This guy makes some good points:
When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.
That model works for some incoming data. I only need a few seconds to come up with my official response to much of what is shared by way of the realtime web: Farmville update (hide), Foursquare Check-in (ignore), Mel Gibson tape (email link to Rabbi), Kid in a watermelon (retweet).
Other news and information doesn’t necessarily fit into the new instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it’s getting more difficult to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the data that requires a little more consideration.
I think politics had a little more to do with the Sherrod debacle than he does, but it’s telling that nobody embraces the ADHD Twitter culture more than online journalists.
(via)
Derelict
From what I’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced interviewing the latest crop of “journalists” over the last 10 years, it’s not so much ADHD as some other kind of comprehensive brain disorder. They don’t know anything, they can’t remember anything, and they don’t want to learn anything. They’re complete tabula rasa, and they work very hard to remain that way.
So no matter what comes their way from the right, they’re always completely credulous. Sure, Breitbart has been conclusively proven to be a dishonest hack over and over again. But . . .
Athenae
It’s not so much that they embrace it as that they use it as an excuse to be lazy and stupid. Come on. They’re adults with their own agency and they can decide to actually HAVE those standards they like to lament all those filthy bloggers for not having.
I don’t buy for a second that the speed of the flow of information is to blame for their actions. They’re being the lazy assholes they always wanted to be, askeered of missing a story so they jump on whatever right-wing bullshit they see, and “Twitter culture” is no reason to let them off the hook.
A couple of decades ago it was the speed of information getting out through those newfangled 24-hour news channels that was to blame for journalistic negligence. Same shit, different excuses.
A.
Michael
Thinking through a story is hard, and restraint from instant opinion will get in the way of a scoop. Besides, real reporting costs money.
Far easier to do a knee-jerk reaction.
ETA: You can’t spell “twitter” without “twit”.
WereBear
I agree; this is simply bullshit.
There’s nothing that says one has to do a job like a pithed frog instead of a journalist.
They are covering for the fact that what their bosses are hiring are not journalists. It’s not about uncovering facts and writing them up with coherence and clarity.
I guess we need a word for the spokesmodel/carnival barker/propagandist that “reporters” have become.
mistermix
To explain a behavior is not to excuse it. I think his explanation makes sense. I agree with those who say that journalists should do better, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m often overwhelmed by the stream of information pouring out of the Internets and into my eyeballs.
WereBear
@mistermix: I see yer point, and I’ll raise it; I think we are creating people who are becoming numb to it. They are less likely to over react to a flash in the pan scandal, but also less likely to notice a flare of danger.
geg6
What a load of bullshit. This asshole laments over how HARD it is to dig through all the available information, good and bad and important and not, and so we shouldn’t blame their coverage for being stupid and shallow and uninformed of facts on them because it’s just too much for them to be expected to manage. Fuck that.
If I can manage to do it, they certainly can. Funnily enough, if they weren’t so enamored with being followed or following each other on such an idiotic and shallow platform as Twitter and actually did their fucking jobs as journalists, perhaps they may find themselves actually being able to determine what is important and what is not. The minute I hear or read anyone referencing Twitter, I know immediately that they have nothing to say worth listening to.
Journalism is, with less than a percentage point of exceptions, dead in this country.
mclaren
tl;dr
Violet
The live by the clickrate, die by the clickrate mentality mostly likely has some small impact too. But yeah, they aren’t doing their jobs.
Many people in many jobs have a lot of annoying distractions. They still manage to get their jobs done. Journalists should be able to do the same thing.
MaximusNYC
Does anyone even remember what TV news looked like before 9/11, without the ubiquitous crawl and the continually updated BREAKING NEWS!!1! graphics? I know it was going in that direction, but 9/11 amped it up and made it much worse.
Rob
Yes Twitter caused Whitewater….
kay
I think it’s a problem, and it’s bigger than what’s explored here.
Again and again, they accept the premise included in the first planted, deliberately deceptive question, and that’s where they go off track.
The Gulf oil spill is a good example, but there are tens of them.
The first question they asked in the Gulf oil spill was “why hasn’t the response been federalized?” They were given that question, and there’s a reason for that. It assumes something that hasn’t been established. In that example (as in others) that question includes erroneous information. The Gulf Oil spill was federalized, almost immediately, under the Oil Pollution Act, the moment it was declared a “spill of national significance”.
The answer to that question is ” Wrong. It was federalized”. There’s lots of good questions after that, but they’re way the hell off track once they accept the assumption implicit in the question.
There were political reasons to include the misinformation in the question, because that set that frame of the analysis, and they fall for that every time.
It takes individual independent thought to reject the question that includes the assumption, and that takes ten minutes, and a reliance on your own thought process. They’re going to spend a lot of time chasing bullshit, and debunking assumptions they endorsed, and backtracking, because they jump too soon.
Geeno
@mclaren: WIN!
slag
@MaximusNYC:
Having just spent a couple of days in a hotel room with a television I can totally relate to this. The false sense of urgency throughout all of television (not just news) was incredibly off-putting. Everything–from the Biography Channel to the Travel Channel to all the news channels–was fraught with this underlying sense of gravity and peril. I couldn’t watch any of it. It made me want to bury my head in a pillow.
On my way home, I thought a lot about the effect that television was having on the majority of our population. I don’t know exactly what effect that is, but I can only assume that it’s not a good one. Going to a hotel with a television used to be a fun thing for us because it enabled us to see stuff we don’t normally get to see. Not anymore. I’ll never voluntarily turn that thing on again.
Steeplejack
@mclaren:
Heh. That’s hilarious coming from you.
fourmorewars
Guess I have a little sympathy for journalists in that they’re deathly afraid of getting caught by their bosses, having missed some nugget among all that fast-moving tripe. More a defensive thing than the way they’d maybe work if they had their druthers.
But this could be melded into Greenwald’s piece that Atrios pointed to, about the CNN’ers complaining about bloggers, to point out how they should be happy there are folks out there who feel they can afford to slowly digest one story instead of feeling obliged to engage in the behavior described here.
The talk about journalism and 9/11 reminded me about how, on that day, all the talking heads sounded so much less rehearsed. And I wondered how long it would be before you heard them falling back into their old stentorian rhythms. Answer: about seven that night, I believe, when NBC had a short rehash cued up, and I heard Stone Phillips’ voice coming from the TV. Come to think of it, has anybody ever heard Stone Phillips sound spontaneous?
fourmorewars
On second glance at the excerpt, it strikes me all the comments, including mine, are discussing the job of journalism. Is that what the article linked to actually goes into? ‘Cause, I mean….Farmville and Kid in a Watermelon?
Brachiator
The guy ignores what is staring him right in the face.
The Sherrod incident was a carefully crafted political dirty trick that has nothing to do with the Speed of the Internets.
Over the past few weeks, the conservative elites and the reporters and pundits who willingly whore for them have been pushing the lie that there are no white racists, only black racists, enabled not only by racist organizations like the NAACP but by the Obama Administration itself, which has “Get Whitey” posters on the wall in the Department of Justice and also apparently in the USDA.
When theNAACP noted the obvious, that some tea partiers are racists, the word went out among conservative pundits to look for, or to manufacture, an incident in which a black government official or employee could be shown discriminating against white people.
The TV news cycle, which predates the rise of the Internets, is great for this kind of thing, where explosive breaking news typically suppresses more careful consideration.
What was an unexpected bonus was the USDA officials falling for the lie and firing Sherrod.
Ultimately, this has nothing to do with journalists or real journalism. It has everything to do with the ongoing efforts of conservatives, within and outside of government, to bring down the Obama Administration and the Democrats.
Lastly, the Intenets makes it easier for people to jump to conclusions, but it only magnifies typical human nature.
Sheila
The best case scenario is that our access to an overwhelming amount of “information” in a short period of time is altering our genetic make-up so that we are able eventually to take in, process and evaluate all the data much more quickly than previously. The negative effects may simply mean we are in a transitional period and will come out the other side new and improved. The audacity of hope?
steve
If you look at how much ‘news’ is important and beneficial to hear, you’ll discover it’s virtually none. Go to any news source, and what you get is worthless stuff like:
“bob johnson leads fred williams by three points in poll 2 years before election”
“Famous actor tim franks charged with dwi”
“tips for losing 5 lbs by Thanksgiving”
“Riots in Bolognastan over cuts in civil pensions”
“Plane crashes in east Chile, 14 missing”
“Wisconson’s 7th district race heats up”
“Young Senegalese try to wrestle way out of poverty”
“Bus plunge kills 17 in Indian Kashmir”
“Newsweek: Comedy goes raunchy in China”
several of those I copied and pasted from MSNBC right now.
I could spend an hour reading all those stories and learn nothing of any importance. In fact, I would have done myself a disservice, utterly wasting an hour of my life. So why do I do it? Well, I’m easily bored, and there’s always some poppin’ fresh info from news sites to alleviate boredom for a few mins. But when I look back at the time I’ve wasted…ugh. The fact that I spent ten seconds of my life reading about anything–anything–that ever came out of John Boehner’s mouth makes me disgusted with myself.
My plan is to change my life the following ways:
1) stop watching all cable news (done)
2) stop visiting all news websites (half done)
3) stop visiting all political blogs (not done)
I am convinced that an hour or so per week reading the concise news magazine The Week will tell me any news that I actually can benefit from. And when it comes to voting, does it really take more than an hour before election day to figure out who to vote for? I doubt it. Most races, it’d probably take out 30 seconds:
candidate a supports tax cuts, teaching all scientific viewpoints, tax cuts, deregulation, internment camps for swarthy types, and tax cuts. he’s endorsed by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
candidate b supports increased funding for science, rebuilding our infrastructure, fighting climate change, supports a woman’s right to choose, separation of church and state, and no discrimination against gays. He’s endorsed by Barack Obama and the ACLU.
See? How long did it take to choose?
I’m looking forward to a life of not wasting time on stupid cable-driven nontroversies and meaningless spectacles.
Jules
@Brachiator:
You are right but was not just about the NAACP, this was about sliming Sherrod personally because she is the lead plaintiff in the Pigford case that the gov’t lost, BUT the Senate has so far refused to approve the funding so those black farmers who joined the class and the Sherrods have still not been paid.
This week they put the funding into the war supplemental bill which they were unable to get cloture for and now will be filibustered.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/o/l/oldengoldendecoy/2010/07/lshirley-sherrod—the-pigford-vs-vilsack-lawsuit.php
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/shirley_sherrod_and_the_discrimination_of_black_fa.php
Bartbrat can claim all he wants that it was only about the NAACP (and to him maybe it was) but whoever gave him that tape and paid him had a much bigger agenda in mind.
Brachiator
@Sheila:
I wonder. Is this “information” really overwhelming? For much of our existence, we had to take in and quickly process information to determine whether or not it was a threat. Our lives often depended upon the decisions we made.
Now we sit back and scan a lot of crap that is mostly little more than entertainment and the biggest threat we face is being bored to death.
We can already flip a switch and turn the crap off. Do we really need evolution to come to our rescue?
dms
@Jules:
No, it was not all about the NAACP for Breitbart. Read his first foray into this debacle. It was all about Sherrod.
He, yet again, is lying.
Brachiator
@Jules:
You may be onto something here. Sherrod now appears to be a community activist inspired to come to work for the government, and we all know how dangerous these people can be.
Sherrod’s earlier attempt to become a farmer has an interesting idealistic background:
Unsurprisingly, since only white people from the heartland can be Real American Farmers(TM), Fox News and other conservative media are disparaging these people as “black wannabe farmers” who have the nerve to sue the government while we have budget deficits.
So let’s review. White people work hard and deserve everything they get. Black people are racists who are always on the hustle, looking to get something from the government. Sherrod should never been hired by the USDA to be put in charge of agricultural programs because, even though she was fair to white people, she might, just might, insist on being fair to nonwhites as well, and this is intolerable to the malignant conservative elites.
Let’s look at what black farmers had to deal with under the old system, keeping in mind that white people can’t be racist and Sherrod was an admitted bad person.
And note here that the speed of the Internets helps clear through the BS and more clearly monitor the efforts of conservative elites who seek to continue the smear against Sherrod. Note that they can’t even enjoy the Obama Administration’s reversal on Sherrod. They must keep finding a way to portray her as either a black racist or an activist race hustler.
dms
Just read the entire entry. This stuck out:
“You think it’s easy to become an expert pundit on topics as varied as phone antennas, oil spills, Lindsay Lohan’s jail experience, World Cup soccer and the inner workings of Mel Gibson’s phone etiquette in a single sitting?”
I don’t know what job he has, but who’s asking him to be an expert PUNDIT on all of those subjects? Who’s got a job that varied? Most of those topics are useless drivel, which only require reporting the known facts. Who’s asking him/her to opine on everything?
If opining on everything is our news model, then we are truly fucked.
Johnny's mom
Did anyone see the news teasers on MSN’ s homepage this morning? “Regrets Following Racist Claims”, with Sherrod’s picture. Made it sound like she was the one with regrets. So I had to read it ’cause my head hadn’t exploded for like the last 5 minutes.
The article started: “was forced to resign after a blogger posted comments she made about race to an NAACP audience” still making it look like she’s the one who was racist. There’s NO mention of Breitbart’s editing until after the fold.
Tell me they weren’t willfully promoting Breitbart’s false claims because the only thing that counts is sensationalism (sensationalism IS the new journalism).
Tell me they don’t know what % of their readers only read the first line or first paragraph. Those readers never would have seen any mention of Breitbart at all.
(that sound is my head exploding all over again)