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Re Hersh -- A couple more things to add. (It's Saturday, which means I'm thinking it's okay to be more long-winded than usual without burdening other people, and also that I want to get outside and don't want to spend more time editing for length)
I have this debate with my wife, a former journo and foreign desk editor herself, about why the rest of the profession (speaking in terms of print only) is not more like Hersh. A couple points from those exchanges I'd share:
1. An enterprise piece like what Hersh does is something a hell of a lot of reporters would like to do, or have a crack at doing. They pitch their stories, but often times they get shot down. Some of the pitches are invariably bad, and they get told 'try again', some of the reporters aren't going to be up to it and the editor knows it, sometimes news judgment says another story is more timely or a higher priority, sometimes the editor is just stupid. (Some prize quotes my wife shares with eyes rolling fast enough to make me reach for the first aid kit: "No, let's not write about xxx, it's just too far away"; "I just don't get the Middle East")
2. Economics obviously play into it. In the last few years I've met a lot of foreign correspondents, most of them now retired or freelance (hence their availability to work on the projects I've been involved in), who used to operate in a very different world. One really great guy worked for the Baltimore Sun, covered SE Asia and went on to write several books based on his reporting. His first assignment in the 60s, the editor sends him to Laos or Cambodia (I don't rememebr which) and says, take a couple months, don't file any stories, just learn your way around. I heard similar stories from BBC reporters.
That just doesn't happen now; the outlets will parachute a reporter into a place like Afghanistan for a couple weeks, tell them to file by the end of the week. They end up applying a lot of the old templates from their previous assignment, e.g. reporters arriving in Afghanistan find, shock of shocks, that just like Kosovo (their last conflict reporting), the place is a seething hotbed of ethnic conflict in which Pashtuns become Serbs, Tajiks become Albanians, Hazaras become Turks, or vice-vice-versa, when that is not really the story at all. The reporters aren't any stupider, lazier, or more myopic than FCs who came before them, but they are operating in an environment where the 'wall' between editorial and business has been breached, the expectations have changed, and the resources they have to work with are very different. Maybe they should knwo better but ofttimes they don't, and their editors aren't providing any adult supervision.
(Credit where it's due, a WaPo reporter named NC Eizenmann filed some very good, nuanced features from parts of Afgh that journos rarely go)
3. I'm getting on my soap box here so I'll try to make this one short ... the Committee for Concerned Journalists put out a great summary of the problems several years ago, also discussing the synergry with cultural and demographic changes. (disclaimer, my opinions are mixed in with what follows) Journos are more educated now, and their expectations about professional advancement have ballooned accordingly (e.g. they will avoid shitty beats, live in the suburbs instead of the communities they cover, prize Beltway or state capitol gigs as an indicator of their status, etc) in a way that is more common than previously. They're aided in that by the structure of ownership, in which you can taxi-squad in a smaller paper before getting called up to the show ... but never develop the essential habits and breadth of covering (well) the issues of the smaller place. The establishment of 'journalism' as a 'profession', instead of a craft with some hands on blue-collar values and lots of blue-collar hacks on the beat, helped the quality initially, then narrowed the spread and stilted coverage to a smaller and smaller audience, a trend which was exacerbated by the business' side's demographic targeting. Then, there's the whole 'celebrity journalist' thing, about which the title says it all.
Anyways, it's all pretty abstract and insider-baseball until we get to see what we've reaped among our 'watchdogs' ... a tendency toward coverage by 'tenured' establishment reporters with middle-class expectations, expensive mortgages and private school fees, who have everything to lose by not allowing themselves to be played by their sources or give in to their other connections and few 'crucible' experiences that would have taught them why, or even how, they should resist and confront such authority. Not everybody, surely, but enough that we get what we've got now.
(I know kick the soap box out from under myself; sorry for all the diarrhea-of-the-keyboard)
