Letters to the Editor
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To Do Journalism
You have to make a living at it. Salaried reporters face the same sort of compromises as anyone does who takes his pay from someone else. Once upon a time, if you were lucky, you might have gone to work for someone who at least claimed allegiance to the principles of the fourth estate, but I suspect that more often than not you'd have found yourself working for someone who simply had a partisan dislike for the one chosen to be what Garrison Keillor now calls the current occupant.
Which brings us to our current predicament. The moving finger now having writ and moved on, today's media are now large enough to create an entire class of embedded sycophants, not to mention one or two Rupert Murdochs, whose agenda is something more like one ring to rule them all than comforting the afflicted.
It takes resources to report on anything below the glossy surface. Most of us -- those who can still stand to watch television or read the NYT, anyway -- have long since developed analytical skills similar to those of folks in the old Soviet Union, skills which begin in the acknowledgment that everything we see or read is a self-serving lie of one sort or other. (This is true of both the left and the right -- while I've always been morally certain that GWB was an irresponsible wastrel, I was also glad to see Dan Rather get his, even if it was the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy which handed it to him.) One inconvenient truth remains, however: knowing that someone is lying isn't the same thing as knowing what's actually going on.
Bloggers will never have, except in a few cases, the resources to be journalists. If you think of journalism as a funnel, with the narrow end pointed at us, what bloggers can do -- and have done, for the most part -- is to wrestle control of the narrow end from the Rupert Murdochs, and turn it back against them. We should think of ourselves as the vox populi, the largest Op-Ed page in the known universe. If, as the economics of the post-industrial age evolve, we can do more, so much the better. No matter what happens, though, the present situation is inherently unstable, and can't last.
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Corporate communications, not journalism
Wolffe's definition of what the White House press corps is supposed to be doing is exactly the same as what anyone in the information department of a major corporation sets out to do. And that is not to challenge management but to get management's message out, whether to employees, stockholders or customers.
I'm glad he made it clear that he believes political journalism is -- or should be -- just a form of corporate communications with the president of the United States playing the role of CEO.
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Duty of the press
I'm ain't no journalist, but I do "know" 2 things they should keep in mind: 1) if you're mother says she loves you, check it out; and 2) comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.
Even by those simplistic standards most of today's Gang of 500 is failing.
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Remember Katrina
you're doing a fantastic job Brownie!
These are people that exist in a different world and do not choose to look with critical eyes as that may be against their best interests in climbing their social and monetary ladder to success.
These types are working the jobs they have because they are known assets of the ruling elite.
These are the people that are among the most disgusting of the ruling elite except for the congressmen and women that actually take oaths to protect and defend the Constitution and then sell out and ignore the law of the land through the good offices of corruption.
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Blogs and journalism
One of the reasons journalism has declined is that the resources mounted to manipulate it have increased dramatically. A PR team that wants to get media coverage for an event or product has far more time and resources to put into crafting a story than a reporter does, and thus it is not too hard to get that reporter to run the story if it is well crafted. Sad but true.
On the political level, this is only more true. Does John Solomon spend his life digging up dirt on Harry Reed or John Edwards? No, oppo researches hand it to him and since what they hand him is true, if heavily slanted by omission, and since his editors will reward him by running such pieces prominently. Recently he moved from AP to the front pages of the WaPo, in no small part because of the success of pieces that began as oppo research. Clinton's team was a master at this. Rove's is bigger and better.
One of the most valuable ways blogs can help 'push journalists to do their jobs better' is by helping to counter this massive imbalance in resources not in favour of the journalists per se, but in favour of the facts. Josh Marshall at TPM did yeoman work on the John Solomon stories, providing key information not in the Solomon pieces. This blog and others, both in their content and their commenters regularly provide research and context that the MSM has failed to find. (Sysprog, you remain my hero.) So far, I would argue that this functions far better in conjunction with mainstream media than it does as a replacement for it. FDL liveblogging Libby is a great example. The MSM should have but did not devote the resources to provide live coverage of the trial. FDL provided those resources and, this is the good part, the MSM took advantage of FDL's work and informed the public through their own pages more fully and more accurately than they would have without FDL.
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a simple question
I have been trying in vain to prod any of the journalistic pack to ask the President what he means by his oft repeated phrase "We must defeat the enemy over there in Iraq or they will follow us home." In fact, in local news stories about two very young soldiers from this area who were killed in Iraq the families mentioned that the boys volunteered so that we would be fighting "them" overseas so that we would not be fighting them here.
So, would someone please ask the President exactly who the enemy is that will come here?
How many does he expect will come here?
How will they get here?
How many will it take to do us serious damage (since only 19 perpetrated 9/11)?
Can we kill or capture the enemy down to the last person?
Such questions seem important and obvious, but I haven't heard them asked.