Journalism Is Dead

With Glenn Beck, not the mainstream media, exposing Van Jones for the rest of us, it might be the appropriate time for a little rant against the state of modern journalism. How to put this: “Journalism Is Dead.” Yep, that about sums it up. And I have particular anger for Fox News.

Modern journalism is in a bad state. Though, to be fair, most of what ails modern journalism has ailed it since journalism first began:

• Modern journalists are biased. True enough, and when I get the chance, I will put together an article showing you just how biased. But journalistic bias is nothing new. Indeed, at one time, journalists were openly biased. When you pick up the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for example, you’re looking at a paper that was founded as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.

So even though the New York Times is a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, that’s nothing new -- they’re just less honest about it. Same thing with the Associate Press announcing just prior to the election that they would no longer present all views “uncritically,” but will instead put their own spin “on the news”. And while this may represent a change of official policy, it certainly won’t change the practice, which has involved spinning for as long as I can remember.

• Charges of being co-opted are nothing new either. The Founders called for a free press. But other countries have not been so noble. Pravda means “truth” in Russian, but you would have been hard pressed to find much truth coming from Pravda during the cold war. The Pentagon periodically gets caught paying journalists to present favorable opinions on its behalf. And while corporations now dominate journalists, this is not so different than the days when Randolph Hearst ran his newspaper empire with an iron fist.

Modern journalists are also an easily co-opted group. The Washington Post tried to use its connections to sell “off the record” private meetings between the rich and powerful and those with too much money. White Houses have learned to manipulate the press corp as well by granting special access. . . hello ABC. The NFL, a master at manipulating journalists, dispenses tickets, interviews, and access to keep its journalists in line -- when they don’t outright hire them. Corporations have gotten very good at using journalists for their purposes as well. Maria Bartiromo of CNBC got in trouble when it was revealed that she accepted favors (like flights on private jets) from the same people she reported on. And CNBC has started pimping for sponsors, unless you want to believe their repeated “spontaneous” sales pitches for Gap jeans are actually news.

At this point, modern journalists are little more than press agents for the people they cover.

• Charges of sensationalism are not new either. Sure modern journalists try to create crises and false urgency to sell their work and they often trade in salacious details rather than relevant fact, but that’s all been done before. The phrase “yellow press journalism,” which fanned the flames or populist resentment to begin the Spanish American war, was hardly meant as a compliment.

The Real Problem Is Journalistic Laziness

So what is different today? Frankly, journalists have gotten lazy. How else do you explain the media, with its vast resources and supposed training and drive for the truth, being scooped repeatedly by bloggers? How else do you explain allowing plagiarized work to appear in a paper like the NYT day after day for so long without any editor noticing? How do you explain journalists who don’t know what they are talking about and don’t take the time to inform themselves?

You do know that you really can’t trust anything they tell you, right? As anyone who has ever been involved in an incident that ended up getting press coverage can attest, the journalist is often the least knowledgeable person in the room, both when they arrive on scene and when they leave. And few facts survive the journey through the journalist’s mind to reach the work itself, if they ever made it into the mind in the first place. Indeed, in my experiences with journalists, I have been shocked to see how poorly the journalists understood the events about which they reported and opined, and how little they cared.

And frankly, modern journalists are a strangely uninquisitive lot. They don’t know and they don’t want to know. Why? Maybe because the more you know about something, the more you realize just how much more you don’t know. Perhaps, it’s easier to remain ignorant of our ignorance. After all, ignorance is bliss.

So how does this manifest itself? It manifests itself in many ways. Stories are shallow and often wrong on fundamental levels. Journalists do little work to cultivate contacts, which used to be the lifeblood of journalism. Instead, they read the AP wire or scan the net. Place a quick mid-night phone call that won’t be returned in two rings, and bamo, you have a story and a failure to deny the story: good to go! Journalists no longer even wait to confirm their stories with a second source, which used to be the fundamental rule of journalism. Instead, they just add the magic words “is being reported” to let you know that this news is really only rumor. And when was the last time you heard of real investigate journalism?

When I look at modern journalism, the writing is poor, the research is worse or non-existent, and the reasoning is laughable. Not a week goes by that I can’t find some article that contains such obvious logical inconsistencies that the journalist should have realized their “facts” were impossible. Even when I read a “reputable” magazine like the Economist, I marvel at how easily I can rip up article after article without even researching a single fact. Your names are wrong, your dates are wrong, your numbers don’t add up. You just claimed an average rate that exceeds the population size. You claim that no one raised and objection, right before quoting someone who objected. Think people.

My Problem With Fox “News”

So what bothers me about Fox News? Fox News had a unique opportunity and they blew it. When Fox burst onto the scene, conservatives flocked to Fox in drove because they were sick of hearing their views ridiculed on each of the other channels. At that point, Fox had a chance to re-define journalism.

Fox could have changed the face of modern journalism. Fox could have forced journalists everywhere to start dusting off their sense of journalistic integrity and to stop being so damn lazy. But they didn’t.

Fox could have teamed up with a good reporting unit like the Washington Times and started to give us hard hitting news. They could have easily drawn in people like John Stossel and asked him to perform the kind of investigative journalism that he has done so well throughout the years -- hard facts, gathered through traditional means and verified, fairly presented, with logic and reasoning and without political bias. But they didn’t.

Did you wonder what life was really like on the streets of Baghdad when all that CNN would show you was Marines being killed? How about an investigation into what caused the banking crisis? Who was responsible? What is China doing in Africa (future article coming up on that one)? Did you even know they were in Africa? How about the Saudis? Does ethanol make sense?

Well, Fox didn't investigate (though their anchors happily gave you their opinions). Fox does not produce its own news, it just reads wire service reports. You can get those on-line a lot quicker and a lot more accurately (Fox shortens the reports to keep them simple). Fox does not do investigative journalism -- other than puff pieces. They will never uncover a government fraud or expose a defective missile system, because they just don’t do that kind of work. And they barely know other countries exist.

Fox doesn’t bring in experts to enlighten you, it brings in combatants to snipe at each other for thirty seconds before the segment ends. Fox News is news for those with attention deficit disorder. It is for people who want to hear someone argue for their side, it is not for people who are looking to learn the truth. It is talk radio, done on television by well-endowed anchors and anchorettes. And we conservatives accept this because there is no alternative.

Now, I'm not saying that the other networks are better, they're not. But that doesn't change the fact that Fox is offering very shallow product to us. It also doesn’t change the fact that Fox is squandering a golden opportunity here. If they tried harder, they could redefine news and give the words "journalistic integrity" some meaning again. They could give us the free press that a democracy needs. They could enlighten us about the world around us, about our politics, about each other. They could tell us the things we need to know to make good decisions. And most importantly, they could give us a source of news that we could trust. But that would be hard.

* end of rant *