Letters to the Editor
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truth in reporting
They cannot help themselves...these so called reporters. There is so much pressure to do "something" that is different or to cget that "scoop" that they manufacture stories and ignore facts. I.E. Chris Matthews talking to Rudy, who says he's going to reduce corproate income taxes by 10 percent to stimulate the economy. If he had bothered to check, he would know that the current 35 percent rate, is almost never paid by any corporation. In fact, they get rebates totaling millions of dollars. Since they are interested more in who's in the lead, they don't do any fact checking. It never gets any better and the people continue to suffer.
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what the media could do:
1. Stop pulling crap off the Inter Web and presenting it as research a la Brian Williams at last week's Democratic debate: "Now Senator Obama, lots of rumors are being spread about you on the web. Rumors that you're a Muslim, that you swore your oath of office on a Koran ..."
Instead, look at the candidates' statements, and compare them to their records. Then ask them questions about them.
2. Stop repeating everyone else's story/catch-phrase until the words become meaningless. Come up with your own words for your own stories.
3. Stop passing along information you haven't covered, or at least fact-checked, yourself. (My "favorite" was the inaccurate coverage and hypebolic spin on Paul Wellstone's funeral, which cost Mondale the MN senate seat. If every reporter who claimed the funeral was a campaign had *attended* the funeral, instead of watching a 30-second clip from a 3-hour event, thy'd have needed a much bigger building).
4. Stop presenting both sides as equal (ie an actual expert arguing with a tinfoil-hat warrior in the name of "balanced" reporting), or presenting an opposing view that is so overwhelmed by the dominant voice, that the reporting is neither "fair" nor balanced".
5. Stop treating news as entertainment, and entertainment as news. What Brittney Spears or The Jolie-Pitts do is *not* news, unless they run for public office, cure world hunger, or cause a 30-car pileup for the afternoon commute.
6. (or is this really 5a?) Stop thinking you're the news-shaper, the news-celebrity, or the news-maker. You're the news-gatherer, and the news-deliverer. Chris Matthews and Fox and Friends and even Dan Rather should not *be* the story! They should simply *investigate* and *report* the story. This was the secret of truly great newscasters and reporters: they knew it wasn't about them.
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Celebrity Politics
I'm dismayed with Rosen's article. He keeps asking why campaign coverage sucks, then points to the "horse race" mentality and the "pack" mentality without really every delving too deeply into why campaign coverage sucks. It's like he wants to dive into the deep end of this question but can't quite go deep enough. Perhaps his own fear -- of being wrong, of being cast out from his brethren in the press, or of getting it right and not having anybody believe him -- keeps this analysis at the shallow end of the pool.
What Rosen doesn't mention is the significance of celebrity in our culture and how that drives at least some of the poor campaign coverage. Chris Matthews, Keith Olberman, Dan Abrams, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer (to some extent), Lou Dobbs, and other television "journalists" don't see themselves as journalists as much as they do cult heroes within the media. I need only point to Lou Dobbs' influence on American voters with his tripe about "independents' day" -- the idea that voters will disavow the traditional party system and become "independent" thinkers and voters. All the while Dobbs uses his celebrity to create fear and loathing of immigrants. Were he not a media cult hero, most Americans wouldn't bother to listen.
Dobbs is perhaps the worst of the lot, but nearly every other television "journalist" shares the traits of media cult heroes: popularity among the masses, white, usually male (with the exception of Katie Couric), vested in the media establishment, adheres to internal chaos theory (the louder, the more obnoxious, the more invested in competition, the better), and is driven not by such pesky details as journalistic excellence but by personal grandiosity -- how much can his/her personality influence the way viewers/voters think and act.
Tethered closely to this cult hero phenomenon is the issue of compensation. It isn't that real journalism and good pay are mutually exclusive. It is true, however, that when we worship our journalists as cult heroes, we create a monster. Who among us could turn away from the money, prestige, and power that comes with name and face recognition as a media celebrity?
The second issue Rosen could have delved into in more depth is the sports metaphor phenomenon, which ranks a close second to media cultism. The "horse race" mentality comes from sports: who's ahead, who's at the starting gate, who's on the rail. When our media cult heroes talk about candidates and campaigning, they resort to sports language: "fight to the finish," "duking it out across the country," "trading blows," "getting to the finish line first," "cross-country marathon." The fact that most of our media cult heroes are male simply adds to this phenomenon. Males seem genetically predisposed to view the world and everything in it as a competitive sport without regard to long-term consequences.
The third issue that Rosen fails to address in any serious detail is corporate ownership of the media and its effect on public discourse and election of public officials. In a way, corporate takeover of our lives, our country and our politics is nothing short of a PR miracle. "Journalists" are clearly not immune to the constant wearing-down of our internal thought processes and critical thinking skills by the "mad men" of Manhattan and elsewhere. When an interest or interests can successfully 'pitch' a product, service, attitude or belief to the masses, why would journalists not be affected? As we have witnessed during the Bush Administration, pro-business individuals within the administration have helped sell everything from the war in Iraq to the idea that evolution is simply a "theory," using journalism as the vehicle.
Maybe the real answer to honest campaign coverage and coverage of public policy in general lies in reeducating journalists about their basic role in the process: critical thinking and information discernment. When journalists are actively engaged in these practices, the cult of media celebrity and how best to spin a story take a back seat.