Why I'm glad I don't work in the news media

In this blog, I've been often critical of the news media and how they cover various stories and events. However, I'm going to take a slightly different path today. While I stand by my previous critiques, I do feel a bit sympathetic to those who work in news media.

(PBS' Newshour With Jim Lehrer, the highly overrated epitomy of he said-she said transcription reporting, did run an a thought-provoking segment that touched on many of the issues I address below)

I think most journalists are honest people who try to report the news in a fair way according to the standards they've been taught. To what degree they succeed; whether those standards should be revisited by the industry; if journalism should strive for neutrality or if it should strive for objectivity: those are all extremely important questions. But I think we should acknowledge that most reporters and editors try their best to meet that which is of expected them in often challenging circumstances, because today's journalists are subject to unprecedented pressures.

I think it's important to distinguish between the four principal areas of mainstream journalism: TV journalism (such as it is), newspaper journalism, magazine journalism and radio journalism, which is basically just public radio in this country. Each has very distinct strengths and weaknesses but there are certain common pressures they all face.

Pressure by corporate owners to maximize profits with little regard to how its done (public radio doesn't have this pressure; not coincidentally, it offers the best journalism in the mainstream media). As a result, the line between news and entertainment is becoming almost indistinguishable.

Pressure by the talk-show culture which always wants someone demonized and loathes nuance and by the ADD society which wants everything reduced to 20 seconds or less. preferably with pictures.

Pressure by politicians and political parties, which is not new but technology makes it easier for everyone to give 'uncooperative' journalists a piece of their mind.

Pressure by media watchdog organizations, whose jobs are to comb through every word on every media outlet and scream bloody murder every time a piece is a liberal interviewee gets one syllable more in a quote than a conservative interviewee, or vice versa. Their job is also to take things out of context. A paper could write 50 heart-warming stories about local troops playing soccer with Iraqi boys and how warmly the soldiers are welcomed home by their communities but one article about an anti-war rally betrays 'a raging anti-troop and anti-Bush agenda.'

Even pressure by blogs. Many blogs are good and perform a valuable oversight service, some are merely venues for screeds or adolescent angst. Most, including this one, contain entirely commentary, opinion or confession. Hardly any contain original journalism. (It's thus easy to see how a journalist who does the leg work of making phone calls and attending boring public meetings could get a little resentful about being constantly second-guessed by some loudmouth bloggers sitting in their pajamas pounding away on keyboards about topics they know little about anything but still think they're an expert at.)

Another pressure faced by the news media is the famous and incessant allegation of bias. For over two decades, conservatives have never stopped repeating that the news media has a (insert ominous music) liberal bias. They've been very clever in repeating it. A myth repeated often enough unchallenged becomes seen not only as true, but as self-evident.

Liberals and progressives, finally noticing this, have fought back. Not by denying the 'liberal media' charge but by creating a new 'right-wing media' allegation, which they now repeat ad infinitum too (along with related version like 'establishment media' and 'mainstream media,' which are meant as pejoratives). They contend that the news media has been so defensive about the bias allegation that they've overcompensated and are now too conservative.

So now, if a media outlet does a political story, it is all but guaranteed to get hammered with this accusation of bias. This is why much the news media now has an increasing reliance on transcription journalism, rather than investigative reporting which might, gasp, come to a conclusion that someone will scream about. Much of the media is gun shy.

As one of the guest in the Newshour interview opined: I think the press is not all that intrepid when it comes to challenging the wisdom out there when the public is against it. I feel the press is willing to be courageous, as long as it knows it's going to be applauded for it.

While I don't condone this mentality by the media, it's hard to blame them.

Am I exaggerating? You be the judge.

Earlier this week, the local daily Post-Star ran a story about our Congressman, John Sweeney, allegedly being involved in the Jack Abramoff mess. A friend of mine attacked the paper for running hundreds of pieces about teen drinking but only one (at the time) story about the alleged Sweeney-Abramoff ties. A letter to the editor by a Sweeney supporter hammered The Post-Star for even this minimal reporting, saying that a story about corruption allegations surrounding our man in Washington did not belong on the front page. That an article on some (non-local) college student winning a million dollars in a high stakes poker match was run on the front page apparently didn't bother this letter writer.

(Similarly, newspapers constantly run letters to the editor bemoaning the excess of 'bad news' stories. But if the paper runs 'good news' stories, people complain there is too much 'fluff.')

Now, it's tempting to say that if liberals claim a conservative bias and conservatives claim a liberal bias, then chances are the story is fair.

But this false equivalency really is a recipe for dangerous complacency.

Take the media's coverage of the aggression against Iraq. (I use the loaded word 'aggression' because this is an opinion/analysis piece, not a news article)

Pro-war people think the coverage has been overly negative. Anti-war people think it's been overly positive. In my opinion, the coverage was initially very uncritical and has increasingly gotten more critical. The national media has always tended to act in a pack mentality, which its priorities seem so incomprehensible to many ordinary Americans. (Were Gary Condit, JonBenet Ramsey, shark attacks and the Alabama girl kidnapped in the Caribbean really stories that deserved a tiny fraction of the NATIONAL media attention they were accorded?)

Even when the war coverage was sycophantic and fawning, pro-war people still thought it was too negative. And even as it's gotten more skeptical, anti-war people still think it's too positive. The coverage has changed, but perceptions of the coverage generally haven't. The news media can't please the extremes and, for the sake of its credibility, shouldn't try.

The flip side is that if conservatives and liberals (or Democrats and Republicans) agree on a policy, then the media generally assumes it must be a great idea. The label of 'bipartisanship' almost always makes the media to relax, even when they shouldn't.

Recent history offers an excellent manifestation of this danger.

Before the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration presented (carefully selected) evidence of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program. Most people, with a few exceptions, accepted the truth of the 'evidence,' even as they disagreed on what course of action the evidence implied. Some thought the evidence meant we should go to war, others thought the evidence wasn't grave enough to justify war..

But the very basis upon which these conclusions were drawn was almost never questioned in Washington. And since all national political stories are centered in Washington, this myopia is another weakness, that piece of conventional 'wisdom' was almost never questioned by the media.

This unquestioned conventional wisdom was the foundation of the debate on the war yet its accuracy wasn't seriously investigated until after the fact, until after it was too late. The media was lulled into complacency because Democrats and Republicans agreed.

This begs the question: COULD the US news media have investigated the truth of the WMD allegations and if so, how and to what degree?

Journalists are not weapons inspectors. They're not spies. Given the repressiveness of Saddam's Iraq, the best most journalists could've done is to ask outside experts. But media accounts of Saddam's 'obvious' WMD program were presented as definitive.

The media likes to portray itself as the watchdogs of the power, as the venerable Fifth Estate. One thing the media does a poor job in is explaining its limitations.

People constantly complain to media outlets, "How come you don't cover this?" or "How come you don't do more stories on that?"

They rarely get a response that is not defensiveness. "We're doing the best we can" is only a half answer. "We've already done 428 stories on that topic" doesn't mean you've covered the angle the reader/viewer is trying to get at.

I know journalists feel beseiged from all corners. But if they better explained their constrictions, it might defuse some of the criticism. Journalists like to think of themselves as 'the good guys' and I think they generally are too (full disclosure: I was a journalist for my college paper). While they probably expect hostility from the objects of unflattering stories, they haven't reacted well to the skepticism shown them by the general public. The defensiveness, in turn, feeds that skepticism. For a profession that demands transparency of others, it could practice more itself. A little openness goes a long way.

I don't expect my local paper to have a man in Washington covering the president (though even the tiniest media outlets seem to find resources to send people to tightly scripted, news-devoid political conventions). But they can have a man in their home office write an article when a national story has a local angle.

I think smaller newspapers rely too heavily on the wire services and their he said-she said transcription reporting. If they can't do original investigative work on an important story (at non-local levels), I'd like to see them consider using more stories from alternative media or even from foreign media outlets, to give readers a different perspective.

I don't expect national television to cover my city's mayor's race, but do they need to spend countless hours on every photogenic suburban white girl that gets kidnapped?

I don't expect TIME magazine to send a journalist to penetrate the reclusive Saddam dictatorship to investigate their alleged nuclear program. But I do expect them to be up front about the limitations of their reporting. If they have no independent evidence of their own, I expect their journalism to give equal weight to the administration's claims and the criticism of those claims by people like Scott Ritter. When you give 95 percent of your coverage to allegations of one side and 5 percent to the other, it's pretty obvious which position you're implicitly endorsing. If you don't have enough information to know where objectivity lies, then at least strive for neutrality.

Larger media organizations should be more careful about letting their guard down whenever an issue is declared to have 'bipartisan consensus.' In fact, this is when they should be most vigilant. Often, there are more than two sides to an issue.

Heaven forbid any media outlet regularly include comments by a Green or a libertarian or some other non-Democrat/Republican in important stories.

I'd like to see all coverage of especially campaigns focus more on the substance of the issues involved and less emphasis on the 'horse race' aspect. I don't really care if Joe Schmo thinks Mitt Romney has a good shot being elected president in 2008. I'd much rather read what kind of president Joe Schmo thinks Mitt Romney would make and what his positions on key issues are. And frankly, I won't really have much interest in even that for at least two years.

As I said, I think most journalists do the best they can given the norms of the industry. I'd just like to see more of them really challenge many of the standards that need to be questioned. If they held their own business to the same scrutiny they held the political business, it would result in a much better service to the public. Both in terms of their product and the political product.

I think journalism is one of the most self-critical professions... but only within certain boundaries. Those boundaries are rarely questioned. Journalists engage in massive self-flagellation whenever an obvious breach of ethics occurs, such as Jayson Blair. This is something obvious that everyone can agree upon: making stuff up has no place in journalism.

But this masks other, more subtle structural issues. For example, I'd like to see those within the media tackle a more challenging but more fundamental question: should journalism strive be neutral or should it strive to be objective? Is its purpose to provide an artificial balance or the complete picture? To provide a truth or the whole truth?

Something to ponder.