Criticism is not taken lightly. I know. There's nothing more grating than showing up to your office and getting a voice message stating that you had misspelled someone's name or got the date wrong of some festival. Human errors are the pitfalls of the business. It has always happened and always will.
As per my personal correction policy, during my previous post about McGavick's DUI revelation, it turns out the capitol mentioned in the story where the incident took place happened to be around the Washington D.C. Beltway. This geographical difference is a bit out of The Olympian's bailiwick.
Mea culpa.
The main thesis of my argument, however, is still intact despite self copy-editing errors. My criticism towards our media watchdogs was not directed at Mr. Postman although he has chosen to yelp the loudest. So he'll be on the receiving end of my rolled-up newspaper as I'm swatting folks over the nose.
He takes umbrage over the three scenarios I outlined yesterday which would have indicated bias either for or against McGavick. He also jumps to the conclusion that I'm calling the Washington state political press corps lazy.
To which I respond "Where were you on all of this?"
What he does not choose to address is the big picture problem I outlined. Why is the media waiting until campaigns give them this information before it becomes news? Where are the enterprise stories? Where are the investigative pieces? Where is the discussion of the issues? And why are you content to simply write about press releases, polls and FEC reports?
What is happening, and what I see as a problem is that the front and editorial pages of our papers are being shaped not by editors and reporters but, in part, by politicians, campaign staffers, lobbyists and special interest groups.
If Washington CeaseFire the Building Industry Association of Washington or whoever wants to get information promoting their cause or damaging their opponents they contact one of their "sources" in the newsroom in order to get that information published.
Newsrooms are very reactive, not proactive, when it comes to this.
There's this mystique that reporters go out, hit the streets, cultivate sources and it still happens. But then too often you have situations where a fax or email comes in and a reporter will scurry off to a ribbon cutting at the Hydroplane Museum or a firefighter's charity ball or a political rally with thirty people at it.
Most of the coverage is innocuous. When Diane Tebelius wants to get out information that former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is coming to town, guess what happens? Same thing for U.S. Senate candidate Jon Tester, Democrat, from Montana.
To be sure not every press release that is sent out gets picked up but enough of them do so as to make it worthwhile for folks to send them out. And it's enough to be noticeable by any trained individual when they pick up the paper and look.
When we all head to our daily or weekly editorial meeting we usually have a pretty good idea how big our editorial hole is and by God it needs to be filled somehow. It's awfully easy and awfully convenient when the Democrat or Republican parties sends us a press release with quotes, contact names, numbers and a nice ready made issue to write about. Interview former State GOP chair Chris Vance or current Democrat Chair Dwight Pelz. Throw in a campaign spokesperson and you've got an insta-story that filled that 20-inch hole on the front page. It's Shake 'n Bake and I helped.
It becomes a real problem when the charges of scandal, corruption and political propaganda are at stake. Reporters get used as either willing or unwitting auxiliaries when one side accuses the other of not caring about jobs, the deficit, the environment, what have you.
Is it laziness? Being too busy? Or is it just being stuck in a rut?
Either way, whenever constructive criticism is brought up pointing this out, especially when it's from a young little hicktown reporter like myself, veterans of the newsroom and at major dailies- who also happen to get an extra digit on their checks each pay period - scowl and sputter and slap saucy snots like myself back into their allotted spots.
So back to this Aug. 24 revelation by McGavick. If he did not release this information, at the time of his choosing, when would it have gotten out to the public? Would the newspapers have waited until the Democrats did their own investigation to scoop up the "dirt"? Would they have done background research themselves a couple weeks before the election? Or would the information have never been known?
The reason I am upset is because I have a bit of too much faith in the Fourth Estate and the capabilities of my colleagues in the press in getting information to the public. And I get mighty disappointed when once again they fail. It gets a bit tiresome to see news broken, yet again, on a blog.
I think DonWard is close, but while I believe that reporters are writing exactly what their editors want, or more specifically, the story and slant that their editors want, their editors are under the thumbs of publishers who are using their papers to create the perception of the news that their allies and friends want. And those friends are the politicians, government types, and certainly the special interests that benefit from the right kind of coverage.
I've spent quite a bit of effort myself trying to take the press to task for their lazy reporting, refusal to really investigate anything that takes more than a couple hours before a deadline, or anything that might damage their relationship with government and powerful special interests.
The benefit of the blogoshere is that it is not controlled by the interests that manipulate the press. And if and when those types of stories get reported on blogs, they are subject to immediate and equal time. That keeps the reporting on blogs honest, and that lack of equal time is why the mainstream press is ignorant of their biases, out of journalist control, lazy, and blistfully ignorant that they just might have to defend what they report. Because if they ever really had to defend their article with immediate and equal time, papers like the Times and PI would be routinely trounced with the facts - and the rest of the story.
Posted by: MJC on August 30, 2006 07:32 PMI think you've got too much faith. The days of the intrepid gumshoe are long gone. In this day and age with email and hundreds of online databases, reporters are content to sit at their desks and do "research." And the big names just wait for "leaks" so they can break a big story that is inline with the accepted journalistic political stance: left.
I think this is just more evidence that the old dog is dying. And good riddance. I'd rather get my news from bloggers. Yeah, sure there's a role right now for newspapers that bloggers don't fill. But it won't be long before bloggers organize into journalistic entities on their own right and begin to completley supplant the major newspapers. Michelle Malkin and Hot Air are a great embryonic example of this trend.
Why should I have to listen to the same talking head tell the same lie as his colleagues about say, the Israeli-Palestinian war? I'd much rather get the real truth from the man on the ground who doesn't have an editor telling him what he can and can't say.
Postman is one of the better jounalists here in Seattle, and he's done a great job of late embracing the blog. But the old school structure around him is something that even he will eventually see as weighing him down.
Posted by: Jeff B. on August 30, 2006 08:49 PMI bet my old professor Cliff Rowe is disgusted by the media these days.
Posted by: Dengle on August 30, 2006 09:11 PMBTW: It's still ridiculous to think that any journalist would sit on a story they dug up like McGavick's DUI. This is because they all have the irrestable motivation not to be scooped by the next guy to dig up the same story. Unless you're proposing it was a conspiracy by every newspaper and blog in the state?
Posted by: Sorry Charlie on August 30, 2006 10:00 PMLet's say you're looking for a DWI conviction for Maria Cantwell....
You'd have to go through the police records for every single county in the United States (there's 3,141 of them, according to Wikipedia). Maria started driving before computers, so there won't be a database, or a name index. You'll have to search, record by record, through every incident report in every county in every state in the U.S.
Didn't find it there? You wouldn't be done. Municipalities make arrests too, you'd have to search those. There are about 30,000 cities and towns in the United States. Their records aren't indexed by name, either. You'd have to go record by record, looking for Cantwell's name.
Is that a good way for our newspaper reporters to spend their time? Digging through police records at more than 30,000 towns? I'm thinking no.
Posted by: Seth on August 31, 2006 01:52 PM