Sounds Like Gobbledygook to Me
With the Philly newspaper strike averted for a few more days, the role of journalism in our lives is perhaps a fitting topic. The news media bemoans the fact that profits are down in the newspaper industry and papers struggle to find their place in society.
Dan Froomkin, who writes the White House Briefing at the Washington Post, has written an excellent article at Watchdog Blog, On Calling Bullshit:
Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.
What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.
Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.
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I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.
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If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
I'm sure neither wants the job. We'd much rather mock (comedians) or critique (bloggers) journalists, which is our role in all of this.
The news media is clearly in flux. Surely there needs to be adjustments to accommodate new media outlets, such as the internet. However, as Froomkin says so well, the real problem is that the press has lost it's way. It has forgotten it's mission -- the Fourth Estate's role in society is to be the "keeper of the watch" for its citizens. See Put Down the Steno Pad.
I for one have been a major consumer of newspapers my whole life. If have always read 3-5 papers a day. I've always been interested in getting different perspectives on the news, so that I could form my own opinion. But over the last several years, I have found that perspective missing. It started with the run up to the Iraq war. I started reading the international press and alternative media to see what was really going on, not just the White House press spin faithfully reported by the media.
Maybe it's not so hard to fix. If reporters go back to reporting what's happening, people may read them again. Can't hurt to try. Just call bullshit.
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