David Cay Johnston has written a really good piece explaining how the death of beat journalism is making us all dumber. Excerpts don’t do it justice, read the whole thing.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?
Our messy unity will be our strength.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.
If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.
Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.
The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker
He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.
The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.
I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.
“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”
They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.
Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.
He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!
This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.
… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop
I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.
cleek
well, i can’t just take Johnston’s word for it. now i’ve got to go track down and interview sources to verify everything he wrote. Great…
Wilson Heath
DCJ is no wimp in journalism. Dude decided to learn everything he could about taxation and tax policy when he realized that it wasn’t being adequately covered and explained. Definitely not a stenographer.
Comrade Javamanphil
No, no, no. This is all wrong. It’s those damn kids and their crazy internets that are killing the newspaper industry. Now, has anybody called the Cato institute to see if next month’s op-eds are ready?
Ash Can
It seems to me that if j-schools don’t have placement exams in law, economics, and government, and remedial courses to teach the basics of these subjects for the students who don’t test out of them, it’s high time they started.
agrippa
The number of reporters at a newspapers have been greatly reduced. Cost reduction.
The quality has gone as well.
gypsy howell
And considering that most people get their news from TV, the situation is even godawfuller.
Dennis SGMM
@Ash Can:
If the reporting on the tax cut extensions is any indicator, they sure as hell don’t understand marginal tax rates.
@agrippa:
It’s mystifying to me that layoffs have been the answer to declining readership at so many newspapers. OTOH, I went to the Beat the Press blog that was linked from Johnston’s article and it seems that a number of reporters are sleeping on the job.
Leslie
Ash Can makes an important point — j schools aren’t training reporters on the content they need to know, at least not when I was getting my BA in journalism. It’s not primarily the numbers of reporters, although obviously that’s a factor, it’s their lack of knowledge. Personally, I think there should be no j schools but only a concentration in whatever specialty and new reporters should be hired on the basis of their degrees.
But the larger point is that since the 80s newspapers across the country were bought and sold by companies that had no interest in journalism and only in short-term profits. They’ve gutted reporting staffs and handed down stupid decisions from on high based on a misreading or total lack of concern for the core mission of a newspaper. Editors and reporters were fired to keep salaries low, people were brought in because they had management experience in the company. They lacked knowledge of their field, the local community and its news.
It’s so depressing.
agrippa
@Dennis SGMM:
Reductions in number and quality has been the response. Ownership has been concentrated; local ownership scarcely exists. Cost reductions above all.
It is very hard for people to keep up; some foreign papers do a better job of covering Washington than most US papers.
What do we have? Tub thumbing; political zealots/hotheads who are strangers to the truth putting out propaganda. The RW does that very well. What passes for a LW [ we do not really have an actual LW in the USA] tries hard to keep up .
Dennis SGMM
The salary abuse in Bell, California, went on for years. The absence of local reporting allows for all sorts of mischief. In my own small Southern California town, our City Council was hijacked by a slate of well-funded, get-rich-quick candidates when the real estate boom heated up. They went on to make a series of astonishingly short-sighted, bone-headed, decisions. They did a lot of damage and cost the city considerable money yet they were able to do so for years because only those of us who attended the council meetings knew what was going on. Many of us tried to spread the alarm but it wasn’t until they decided to sell the golf course to some developers from Texas that a hue and cry went up.
Marc McKenzie
@Dennis SGMM: Great example, Dennis. Like many, I was not aware of this story until it broke.
One wonders what would have happened if this type of journalism existed in the 1970s…Watergate would never have been exposed, along with numerous other misdeeds.
mistermix, thanks for this. It was worth reading–even if it was a gloomy article.
cathyx
Who’s going to pay anyone to report the real news? There are no jobs available for real reporters.
MattF
I’ve been living in the DC area for… a lot of years, and the decline of the WaPo is (as everyone knows) a case in point. Once upon a time… the Post, institutionally, felt that it was just about tied with the NY Times for quality journalism. This was never actually true, IMO, but the Post was, in fact, a plausible beta to the Times’ alpha.
But that was then. I still ‘read’ the Post, if ‘reading’ means skipping the editorials, the sports news, the political news, and the international news. Local news (which is actually covered by the ‘Gazette’ franchise that the Post purchased a couple of years ago) and movie times are generally accurate and acceptable.
c u n d gulag
I studied journalism in college in 1977-78.
And that’s why I can no longer read most of the reporters in the NY Times, WaPo, and WSJ. They write lazy shit that my professor would have given me an “F” for, if not outright embarassed me in front of the class and thrown my ass out the damned door.
And most Op-ed columnists are even worse. But them, I can understand. Many of them have an agenda.
And I certainly don’t mean ALL reporters. There are still many great ones. But the rest of them are lazy, incurious oafes.
LosGatosCA
Even at peak newspapers and magazines were only marginally competent. Now all pretense and funding is gone, so that margin is wiped out.
The ‘pinnacle’ of journalism in America employed Judith Miller to cover up the Iraq War malfeasance, etc. Journalism has been dead for a long time.
agrippa
@LosGatosCA:
I agree with ‘marginally competent’. Even in better days, thee was so much that was not reported or lightly reported.
agrippa
@LosGatosCA:
I agree with ‘marginally competent’. Even in better days, thee was so much that was not reported or lightly reported.
El Cid
@c u n d gulag: That’s what strikes me so often. It doesn’t have to be a work of journalism.
Any research paper I had to do in undergrad would have been instantly failed had I adhered to the standards of evidence and relevance of data and coherence of arguments of the very most prominent and respected pundits and many major ‘journalists’.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
My wife went to a City council meeting for a school project and found city council members re-writing zoning laws for family members’ businesses and (mormon) ward members, while other people (the majority of the rest of the people there) were ignored. Luckily, the papers here in Utah have laid off most of the reporters to buy up coverage from independant writers (read: national blogs and AP reprints) so this story will never be covered.
burnspbesq
Anyone who has any respect for David Cay Johnston must not have read his two books on tax policy issues, or the column he now writes for Tax Notes Today. They are dumbed down, poorly reasoned, and unbalanced. Polemics, thinly disguised as analysis. The guy wears his biases on his sleeve, and seems not to be the least bit ashamed of them.
The Times editorial process reined him in somewhat. Freed from those shackles, he has become the Taibbi of tax journalism, but without the gratuitous profanity. And no, that’s not meant as a compliment.
c u n d gulag
@El Cid:
You’ve got that right.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the younger generations getting medals or awards for doing nothing much besides showing up?
I sound like an old jerk, and I am, but when I was a corporate trainer, a lot of the trainees wanted some sort of a reward, and we used to ‘motivate’ them by some little tchatchka (a knick-knack), or something for accomplishing a major task, or answering a very tough question. Pretty soon, I stopped doing that because the wanted something for doing basically nothing. When they’d ask where there reward was, I’d tell them their reward was that they got to stay in training and keep their job for another day.
I was never rewarded for just doing my job. For that, I got to keep my job. I had to go above and beyond to get something.
You don’t get an Olympic Gold Medal for just jogging. You get one for sprinting faster than the other people sprinting with you.
I don’t know what elese to call this but the “Special Olympicization” of the work force.
I love those kids, my nephew’s autistic, and I agree with giving them ALL awards, no questions asked. I just question whether this is the way to run newpapers, TV or radio news, or basically any other endeavor except that which involves handicapped individual. (No jokes about that, please).
You reward excellence. Competence means you get to keep your job.
ornery curmudgeon
@burnspbesq: “Anyone who has any respect for David Cay Johnston must not have …”
This comes from burnspbesq the weird and steadily-wrong troll, so it needs to be taken with a shaker of salt.
burnspbesq
@ornery curmudgeon:
Looked in the mirror lately? You just wrote your own autobiography.
Or, more precisely, your autobiography would read, “I’m too lazy to think or actually, you know, analyze shit, so when someone says something that doesn’t fit neatly into my preconceived world view, I don’t bother to engage on substance. I just go straight to name-calling. I think that makes me a BSD.”
mistermix
@burnspbesq: How about a link to a take-down that shows some points that Johnston got wrong? And, please, not a link to the whole tax code as is your usual practice.
Otherwise, I’ll just write this off as more of your usual bullshit.
El Cid
@burnspbesq: It may be common that tax policy experts view Johnston’s work as polemical and wrong in many basic arguments, but it’s also the case that Johnston’s work has been seen by such types as valuable in a number of important ways as well.
A complete and cynical dismissal appears to be unwarranted, and in short unconvincing, at least to some of the scholars of the field.
low-tech cyclist
David Cay Johnston:
If you’d have asked me in the infancy of the blogosphere, six or seven years ago, I would have expected that by now, we would have a legion of people going through the documents of the various Federal government agencies, state governments, and whatnot by now, and using blogs as a means of reporting their findings.
Why? Because there’s only a market for a limited number of blogs whose forte is general political commentary, there’s a LOT of competition to fill that need, and there’s a goodly number of bloggers who got there early and have firmly established their position in the market, so to speak. So if you want to develop a reputation as a blogger, you’ve got to find a particular niche and become good at it. Becoming THE leading blogger on the internal workings of any government agency from DoD or DHS to NOAA or the Census Bureau seemed like an obvious route to developing a reputation as a go-to blogger at those times when issues involving your area of expertise fill the news.
I don’t see any evidence that much of this has happened, though, and I’m not sure why.
sparky
thanks for the linky, mm (OMFSM!)
it occurs to me that perhaps many of the problems of the good-sized newspapers is that the market has changed in ways that simply don’t bode well for any large paper. for large events TV is there first, and there is no shortage of people willing to opine in front of a camera. on the other hand, the local journalism discussed here isn’t actually dead–it’s just in the local papers, many of which seem to be doing just fine. yet we expect the good-sized paper to perform both of these jobs even though we no longer support them.
my point is that the large post–WWII setup with large staffs on the papers was never the norm, and the papers now occupy what has become an unstable and shrinking middle ground. so the expectation that papers would continue as they “always” have (because after all, that’s what we are used to, dang it) seems a bit misguided.
as for the other point about education, IMO that’s a bigger problem. in a cut and paste world, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to actually “learn stuff”. that tends to get in the way of making the dollars.
sparky
@low-tech cyclist: i can think of a number of reasons why that hasn’t happened:
a. it’s boring*
b. anyone with that level of knowledge would have to be in DC. so that rules out most of the US.
c. they would also have to have no connections with the Federal government.
d. it’s boring
e. a site like that would require a ton of work for, what would be, at most, 50 people. if that many.
f. it’s boring.
g. as we see with wikileaks, the State will go to great lengths to silence or crush actual criticism other than fluff about politics. how long do you think a blog critical of agency action would last once it exposed malfeasance?
h. it’s boring.
*not necessarily my opinion, but i would bet the opinion of most of the people on the “ground floor” of journalism.
El Cid
@low-tech cyclist: A blogger of his day, I. F. Stone, who published his own Weekly in order to counter the major incorrect or propagandistic themes of the big money newspapers, through personal Herculean efforts and a heavy reliance on government documents and Congressional hearings over insider gossip.
His view in 1963.
Karen
The fact about journalism is not that it’s done on the cheap but it ceased to exist thanks to Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Thanks to them, news became less about FACTS. You could get stabbed in front of someone and if Fox News says it never happened, it never happened.
What we have now is just rip and read reporting. They say or write what they’re told to. This isn’t just on Fox, by the way, it’s for all media now.
The few who considered themselves to be journalists out of some naive sense of idealism learned after they were demoted or fired that the news was propaganda and had no interest in the real truth if it didn’t serve their agenda.
Woodward and Bernstein would have been fired today.
Comrade Kevin
@mistermix: Are you kidding? We’re just supposed to accept his wisdom from on high. After all, he’s a lawyer, you know.