How Actual Journalism Works, Part 2
This week Joe Klein wrote a post that did not attempt to hide his disdain for his critics. While he showed a willingness to outline his reporting process and address concerns raised in his comments, he did so in an extremely defensive, thin-skinned and condescending tone. He also made the following memorably clueless assertion: “Tell me where I’ve been misled by my sources.” His commenters quickly pointed out his factually challenged reporting on the FISA debate. They also brought up a number of other great points (Jay Rosen and Jay Ackroyd in particular), and if you don’t go through all of them let’s just say it is safe to be skeptical of the whole environment elite media operates in.
Their criticisms suggest other criticisms as well. For instance, once the administration decided it wanted to go to war against Iraq (finding an actual reason was just a bureaucratic detail) the role of the media should have been to push back on the policy itself. When the war began the Pentagon flooded media outlets with its own experts - Klein refers to a “vast majority of [his] military and intelligence sources” - who were only too happy to sell the public on it. But in a democracy the media ought to function as a check on the government, demanding transparency and diligently probing for abuses. The New York Times’ report and subsequent document dump is beginning to show exactly how most of the major outlets allowed the government to furnish experts. How does that provide any meaningful verification of the government’s claims or expose holes in its story?
Once they buy in to this model they are no longer framing the news but having it framed for them, and become more like state run media than independent voices. They voluntarily constrict the perspectives offered, and opinions - even critical ones - remain within that narrow range. With the Iraq war there has been an almost complete marginalization of those who oppose it on policy grounds. We do not see them because the government will never provide them. All discussion is directed at whether a particular aspect of the policy is “succeeding”, with the unspoken assumption that such success will mean success for the whole enterprise. If there is a failure, it is a failure in the planning or carrying out of the war, not the decision to go to war in the first place. We have seen an endless stream of government sanctioned “message force multipliers” reinforcing that position. It is, to put it mildly, not an effective check on creeping tyranny. When there is no outside confirmation, no attempt to identify and track down dissenting views, no suggestion of an alternate narrative - when none of this happens, the media is just a private partner of the government.
The response might be: “We exist as profit centers for parent companies. We will do nothing that meaningfully jeopardizes our consumer base or discomforts our advertisers. We will not sacrifice subscribers or viewers by consistently presenting unpopular descriptions of current events - even if they appear to be true. We would go out of business if we did so. We have no obligation to live up to your standards of purity, and if you think we do you need to grow up.” Fair enough. But please - once you do so, describe yourself that way. Admit to the high pabulum content and tell us you are institutionally averse to challenging those in power.
Reporters should not postulate good faith on behalf of the government; they should do their own analysis, speak to adversarial sources and look for interpretations that challenge what they are being told. The day after Klein’s post the L.A. Times ran a report by Richard B. Schmitt showing exactly how that is done. He reviewed records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (I hadn’t heard of it either) and the data showed surveillance cases up but terrorism court cases down. He located his own experts, one of whom said “[h]ow does one measure the success? The short answer is we aren’t in a great position to know.” Maybe more Congressional oversight of the executive branch might correct that. A Justice Department spokesman said correlating surveillance with court cases is “apples and oranges.” It may well be. Doing some poking around outside administration-approved channels certainly raised an interesting question though, didn’t it? It shows what is possible when one actually practices journalism instead of snidely asserting so.
Dan
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Good reporting is gone, Dan. Great reporting is a thing of the past thanks to the Bush Regime. It's the bloggers now who are the ones reporting the truth and this explains why our Congress at times has tried to squash us! Freedom of speech, baby! It's ours. ;-)
And keep agitating for better reporting, of course.
I'm going to differ a little on this. I don't think all this began with the Bush administration.
As early as the '60's even highly educated people, when asked for their take on a situation virtually never said what they thought but rather "Jim Reston wrote in today's Times" or "I saw in the Washington Post that..." or lately "because they said last night on O'Reilly that he's a Muslim." In other words, we began to have a public, somewhere along the line, that decided knowledge was awkward while naked, unsupported opinion is socially acceptable. We got ourselves a president who boasted about a C average, being out of the loop, being inarticulate, but being a "decider" and a public that thought that was just swell.
The Pentagon's surrogates are the tip of an iceberg, as you point out. Someone said yesterday that CSpan, which is taken by many in the public to be god's word on what's happening in Washington is, in fact, part of the leadership system. How? Because what you see on CSpan looks like useful raw information but does not even begin to show the process which goes into decision making. Thanks to CSpan, we can see (for example) Gonzales getting scorched public over and over again in hearings but never being hung. And then we bang our heads against the wall because, even after all this, the guy sticks around for months, years. CSpan isn't showing us the decisions made in closed midnight meetings well away from cameras (and, during the Republican Congress, well away from Democrats). The "real business," political transactions,and the "hard decisions" are well out of sight and not made in a particularly democratic way. It doesn't have to be that way, but we have ceded our power. Oversight is boring, awkward, tiresome, time consuming. We are left with Biden's descriptions of the shenanigans in the Senate, the special committee meetings which excluded any opposition, etc. etc., and Harwood's and Leib's descriptions of lobbyists and Congress. Dirty politics have always been with us, but the extent and depth of the dirt has never been worse.
Worst of all, we have a whole culture which supports both out-of-sight,out-of-mind politics and its correlates -- bad reporting and increasingly autocratic government. For years we haven't wanted to know. We haven't wanted to know the (awkward) facts. Please, just give us the story.
And if there's anything news organizations are good at these days, it's narratives which engross, often entertain, and are intended to sell. We keep trying to find someone to blame for that uncomfortable situation when in fact all we need to do is look in the mirror. We are among the generations which grew up with corporate-owned and corporate-dependent news providers. By now, whole generations have been responsible for letting go of the complicated, multifaceted real news and opting for sound bites, headlines, common "wisdom,"and easy-to-follow narratives. We grew up that way and we're doing the same thing to our kids.
I don't honestly think we're going to make a dent in the situation by just demanding better reporting. The system which pays those reporters is beholden to un-democratic, wholly irresponsible entities which we keep in business with our own dollars.
Wow, that's a lot to digest PW. A couple thoughts: I think people have approvingly quoted news sources/analysts for as long as they've been around. I've read enough from Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald to form very high opinions of their analysis, and when I approvingly quote them it doesn't mean I uncritically believe everything they write.
I think there will always be "decisions made in closed midnight meetings well away from cameras" and don't think that's necessarily bad either. It would be a circus is everything was always in public. Having said that, we should evaluate them on their public stances. I don't care what kind of understandings or arm twisting was done behind the scenes - I'll go on how you vote after all that is done.
I think the interplay between news orgs and readers/viewers can be more than strictly commercial as you suggest. No matter how tarted up it is, it still is ostensibly "news" and we can make aspirational appeals to those working there to try and push for a more thoughtful (but less sexy) product.
Dan lives on Mars.
It may be naive to assume our news sources evaluate people according to their vote and their actions. You do, Dan. Tim and Kay and I do, I bet. But I don't think the media do. And that's the problem. Because as long as we allow the media as much influence on how we engage with our elected pols,their standard of probity should be as good as or better than ours.
I'm going to post a little treasure for you at my place, Dan -- a nice opener to a good article by Mark Slouka in Harper's.