A Glimmer of Hope
Over the weekend, I came across a letter from a journalist posted on Romenesko that gave me some hope that the mainstream media is starting to realize how poor their product has become and how they've allowed a bunch of clowns and crackpots yelling "bias" to fundamentally alter the way they report the news. I encourage you to read the whole letter, but here is the key paragraph:
The most revealing line in the letter is the one I highlighted in bold: the acknowledgement that current journalistic convention often calls for a statement made by one side of a political debate to be "balanced" with "an outright lie" from the other side. This is a fact that any intelligent media observer has long known, but it's still pretty shocking to hear a professional journalist come out and say it. As I've noted before, this single observation is the key to the political success of Karl Rove, a man who was one of the first to realize that mainstream journalists are no longer willing to call a lie a lie. Rove realized that rather than risk incurring the wrath of the right-wing media machine, mainstream journalists now reliably report all political stories in a "balanced" narrative format (i.e. Democrats say X, Republicans say Y). Rove understood that when politics is covered this way, objective truth no longer matters. And the rest is history.
It's encouraging, however, to see such a letter given such prominent display on Romenesko, a site which is read religiously by most professional journalists. Will it necessarily change anything? No. But at least it indicates that some journalists know why their product has suffered, and as they used to say on G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.
"In fact, one of the biggest problems we are facing
is the fear of being labeled as biased. Not in actually
*being* biased. Our giving in to this fear has turned
much of what we produce into sanitized mush. There
are stories buried in this mush, but the essential truth
they are trying to convey often cannot be discerned.
It must be "balanced" with something. Sometimes,
with an outright lie. And so two things have happened:
Fewer people read these stories (for who wants to read
mush?); And, often, such stories are open to easy assault
from any point of view. Mush is easily shaped into
whatever someone wants to make of it." (emphasis is mine)
The most revealing line in the letter is the one I highlighted in bold: the acknowledgement that current journalistic convention often calls for a statement made by one side of a political debate to be "balanced" with "an outright lie" from the other side. This is a fact that any intelligent media observer has long known, but it's still pretty shocking to hear a professional journalist come out and say it. As I've noted before, this single observation is the key to the political success of Karl Rove, a man who was one of the first to realize that mainstream journalists are no longer willing to call a lie a lie. Rove realized that rather than risk incurring the wrath of the right-wing media machine, mainstream journalists now reliably report all political stories in a "balanced" narrative format (i.e. Democrats say X, Republicans say Y). Rove understood that when politics is covered this way, objective truth no longer matters. And the rest is history.
It's encouraging, however, to see such a letter given such prominent display on Romenesko, a site which is read religiously by most professional journalists. Will it necessarily change anything? No. But at least it indicates that some journalists know why their product has suffered, and as they used to say on G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.
posted by A.L. at 11:22 PM
1 Comments:
I agree with your point generally, but I think there is bias in reporting--not a systematic political bias necessarily, but a bias in terms of simplistic, anecdotal storytelling at the expense of deeper analysis. The fact is that, like anyone else, a reporter's background and ideology is likely to affect how he or she interprets observations and this effects how the story gets written. So, while I agree that the media has failed in many cases by displaying a phony "balance" I don't think the answer is simply to go to the other extreme. I would like to see reporters analyze their own motivations and dig deeper into assumptions that they don't necessarily share. If you are reporting on the pro-life movement, for example, try to understand their reasoning rather than simply dismiss it. Same with Iraq; you don't have to simply report the lies and evasions from the Administration, but that doesn't mean simply assuming that everything they say is a lie. My point is that very little is as black and white as the media says it is (liberal or conservative). The media needs to convey the complexity to the public, not some right/wrong dichotomy.
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