the Post that stamps the story as important, before sending it back down to other papers."
Readers -- not to mention the legions of quality reporters at the nation's other 1,500 dailies -- can be forgiven for finding this notion laughable and borderline offensive. Since when does a meritocratic country of 276 million weirdos need a single council of wise men to decide what stories are important?
Yet some people act as if our very democracy depends on this essentially undemocratic notion.
"America's readers need The New York Times to re-establish its credibility," warned Mike Clark, the "reader advocate" for The Florida Times-Union. "America's journalists need the Times to regain its status as a journalistic role model."
This last point is highly disputable, though rarely disputed. The New York Times publishes in the most cosmopolitan and competitive newspaper market in the country; its focus on global and national stories, and its tone of liberal intellectualism, make perfect sense in an international and Democratic city that already has three local tabloids and two right-leaning dailies.
Almost every newspaper that views the Times as a role model, on the other hand, is a local monopoly in a less liberal city. Chances are, it will equate success with such Timesian yardsticks as Pulitzer prizes, and (in the immortal words of Rick Bragg) the ability "to go get the dateline."
All the more reason why the Times' horrible month will be good for journalism -- if it causes papers to reconsider their newsroom values and journalistic role models, old bad habits may receive a fresh round of scrutiny.
Already, many dailies are tightening up their use of anonymous sources, which have long been the crutch of budding fabulists. Newsrooms across the country are conducting internal investigations to determine whether they could be fooled by the next Jayson Blair, and are looking for ways to interact more smoothly with their readers. According to The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz, "The Saint Paul Pioneer Press and The Plain Dealer [of Cleveland] will soon begin sending letters asking people who have been written about in their pages if they had been covered accurately."
As importantly, the bulk of this navel-gazing is happening in public, giving readers a rare, transparent glimpse into the sausage-making minutiae of newspapering. A week ago, if you had asked 10 Americans about the journalistic significance of the word "dateline," nine probably would have said "that stupid entertainment show on NBC."
Now, after Times reporter Rick Bragg was caught filing evocative feature stories with datelines from cities he barely visited, and two weeks after Blair was outed as an out-and-out dateline fabricator, it's a household word.
And non-journalists aren't the only ones learning about this concept -- I certainly had no idea that such a thing as "dateline pressure" even existed, and only in the midst of the current crisis did I learn that Bloomberg News fudged a bunch of datelines from Iraq during the war. (The financial newswire announced this week it is responding to the controversy by scrapping datelines altogether ... the less the information, the fewer chances of making it up, I guess!)
Further, I learn by looking at my colleague Amy Langfield's Web site that, "There has been rampant dateline abuse by many news organizations for years.... Over the years, I've been told by editors to use the good dateline if there was a photographer there, or if a press release originated from there or if a completely unreliable stringer whose information we couldn't use was there." Who knew?
To be sure, there are more weighty and pressing issues facing the world than the previously obscure practices of professional news organizations. But it does make for amusing theatre, especially in an institution as humourless and self-regarding as the American press.
And it also has a strong upside, if journalists would just look at it from a different angle. Typically, when reporters see an imposing-looking glass house, they reach for the nearest rock. The idea, and it's a good one, is that excessive regard for any American institution can breed both corruption and servility, and will, in any case, obscure the truth.
Journalism organizations are forever agitating to strengthen various "sunshine laws," which already make most governing bodies more legally accountable in the United States than in any other country I'm aware of. This notion of transparency, too, is a welcome and democratic thing, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't improve the process of news gathering.
Newspapers, in theory at least, are attempting to help their readers become as educated as possible about their city, country and institutions. Luckily for everyone, the World Wide Web has enabled consumers these days to have an unprecedented ability to consume, debate and, most importantly, repackage their own news, from nearly infinite sources across the globe.
Every person who has created a current-events weblog -- and there are tens of thousands of them, at least -- has been forced to write headlines, weigh the veracity of sources, select an appropriate mix of stories, avoid running afoul of libel and copyright laws ... basically, to make many of the decisions that are familiar to editors everywhere.
This has created a revolutionary level of reader sophistication, one that savvy newspapers will eventually recognize as a valuable source of feedback and potentially bottomless reservoir of distributed intelligence. If a newsroom uses the post-Blair level of scrutiny to strengthen practices and improve the product, these people will be the first the notice.
First, though, journalists have to get over the idea that The New York Times "defines public reality" and gives the "imprimatur" of newsworthiness. The future belongs to those who talk with the audience, not at them.
"I guess in this era of Jayson Blair mea culpas, news agencies are wisely using this time to fix a lot of the grey-area dirty-little- secret stuff they've had as de facto policy over the years," Langfield wrote. "I vote for a long and painful confessional period in hopes that a lot of dirty laundry is aired and lessons learned."
Perish the thought.
Wow, what a (deserved) slap in the face to a large portion of the black populace.
Just a few years ago, people called them 'talking points'.
This has been true. But why? The Times has lied for decade. Why only now is it an issue?
Which ones would those be?
I guess you can count the NYPost as being somewhat right wing but beyond that which ones?
The Daily News - I wouldn't exactly call it right wing though you could say it isn't nearly as left wing as the times.
After that in the area you got Newsday and The Star Ledger of New Jersey. Both of which no reasonable person would call the right wing. Both are so far left that actually compared to them the New York Times is an ultra right wing paper.
Why now? Because only now have they been caught so red-handed, and it started with Jayson Blair. That just got all these self-important no-talents to start fighting amongst themselves, which is allowing a lot of other "stuff" to start leaking.
Well, that and the fact that the internet, talk radio and cable stations like Fox News Channel, have finally provided this market the competition that has long been needed. And just like people fleeing Communist countries, when given a choice, people will flee the leftist media.
The Daily News is a "New Democrat" newspaper that is center-right on foreign policy, center-left on everything else.
BTW: You forgot to add the Staten Island Advance, and the Bergen Record (Nearly as bad as the NYT). People in Westchester tend to read the Times and the Post. "Snoozday" is as boring as Lawn Guyland (I delivered it as a child) and the Star Ledger is good for Paul Mulshine (my dad delivered it when it was the NEWARK Star Ledger).
OK, anyone know the newspaper situation in Connecticut?
Part of the problem with these biases is the left is totally unaware of them. They think their viewpoint is "middle of the road" which skews any viewpoint from the right into the extreme.
In other words, it's a liberal crib sheet. You don't have to work or think to be a reporter or editor on another newspaper, you just have to copy the Times.
You're writing's good enough as it is, Matt. Don't lie about where you're coming from.
For the same reasons that all the other issues we on the right have raised for years about fraudulent journalistic "ethics" never became issues until after Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, etc came along. The system worked just fine for the journalists (the public was merely there to shut up and consume), so it was never an issue. Now that we've got choices and have both the ability to question the questioners, and ignore them entirely if we deem them too biased, they are being forced to adapt or die.
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