[Rhodes22-list] The End of the Press?

[Brad Haslett]

The "old" press is dying -

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003877601

Unless, they can get the "fairness doctrine" passed into law, and with
an O/P/R triad (Obama/Pelosi/Reid) running the show, it could happen.

There are still a few honest voices left (see below).

Brad

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Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions

October 24, 2008 - by edgelings

By Michael S. Malone

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game.  With
its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election
campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.  And over the last
few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the
obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my
television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun — for the
first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for
a living.  A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did
for a living, I replied that I was "a writer", because I couldn't
bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me.  I am one of those
people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut.  I am a fourth generation
newspaperman.  As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a
newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy
days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the
Oregonian).  My hard-living - and when I knew her, scary - grandmother
was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times.  And
my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in
intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and
spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer.  I've spent
thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to
magazine editor.  And my oldest son, following in the family business,
so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his
drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a
"journalist", you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media.  Human beings
are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably
colored.  Hell, I can show you ten different ways to color variations
of the word "said" - muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly
replied, responded, etc. - to influence the way a reader will
apprehend exactly the same quote.  We all learn that in Reporting 101,
or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.  But what we
are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to
recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and
develop built-in alarms against their unconscious.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even
though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in
reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that
ideal as closely as possible.  That means constantly challenging our
own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views, and never,
ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge
people or institutions we admire.  If we can't achieve Olympian
detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty - especially
in ourselves.

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of
mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how
the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own
preconceptions.  But I always wrote it off as bad judgment, and lack
of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.
Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New"
Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of
writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated
from 'real' reporting, and at least in mainstream media, usually was.
The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very
nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some
of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as
plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.
I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out
endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that
I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work - not out
any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or
steal a story was a firing offense . . .indeed, it meant being
blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their
crimes - and if they did they were soon rehired into an even more
prestigious jobs.  It seemed as if there were two sets of rules:  one
for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for
folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the
national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading
newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let
opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the
front page.  Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in
my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest
copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York
Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town
paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith - and I know the day and place
where it happened - was the War in Lebanon three summers ago.  The
hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia only carried CNN, a
network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism.  But this was
CNN International, which is even worse.  I sat there, first with my
jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field
reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on
Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah
missiles raining down on northern Israel.   The reporting was so
utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching,
assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of
the story . . .but it never happened.

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display
in the current Presidential campaign.  Republicans are justifiably
foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press
coverage of the two candidates and their running mates.  But in the
last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -
no, make that shameless support - they've gotten from the press, are
starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the
long run when we don't have a free and fair press.  I was one of the
first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan
Rather - not because of his phony story, but because he refused to
admit his mistake - but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is
one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not one of those people who think the
media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial
SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage.  This is the Big
Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov.
Palin better be ready to play.  The few instances where I think the
press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy
McCain's daughter's MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few
newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is
the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse,
actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden.  If the
current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the
United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost
no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk)
and has entire years missing out of his biography.  That isn't Sen.
Obama's fault:  his job is to put his best face forward.  No, it is
the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative
media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has
systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain's lawyer, haven't we seen an
interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer - when we know all
about Mrs. McCain's addiction?  Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that
hard to interview?  All those phony voter registrations that hard to
scrutinize?  And why are Senator Biden's endless gaffes almost always
covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have
two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.  Middle
America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as
the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the
temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate.  So much
for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to
Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the
Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used
to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to
behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own
interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really
are.  It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting
everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is
trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently
volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama
presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever
their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been
unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as
much as they did McCain's.  That's what reporters do, I was proud to
have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story,
like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the
Obama campaign?  Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream
media betrayal?

The editors.  The men and women you don't see; the people who not only
decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give
the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages.  They
are the real culprits.

Why?  I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I
could have been one:  Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where
you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of
power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying
industry.  The Internet and alternative media are stealing your
readers, your advertisers and your top young talent.  Many of your
peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared.  Your job
doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your
started your climb.  The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you
any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before
you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a
pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times
call for desperate measures.  Even if you have to risk everything on a
single Hail Mary play.  Even if you have to compromise the principles
that got you here.  After all, newspapers and network news are doomed
anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can
retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself:  an attractive young
candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he
offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix
everything that has gone wrong in your career.  With luck, this
monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media
via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid
of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the
traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .