Wow

Ok, so maybe wow isn’t how most people would react to this, but how most people react to the quality of news media — with indifference — might explain why we have the news we have. Which is to say less and less of the real thing.

Karr cleared

From the first stories about Karr’s arrest, which quoted his wife saying she was with him, halfway across the country, the day Jon Benet Ramsey was killed, it seemed only a matter of time.

Editor & Publisher recounts how the news media once again made a collective ass of itself.

A Google search for “John Mark Karr,” who was unknown until this month, came up with 10,800,000 results at the time of the latest twist. “John Mark Karr” with “Ramsey” added produced 6.7 million returns.

Slate was among the few hip to the possibility that Karr had made the whole thing up.

More media, less news?

Always a big topic of conversation around my office….

Over the next few years [the newspaper industry] must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach—or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.

Priorities

Number of reporters… contributing to Friday’s front page New York Times story on the JonBenet Ramsey case: 13.

Number of reporters contributing to Friday’s front page New York Times story on the federal court ruling that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional: 2

"…entertainment, masquerading as journalism”

Via Romenesko, a military man asks about yesterday’s coverage of a plane diverted to Logan, “How do we stop the decline of television “journalism” (quotes deliberate) so that those making decisions no longer feel compelled to broadcast each rumor but instead have the courage to take the time needed to gather the facts, discern truth from rumor, and THEN go on the air? I ask because what we got in this case, was tripe.”

Blogging and journalism, Part II

This was a really stupid thing for a professional journalist to do, not to mention completely unnecessary. The photographer responsible, presumably a stringer, has been fired, which is the only appropriate response to such a breach of ethics.

The incident is nonetheless being touted here and elsewhere on the Internet as just another example of mainstream media bias. Inherent in this tiresome critique is the notion that “citizen journalists” stand ready to race in and, whenever necessary, set the record straight.

Fine. But, as Eric Boehlert points out, the accountability — not to mention the dispassionate pursuit of the truth — that motivates most journalists to do the right thing, is sorely lacking among the media’s harshest critics on the Internet.

This isn’t to defend the photographer’s actions, but to amplify a point I tried to make here. To the LGFs out there, the most important thing going on in the world today is taking place in newsrooms, not on the battlefield. That’s pretty convenient for a bunch of irate people sitting before a computer in the comfort of their own homes and offices, listening to news they don’t want to hear.

Blogging and journalism

My magazine subscriptions finally caught up with my recent move, so I only just had the chance to read Nicholas Lemann’s take on Internet journalism.

Where I work, Lemann’s ultimate question — “what has citizen journalism actually brought us” — is discussed pretty regularly in the context of our ongoing effort to adapt to the future needs of the profession. As Lemannn notes, voicing skepticism about the value of citizen journalism can provoke “relentless sneering” from bloggers about the supposed elitism of professional reporters and editors. Indeed, as Glenn Reynolds, who operates Instapundit, a blog of some repute among conservatives, put it in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths”….

Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do do this stuff — and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession.

By “punditocracy,” Reynolds doesn’t just mean television talking heads, op-ed writers and columnists. He means anyone who earns a paycheck working for the “mainstream media,” which as everyone knows is hopelessly liberal and intent on destroying our cherished freedoms. Or not.

In thinking about where to begin with Reynold’s statement, I couldn’t get past the thought that it’s utter bullshit. If he means anyone can, metaphorically speaking, blow smoke out their ass, then I agree. But as a journalist with some experience who only recently sought to fill a couple hours each day with his own blog, I can tell you — and two out of every three bloggers agree — that blogging is not journalism. That is not to say that it doesn’t serve the similar function of giving people a sense of reality that they may not have time to experience or seek out on their own.

But, standards and professional values are as important to journalists as knowing what questions to ask and where to find information not easily available to others. Literally every journalist I know takes this commitment to heart. I know I do, which is why Six String Ink might feature links to news that reflects the Proprietor’s particular interests and world view, but rarely do I offer much explicit commentary about what it all means. That would require, out of good conscience, some additional reporting on my part.

Which brings me back to Lemann. He defines reporting as the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience….

Leave aside the bit about “a distinct occupational category,” and you’re still left with the simple reality that few of the 12 million bloggers out there today bother to get out of the house, let alone “go where important things are happening.”

That’s not the only way to approach reporting, of course. Lemann notes what every journalist already knows about the Internet: “[P]otentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented.”

However, Lemann says, to “keep pushing” in the direction that will bring blogging and journalism together requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs…. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.

I agree, and if that somehow makes me an elitist, so be it.

Moonlighting

Good question: “Please explain to your readers how a government official who is paid by hard-earned taxpayer dollars is allowed to moonlight as a Republican mouthpiece on television.”

Bad answer: “Ms. Czarnecki involves herself as an active citizen on her own time engaging in activities that any citizen engages in. It’s no different than a person on the street doing a TV interview on Election Day.”

UPDATE: “PBS should have disclosed that a “conservative commentator” on a political talk show was a senior appointee in the Bush administration, according to three prominent media ethics experts.”

And PBS, which initially didn’t see the problem, now admits otherwise.

Read it for the pictures

Will free CDs get young people to buy Sunday newspapers?

Los Angeles Times
iMedia International has reached agreement with the Dallas Morning News and New York Daily News to distribute within their Sunday editions CDs filled with movie previews, music samples, video games, comics, celebrity interviews and advertisements. “It was a gamble for us to do this,” says a veep at the Dallas paper, which has been distributing CDs since April. “I’m not ready to say it will definitely pay off in the long run or that my advertisers will embrace it. But so far it looks really good.”

Lying liars

Ann Coulter is the one conservative commentator who literally makes my skin crawl. I can listen and absorb a reasoned argument from anyone. But Coulter is all venom and no substance. She has no ability to persuade, and in fact she doesn’t even try to reach beyond the choir of the ill-informed that has been singing the same tired song since the Clinton administration. She stands for everything that is wrong with political discourse today.

In what should come as no surprise to anyone with an ounce of sense, Media Matters found muchas problemas with the endnotes in Coulter’s most recent screed, Godless, The Church of Liberalism.

Among other things, Coulter:

• misrepresented and distorted the statements of her sources;
• omitted information in those sources that refuted the claims in her book;
• misrepresented news coverage to allege bias;
• relied upon outdated and unreliable sources;
• and invented “facts.”