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."
Everyone in Western CT - that is, the outer NYC suburbs - reads the Post, Times and Daily News like the rest of us, except they usually take their diddly local town paper too, most of which are owned by chains large or small, and suck in the same ways local papers do everywhere else, including having overwhelmingly liberal staffs and editorial pages. Generally they'll read the local paper on the train into the City, toss it in the giant recycling bins on each track inside Grand Central (a great place to get free papers, by the way!), and grab one or more of the NYC papers at a newsstand or have it waiting for them at work.
A lot of people buy the Post as a second paper in the afternoon to read on the train home. I always have thought that the stupidest move Murdoch ever made with the Post was taking it off a 24-hour production schedule. (It used to literally publish edition after edition all day and night, so whichever copy you bought had news never more than a few hours old.) At the very least, he ought to bring back an special afternoon edition to just sell around Grand Central, Penn Station, etc.
Van Atter packing OJ's blood all over the crime scene...
I am not sure I could have convicted him either.
Basically, the media has behaved much like the french, insulting their best customers and then wondering why their customers have looked elsewhere.
And the multiple Westchester editions of The Journal News, a typically sh---y Gannett rag.
qam1: Actually I used to like Newsday a long time ago (10 to 15 years ago). The Daily News you can read in about 5 mins and the Times was always the Liberal rag it still is today and back then the Post was the daily version of the National Enquirer. Newsday used to be the only paper that had any substance. Unfortunately they tried to break into the NYC market and for some reason they thought they had to go ultra left and they hired (stole) many of the most Liberal "Journalist" from the Daily News and other papers. It was a big failure of course and they had to reduce their ciculation back to just Long Island (and Queens). It was really funny because a lefty journalist goal of course to be in Manhattan and now all these elites were stuck in the middle of nowhere(to them)on Long Island. Apparently Newsday still hasn't changed and is a left as ever.
Ironically, New York Newsday was not a financial failure, at least not by the time it was closed down. It was merely "insufficently profitable" in the eyes of a new Times Mirrpr corporate executive from the slash-and-burn school of business administration. He closed it and fired thousands throughout the company purely to jack up the stock price (and it worked, too). Karma eventually got him back, though, as you can read about in this article. (Of course, he walked away with a multi-million-dollar severance.)
Anyway, as I remember it, Newsday - and New York Newsday - were both always liberal going back pretty much forever. They were, and are, the worst kind of liberals, too - suit-and-tie paleoliberals who spend their days solemnly navel-gazing about the fate of the Little People, those who would never in a million years actually pick up a copy of Newsday themselves unless they desperately needed a copy of the help wanted ads. In short, they're dull, dry as dirt. The editorials are dull. The news writing is dull. The newspaper's design is dull (not many tabloids intentionally try to look like compressed broadsheets, but Newsday does).
Basically, New York Newsday never became a big success for the same reasons liberal talk radio is unsuccessful: There's no call for a "serious liberal paper" in a city that already had two liberal papers (the Times and Daily News), where almost all the TV and radio stations are "mainstream" liberal, etc; and because they're liberal, they're simply not enjoyable. Reading Newsday always seems like a chore. The only reason they make money like crazy on Long Island is because they're a monopoly paper out there, and it's almost impossible for a newspaper in a monopoly market to not rake in the dough, regardless of how good or bad it is. (This is why Gannett can buy a local paper, fire 75% of the staff, reduce the newshole by more than half, and leave a crappy shell where the newspaper used to be, and double or triple the paper's profits even while pissing off 90% of its readership: because the readers have nowhere else to go.)
It does, the NYT mispelled it long ago Editorials and no one caught the error.
....heheh.....great zinger, bert......
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.
I, personally, would not mind if the Times reinvents itself....into a supermarket tabloid with obits, puzzles (they have great puzzles) and restaurant reviews. OK maybe a few comics, too....like Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, and The Dowder.......LOL.
One of the great fringe benefits of working in Grand Central Station. That and having the Oyster Bar in the basement (at least the chowder is affordable!).
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