Some thoughts on the press

[pecunium]

I used to be a part of the press. It was an interesting lesson, and has colored my thinking of them ever since. I know that my school (and the others I had the chance to examine) taught reporters to be objective.

Objective doesn't mean, tell everyone's side of the story, it means

adjective

	1: belonging to immediate experience of actual things or events; "concrete benefits"; 
"a concrete example"; "there is no objective evidence of anything of the kind"
		
	2: nonsubjective undistorted by emotion or personal bias; based on observable phenomena;
 "an objective appraisal"; "objective evidence"
		
	3: emphasizing or expressing things as perceived without distortion of personal feelings
 or interpretation; "objective art"

If someone tells me that 1 lb. of C4 will do a specific amount of damage, I don't need to go and find someone else to tell me won't, or that it will do a whole lot more.

I ought to check, and see if the claim is reasonable, but facts don't require other people to argue with them, in some odd sense of "balance."

The press has been failing in this for years. A concerted effort by the Right to make this happen has been successful. The cries of, "liberal bias" can still be heard, even though any, objective, reading of the press would show the Right gets a pass on lots of things (stories like ABC reporting the recent filibuster as being caused by the Democrats).

Pat Buchanan admits this isn't true.

"I've gotten balanced coverage," Patrick Buchanan said of his 1996 presidential campaign, "and broad coverage - all we could have asked. For heaven's sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that."

For a different take Joe Scarborough -- conservative television host Joe Scarborough; former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased."

Looking at the talking heads, beamed into people's homes every day, the O'Reillys, Matthews Hannitys, and Becks, Limbaughs, Savages and Carlsons, there's not a whole lot of "liberal" folks getting pundit slots on the airwaves, it's hard to say the "C"onservative point of view isn't getting a fair shake.

Tim Russert says that his job is to pass along whatever his sources call him up to "inform" him of. No interest in looking to see that they are telling the truth, no questioning their motives.

Judy Miller even went so far as to use two different attributions, in the same story, for the same person.

It's corrosive of the system. If the press is to deserve its claim to the Fourth Estate of government, it can't run along as if its job were to be nothing but a conduit for that government; as when the WaPo said the opinion by the DoJ that the President is immune from oversight, because an assertion of Executive Privilege is absolute, meant the Congress now has legal and procedural troubles in compelling testimony.

Legal is nonsense. Until, and unless, a court (if needs be, and it might get that far, the Supreme Court) says that this broad interpretation of the power of the executive to act in secret it legitimate, the only problem Congress faces is procedural. The US Att'y for the District of Columbia may refuse to present to the Grand Jury.

The Congress can impeach him. Or use it's powers of Inherent Contempt to do the job itself.

But the WaPo made it look as though the law was against them.

We have an election coming up, and that fact, along with some of the structural issues of access, and distribution (i.e. the press gets to see things, and then acts as gatekeeper, and message shaper to the rest of us), matters. It matters a lot.

Fred Thompson ran for senate as a "good ol' boy" in a rented truck, driven by Thompson, from a couple of blocks to the event, and then from the event for a couple of blocks.

It was mostly, ignored.

John Edwards got a perfectly normal haircut (normal for someone who is campaigning for president). It wasn't even that expensive. We're still hearing about it, and it's being presented as if this was some serious aspect of his character, which we need to know, because it show some sense of "inauthenticity."

What it shows is the press has it in for him.

Avedon Carol has a nice piece up,hith commentary on a piece by Jamison Foser, and has more commentary.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Indeed, the decline in quality of "The Press" (now including informational media such as TV) is seriously vexing. In order to function successfully, a Democracy depends upon a well-informed electorate, and it seems to me that the U.S. has come to lack this qualification. Maybe I'm just in "old geezer who thinks everything used to be better" mode, but I seem to remember the days when the news media would either have ignored such trivialities as the cost of some candidate's haircut, or investigated and presented a comparative chart on, say, how much all of them spent on such grooming per month or year.