The Wizard Does Not Care
in The New York Times covers massive craft failure in American journalism. David Barstow shows us just how easy it is to manipulate news organizations--especially television news--when journalists fail to do the simplest of tasks: vet sources and commentators.
I do not fault the administration for manipulating the news media. Spewing propaganda has always been a (legitimate?) function of government. This is one of the reasons we have a First Amendment protecting our freedom to speak and write about public and political affairs.
But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this has nothing at all to do with a failure to vet. What if journalism is something that television news organizations simply no longer want to practice? Barstow writes:
Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.
The key word is "onus." By putting the onus on the analysts, the oxymoronic institution of television news has simply declared: Journalism is not practiced here.
I wrote that "every news organization should have a columnist (an opinion journalist who operates as a with a ) whose job it is to get in the face of every other news organization in the market." The example I used was trivial by comparison to Barstow's reporting. This is a stunning ethical failure of the primary purpose of journalism: to give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing. Nothing about that purpose and ethic is served by electronic . There is no possible way to define the uncritical passing along government propaganda into that purpose.
(Note: I need to acknowledge that the NYT crafts a narrative of government manipulation far more than a narrative journalistic malfeasance. You'll find the TV news reaction at the end.)
We do not live in a world in which television news organizations are capable of seeing this transgression for what it is. We live in a world in which pretend journalists damage our civic discourse by passing along propaganda as news analysis (and talking-head entertainment).
Do not assume I am surprised by this. Barstow has not reported something new so much as he has pulled back the media curtain. The problem is that the wizard isn't embarrassed and won't try to make it right.
his stuff.
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 4:41 pm under
