Thoughts About Our News Media

Over a week ago I posted about the Tiger Woods incident and how it led me to a Chris Hedges  article.  I watched the video posted by a Taiwanese tech firm.   Since then, the video has become very popular, and has even been referenced in Main Stream Media news reports.

Yesterday, I read an article on Talking Points Memo entitled "Tabloid Journalism's Future? Or Just an Extension of the Present?"  While blogs are becoming more important sources of news in today's media culture, they are not yet widely read.  This article is, in my opinion, one that needs much wider dissemination, with as many people as possible reading and thinking about it.  I've been thinking of it since, and trying to decide how to approach what it says to me.  I'm not sure I have an answer yet, but it's important that I try.

Assuming that most of you did not follow the link and read the TPM article, I will excerpt portions and then try to bring my own thoughts into some semblance of order.

A glimpse at journalism's future, tabloid division? How about journalism's present, in a somewhat different form?

It looks more to me like the latter. Next Media is following in the footsteps of what American journalism has made a trademark, particularly in the book, magazine and tabloid-TV businesses. Modern books about politics and business, in particular, are loaded with direct quotes and minute details of events "no journalist actually witnessed."

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I am saying that when people ask you to trust their depictions of "events that no journalist actually witnessed -- and that may not have even occurred," you take them with a serious grain of salt.

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Woodward's books are loaded with direct quotations of people he says he interviewed, and some he didn't. How can you have faith, beyond assuming that he's telling the truth when he says he has it right, that it is right? Why should you?

Now everybody, or seemingly everybody, follows the Woodward lead. Novelistic journalism is the order of our times. But I'm convinced it's one the reasons people have concluded, rationally, that they can't really believe anything anymore.

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Newspapers, too, play the fly-on-the-wall game. Consider what the Times itself did Sunday.

The "Maybe Journalism" piece runs at the bottom of the front page, while at the top is a long story about how President Obama, after long consultations with advisors, reached his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The story is based, says the reporter, on "dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama's 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible."

We readers are still being asked to trust the word of people who violated the confidentiality of the White House Situation Room and other internal deliberations.  I tend to believe the overall thrust of the story -- that Obama and his team struggled mightily with this decision -- but I don't have any faith in most of the particulars, including the anonymously sourced direct quotes of the president and others in the deliberations.

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This isn't the first draft of history. It's the first draft of someone's nonfiction novel on the Obama presidency.

Exactly!  Throughout my education, both formal and life's experiences, I've held to the idea that reading (and seeing, now that TV has become a source) multiple sources is the best way to get a full idea of what actually happened.  However, when news media begin to exercise "Maybe Journalism", the very ground upon which I stand in making decisions becomes a quaking surface.

I am a small player in the politics of our day.  I vote and occasionally write my congress persons and newspaper, but try to stay out of discussions of politics and religion.  It is, however, essential in my opinion that people like me have a trust that what they receive as "news" is actually that, and not some made up account of what may have occurred.  How else can we expect to continue having a republic?

To tell you truthfully, I haven't had a solid feeling that I am receiving a full account of news for a long time.  It seems to me that many news media have abdicated their responsibility to present accurate accounts, settling instead for "he said - she said" reporting, with no attempt to discern which of what was said is true, accurate, and complete.  They call it balanced reporting.  It may be balanced, but it is not much more than stenography, and certainly not reporting.

I would hate to think that just a decade from now, maybe two, people will be reading whatever is the current version of maybe reporting and believing that is all there is.  But if the trend continues, if people do not begin to demand real reporting, tp refuse the virtual accounts, then that's where we will be.  And we will be much the worse because of it, easily led and not knowing the difference.

Comments

[Felix Grant]

I strongly second your concern

I question the "decade from now, maybe two" though.

This has been a creeping aspect of reality for decades already. We are seeing the advent of endgame, now. It is more advanced in some places/channels than in others, but in terms of global audience capture volume it is already dominant. For the reader/viewer/listener who, like you, seeks multiple sources of reliable news supply and applies scepticism to what is offered, it is still possible to get a reasonably clear view of the likely realities; but not for the vast majority of people who simply take a single source as truth.

I'd be astonished if the completion of the process now took as long as a decade ... though it does depend, of course, on how we define "completion". If we define completion as being "nobody gets true news unless they become their own investigative reporter", I'd argue that it's already complete. If it is "the truth is completely indistinguishable from fiction, however careful you are" then it probably never will be. If we take "the distinction between fact and fiction is so obscured that it no longer plays any real part in public perception" then I (on a further personal definition of the slippery word "real"!) give it no more than a handful of years at best.