The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has announced that it will be cutting its Washington Bureau now that it’s long time Washington correspondent, Sylvia Smith, is retiring. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Journal Gazette won’t continue to do good journalism, but I think it is a symptom of the decline of journalism.
David Cay Johnston has an outstanding blog post entitled “It’s Scary Out There In Reporting Land: Beats are fundamental to journalism, but our foundations are crumbling.” Among other things, he talks about the corrosive effect of cheap news.
“So why is there so much crime on the news every day?” Diane, who was cutting Frank’s hair, asked.
“Because it’s cheap,” I replied. “And with crime news you only have to get the cops’ side of the story. There is no ethical duty to ask the arrested for their side of the story.”
Cheap news is a major reason that every day we are failing in our core mission of providing people with the knowledge they need for our democracy to function.So why is there so much crime on the news every day?” Diane, who was cutting Frank’s hair, asked.
“Because it’s cheap,” I replied. “And with crime news you only have to get the cops’ side of the story. There is no ethical duty to ask the arrested for their side of the story.”
Cheap news is a major reason that every day we are failing in our core mission of providing people with the knowledge they need for our democracy to function.
Another interesting take on the decline of journalism came from Fred Clark who cites the pretense of objectivity among journalists as a fundamental flaw. He says that pretending that one doesn’t differentiate between good news and bad news is incoherent and disingenuous. A commitment to the truth requires commitment to the good.
The claim is disingenuous because, again, newspapers are constantly reporting on the days’ news as being either good or bad. This is not — as the pretense pretends — a matter of “taking sides,” but of acknowledging them. It is an inseparable and unavoidable aspect of the newspapers’ commitment to accuracy.
The pretense that journalism requires — or even allows — neutrality or indifference to good and bad is just that, a pretense. A lie. A vain lie in at least two senses of the word. It is a lie told out of vanity and arrogant self-flattery, and it is a futile lie due to its nonstop refutation by the newspapers themselves.
He continues that, if we accept the premise that we can’t know what is good, then we must also accept the premise that we can’t know what is true, in which case, newspapers have no use. And that is, in fact, the road we’ve been going down where newspapers make no effort to find the truth, resorting instead to a kind of he-said, she-said stenography. The kind of “Some say the moon is made of green cheese, others disagree” reporting.
The miserable flaccidity of this refusal to discern or report the actual facts of the matter is, in my opinion, the only truly terminal disease facing the newspaper industry.
. . .
No matter how true something can be proven to be, once it is disputed journalists will cease to treat it as something that has already been verified as true and verified. They will begin treating it, instead, as something “controversial.” And that which is deemed controversial is no longer reported as true — regardless of the facts and the evidence proving it to be so or the utter lack of facts or evidence suggesting otherwise.
And, finally, just because I’m on the subject, Atrios had a recent post about the resistance to the blogosphere by the traditional press. The press regarded itself as something special, just because. And, pretty much, only employees of big media companies really deserved First Amendment protection as “the press.”
The Journal Gazette was my launching point for this little diatribe simply because the story about the closing of the Washington office was on my feed reader. As newspapers go, the Journal Gazette actually tends to do a better job than most of the Indiana papers I read.
The Ft Wayne paper does not need to have a reporter IN Washington to cover Washington.
For years I broke Washington stories that the herd followed while working in San Francisco, Los Angeles and my home in Santa Cruz (when I was with the LATimes 76-88) and from Manhattan and my home upstate in Rochester (NYTimes 95-08 and, since then, for tax.com and others).
In November 1980, as the Reagan Revolution began, I proposed being an additional White House correspondent who was never allowed to leave LA by just covering the executive orders and other paper trail (an idea my editors rejected as too upsetting to the WashBuro, but that a third of a century later won a Pulitzer for Charlie Savage, then at the Boston Globe, when he revealed 700 plus GWBush signing statements which vitiated laws Congress passed.)
Remember what John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG who went to prison, said about politicians: “what what we do, not what we say.”
The little book “Main Street America And The Third World” by John Maxwell Hamilton shows ways to cover the world without leaving downtown.
The problem is reliance on quotes instead of checking out facts and then cross checking, what I call the first two rules of journalism. Just getting a list of government contracts in the Journal Gazette circulation area would be a good starting place. Most are online so its not all that hard, either.
I find some parallels in my own blogging. I don’t know what readers may think, but I think I do my best work when I’m reading and analyzing the General Assembly’s proposed legislation. I think I do my laziest work when I’m just throwing out opinions about the major “controversies” of the day.
a bad day for doubly typed typos:
quote should start with WATCH not WHAT. Appreciate it of you fix this:
Remember what John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG who went to prison, said about politicians: “watch what we do, not what we say.”
I’ll agree with you on that Doug. Your work on General Assembly legislation is excellent. I enjoy it quite a bit.
I’ve never understood why newspapers didn’t take stock in their sports page, and translate what works about that to the city desk. No local paper needs a DC bureau. Federal topics du jour represents info I can get from loads of sources. Newspapers have excellent sports pages. They put several reporters on the topic, each covering a sport or two, with regular reports from on location, with quotes and analysis that run deeper than what the national sources provide.
Every city paper has their city government as something they could report in a similar fashion- with several reporters covering a few departments, with regular reports. This would be material that couldn’t be found in too many other media sources, excepting that bloggers have picked up the slack out of their own interest.
Plus, there’s no pretense of objectivity… at least not that a mediocre bullshit detector can’t ferret out.
I think the quality of the sports department probably has something to do with that bit by Fred Clark about commitment to the truth. With sports reporting, there is not much temptation to shy away from fact reporting – no matter how strenuously the other side might object, the guy either ran 50 yards or he didn’t.
I was once a sports reporter. I was once confronted by an NHL player in the arena corridor for my statement of fact on the radio. He wanted to punch my face into next week. I was fairly fortunate that I was not alone there.
The temptations, or intimidations, to stray from fact- or worse, bury facts- is just as real there. Have you ever seen the locker room interview process at work in the room after a loss? Most reporters walk on eggshells and lob syrup lest they face an outburst from a finely conditioned, angry athlete. A shame there- take the heat. Those outbursts are the best copy!
I am a former newspaper sports and news reporter and editor, 1982-1995. Newspapers are in decline because (1) beginning in the 1980s they decided to use finite news hole on banal topics such as celebrities instead of matters of public importance, (2) they abused in their power, to wit: all respected news services have had appalling ethical lapses (e.g. the Wash. Post’s Janet Cooke and the NY Times’ Judy Miller), (3) mergers and acquisitions turned journalism into a commodity; (4) they got complacent and failed to adapt a news business model and (5) they have been overwhelmed by technological advances that gave us the bloggers of the world. Journalism is in decline because of the first four.
As to the constitutional duty of the press, today’s bloggers, like Mr. Masson, are much better suited to discharge that duty than, say, proudly biased and nonobjective publishes such as Benjamin Franklin or Andrew Jackson’s mouthpiece newspaper or William Randolph Hearst.
So, Doug, keep up the good work and learn from the dinosaurs braying in the tar pits around you.
Thanks, Barry. As a blogger, I feel like the little weasel-like mammal that survived the meteor blast.
Actually, as a little weasel-like mammal you should not need a meteor.
The accepted strategy is to eat the eggs of the dinosaurs while remaining small and fast enough to avoid them.
So, when do we see you ‘monetizing’ the site with ads and sponsors?
Go on, all the big bloggers are ‘taking the Boeing’ – why not you?
[I also think you are somewhat cuter than a weasel – but I guess you stand closer to your mirror than I do…]
A key to the survival of early mammals and, I would argue, blogs is adaptability to a changing environment. What Doug has to be on the lookout for is the correct adaptation. The path is already littered with Internet marvels that chose unwisely.