It’s possible someone here has already linked to this piece, but anyway it’s worth reading again if so (via):
Campaign reporters have deeply internalized the need to appear fair, to be above mere partisanship, to criticize or praise both sides in equal measure. The GOP is acutely aware of this dynamic and for years has used it to their advantage. But real fairness is geared to the facts, not to appearances, and today’s right simply lies more, misleads more, and denies established facts more. That is the conclusion a fair-minded appraisal yields. Empirics have a liberal bias, to paraphrase Colbert.
So what do journos do? Do they call them as they see them and get labeled “biased” and “partisan”? Or do they follow the lead of The Washington Post‘s The Fix and cover politics like a theater critic assessing performances? That’s been the default mode for Politico-style journalists (like, say, Mark Halperin) for a long time. It’s safe and comfortable. There’s rarely any penalty for getting things wrong. You can rise quite high among the ranks of Very Serious People in that mode. But for those like Ezra, rankled by facts, irritated by conscience, it’s not a very attractive route.
[….]It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I have no training in journalism. I was never taught to be even-handed or “neutral.” What training I have for what I do came from two places. The first was a whole lot of time spent with a large extended family in the South (Georgia, mostly) filled with raucous, hyper-verbal drunks with highly sensitive bullsh*t detectors and razor-sharp senses of humor. The second was grad school in philosophy.
In both places, I learned to love arguing, the mechanics of stringing facts and evidence together to reach conclusions. But I also learned that in real-life situations, the technically superior argument does not always carry the day. In real-life situations, the one that wins is the one with wit and timing, the one with the ability to employ mockery, flattery, flirting, storytelling, peer pressure, guile, and the whole array of other non-factual, non-logical communicative tools available to the human animal.
Traditional journalism, particularly in its post-war American variety, has purposefully denuded itself of most of those tools.
I think the phrase “traditional journalism, particularly its post-war American variety” needs the modifier “national” and “establishment”. I’ve spoken with lots of local reporters and they are just as skeptical and bullshit-resistant as sentient human beings are supposed to be.
Likewise, there’s plenty of interesting national reporting and commentary taking place at non-presitge outlets at the fringe of the journalistic establishment — American Prospect and Mother Jones for reporting and New York magazine for commentary (just to cite a few examples).
It’s not that complicated: at local and fringe-national outlets, there’s not as much money floating around. It’t not just that they aren’t necessarily owned by big companies. A lot of local outlets are owned by big companies, but the big companies don’t care that much local construction projects and such, so they don’t put the screws to the reporters the same way. Anyway, a reporter at a smaller outlet might say “shove that 45K a year you’re paying me up your ass”. David Gregory’s never going to say that about his ten million dollar a year salary (I’m estimating here, I know Matthews gets around 5).
Cash is a helluva drug.
Comrade Mary
When you are making $X million a year on TV, you are an entertainer of the sub-type “monkey on a leash”. You are not a journalist.
Frankensteinbeck
This is one of the most important facts for understanding humanity. Most of us react to rhetoric, not logic – and most of us who react to logic can still be overwhelmed by rhetoric. It is why issues may be important, but they always take a back seat in getting you elected. I wish the world were otherwise.
rptrcub
$45K? At a local outlet? When I left a 100,000 population city’s 75K daily circulation paper in the South in 2007, I made 29K.
WaterGirl
This has been bugging me for awhile, so I guess I’ll just spit it out.
I really dislike a long block quote of a great piece, with no mention of the writer’s name on the page. If Fallows wrote something that’s good enough for a long block quote, then please show the courtesy of listing his name in the link.
I’ve been seeing it more here lately, and I think it’s wrong.
cyntax
“…breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.”
I was listening to Disposable Heroes again after however many years it’s been, depressing how much of what they said applies even more now.
redshirt
Cliche but true: Money is the root of all evil.
DougJ
@WaterGirl:
I think people follow the links more this way. It was written by someone people have never heard of.
arguingwithsignposts
@rptrcub: Depends on the management, how long you’ve been there, what kind of editor/managerial responsibilities. It’s possible.
The Moar You Know
Hilarious that you should write this today. My local two-bit rag just ran a union-busting “story” on “merit shops” – non union construction sites, and specifically about a local mall built without union labor – that was as larded up with conservative horseshit as anything I’ve ever read.
The capper was calling the article a celebration of Labor Day.
Our local media is as Foxed-up and anything else out there.
DougJ
@The Moar You Know:
Interesting. That’s not what I’ve seen locally here in Rochester.
WaterGirl
@DougJ: Appreciate the response, but we may just have to agree to disagree. I still think it’s wrong.
I don’t want to see BJ get a black eye because of the massive block quoting without naming the source on the page.
Alexandra
@redshirt:
It’s ‘The love of money is the root of all evil”. There’s a big difference.
WaterGirl
@The Moar You Know: They talked about exactly this kind of thing on Chris Hayes this weekend – can’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday. Good show.
Julia Grey
Actually, the original quote is: “the LOVE of money is the root of all evil.”
I used to live in Rochester in the 70s, so I kept up a little bit with what went on up there for a while. It struck me as I watched newspaper material being picked up by the internet in the late 90s that stuff with Rochester bylines (I noticed, of course) and the Gannet group was somewhat more independent and less right wing than stuff from other media outlets. I lost track, though, and don’t know what happened since then.
I have this vague impression that Gannet was sold to one of the bigger empires?
DougJ
@WaterGirl:
Nobody cares about being named, they only care about links. I get people thanking me for links when I haven’t named them all the time. Never had a complaint.
gbear
This sounds like a bit of a vanity statement on the part of the author. Seems to me that the technically superior argument often loses because the other party in the argument simply doesn’t want to know and won’t listen. No matter how dazzlingly Obama and his crew argue their truths, a huge chunk of the electorate simply won’t give a shit.
Kathy in St. Louis
I hope that you are wrong and that no one is paying David Gregory 10 million dollars a year for the crapfest he manages every Sunday. I can’t even watch anymore, since sucking up and giving passes seems to be the only function of MTP and it’s shilling host. I would be pissed to read that he’s getting a million. If I were an actual stockholder of whatever company presently owns NBC, I’d be raising hell at the next stockholders’ meetup. They could pay almost anyone else with a journalism degree and a short course in radio/tv to do this job and do it better. He seems to do no preparation, never counters any politician on their claims or seem to have the knowledge or will to do so. I’ve seen better interviewers on the MU owned station in Columbia Missouri where the journalism kids get their training. It must be nice to have hung around Washington long enough, played pickup basketball with a pipsqueak like Paul Ryan and cocktail party with this crowd long enough to be considered a “journalist”. This guy really gets to me.
geg6
Great piece. Thanks for the link, Doug. It really is discouraging to see our national media turn into the very people they “cover”. They aren’t journalists, for sure. So glad that the idiots who are the Village are becoming more irrelevant by the day. Cable news has horrible ratings (even FOX), newspapers and news magazines are dying as quickly as the trees used to make their paper. Network news has the same demographic as cable news and print, old, white and male. Their audience/readers are dying off. So it’s not surprising that they pander to their audience. But what will they do when all the old white males they seek to please are a tiny minority compared to the African Americans, Hispanics, women, disabled, gays, young adults, etc., etc,. that will be new majority that have turned them off because they don’t speak to the reality of their lives?
J
@WaterGirl: I’m with Water girl. The practice is very common, but it would be nice to know up front who deserves credit/blame for the quoted material rather than fight one’s way through a series of links.
Brachiator
American Prospect and Mother Jones are both prestige outlets and mainstream. Hell, the Nation, which has been around for decades, is mainstream in its own way. My high school English and History teachers recommended the Nation to me.
There are reasons more than money why these journals rarely rise above the fringe (even though some Mother Jones stories have made their way into 60 Minutes).
And the elephant in the room is the increasingly rapid disappearance of newspapers, news magazines and news stands. Mother Jones becomes even more quickly marginalized if you can’t find the damn thing, and the few remaining booksellers devote shrinking space to popular stuff that sells.
And sadly, too many people are too lazy to search online for these publications, or depend too much on new gatekeepers to provide them with links. And a recent news story in Forbes and elsewhere talks about how more publications are erecting pay walls, which I call journalistic suicide.
BS. Journalists gotta eat, just like anyone else. And even the good reporters I’ve known can be as cynical and crass as anyone else. And there are a generation of editors and reporters who care far more about edgy, hipster writing, and fame, than about some commitment to truth. Applies to bloggers as well.
A recent ad for a writer in the Economist noted that deep experience about economics and business was not essential, but the ability to write stylish and exciting prose was a must.
You do the math.
Bottom line is that more people care about which Kennedy Taylor Swift is fucking than about economics or politics.
And then there is the little thing about the prestige journals who employ incompetent but brand name hacks like McMegan and others. Shit sells, even with upscale wrappers.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
Newspapers are actually still quite profitable. Just not the 30/40 percent profit margins stockheads are used to, so they lay people off the up the numbers.
EdTheRed
“Breeding ignorance, and feeding radiation.”
Linda
I guess this is where the rubber hits the road: As an illustration, let me tell you about my job. I’m a librarian at a public library. We have folks who just try to comandeer the computers and the space. Other patrons won’t confront or challenge them, so it’s part of our job to referee and make sure everybody is playing by the same rules. If we wuss out, the baddest ass people win, and everybody else loses.
That’s where the press is now: they can step up and make the nominal refereeing they do really revelant, or just give up and join the Kardashian boyfriend/husband patrol. Some are stepping up, and some are stepping off.
J
This, I submit, would make a a good model for internet citation style. It allows the reader, to see at a glance, what the back and forth is, who is being cited, through or by way of whom.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/we-have-to-take-it-over-by-davidoatkins.html
Tokyokie
It used to be, probably back in the ’40s and ’50s, that the folks who worked the police beat at newspapers would hang out with cops, because, like the cops, the reporters were from blue-collar backgrounds and identified with them. Somewhere along the line, probably around the ’70s, those reporters started hanging out with ADAs, because the reporters now considered themselves professionals and identified with the law-school grads. I think the Village press has basically undergone the same transformation, only at a much higher pay level.
I remember when Bob Novak first started appearing on TV in the early ’80s, he would wear ill-fitting, off-the-rack suits. But within a couple of years, after becoming a handy tool of the Reagan administration, floating administration disinformation in exchange for access, he leveraged his new role as a savvy insider into an executive producer credit on The Capital Gang, and lo and behold, Bob started wearing top-of-the-line tailored outfits. And every last one of his associates in the capital press corpse took notice and figured out where the big dough was and started acting accordingly. And let’s just say that the big dough wasn’t to be made pursuing Gore Vidal’s path as a TV commentator.
kindness
See we on the outside just don’t get it. The real world is Sally Quinn’s parties and those who go. There is no real world outside of them. So when the Serious Village Elders ponder some bullshit…they are just speaking of their own real world. Now ours.
Brachiator
@geg6:
Rupert Mudoch is heavily invested in cable and satellite companies, not just Fox, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. The Tribune Company and LA Times owns or is heavily invested in the major Spanish language papers in Southern California. NBC either owns or has a major deal with Spanish language broadcaster Univision. Monied interests aren’t stupid. And Spanish language media is often just as mind numbingly stupid as English language stuff, with a few notable exceptions.
Women make up half the population, but the media outlets get away with tossing them little sops. And in Southern California, at least, older white women are as stupid and conservative as older white men, and comprise a chunk of the listernership of conservative talk radio stations.
Meanwhile, younger adults eagerly embrace the stupid, and increasingly report that the get their gossip, uh, I mean news, from social media sites.
Maude
@DougJ:
Need a post title What’s You’re Name Little Girl, or is that a lyric? I am so rotten at titles. With movies, I say, it’s the one where…
Edit: A Rose is a Rose, I don’t care about the names, I can find that at the link.
Maude
@Linda:
Our public library has a session timer. After the time is up, the patron goes off the computer. The patrons also sign in to keep track of times.
You can monitor the computers and the session lengths at the circulation desk computer.
The patron computers also have a program that removes all user changes at shut down.
Brachiator
@Tokyokie:
This is also probably why newspapers of the era rarely reported police brutality issues, or the ongoing terrorism of nonwhite communities by the cops.
And this hasn’t changed as much as it should. Reporters love to kiss the cops’ asses and prattle about how pro police they are. They cops in Fullerton, California charged with beating a mentally ill homeless man to death initially got a free pass from the local media, and blandly passed on the police officers story that the guy had resisted. It wasn’t until the foreign press picked up dissent from a cranky blog site that the lies got unravelled.
And editors and publishers determine what gets in the paper, and the spin that is put on it. Look at the LA Times and Herald Examiner coverage of the Zoot Suit riots of the 40s. Pretty despicable stuff.
The movie LA Confidential gets a lot of the tone of the era write. That there were a bunch of blue collar reporters trying to get the truth out is largely a myth.
Oddly enough, those reporters who did try were commits or socialists. They may have been from the same background as the cops, but did not necessarily view them as their buddies.
geg6
@arguingwithsignposts:
Can’t last. I work with young adults in their natural habitat. I have yet to see a single one with a newspaper. At least, voluntarily. The journalism majors are usually required to read them, but they get them free, never paying for single one. Without the young acquiring that habit, how can newspapers possibly survive? Advertisers will bail as the readership diminishes. The advertising is the profit center and how do they keep advertisers without an audience?
Linda
@Maude: True enough. But we’ve seen a black market in library card numbers to get extra time online. As well as a hooker who was using a remote corner to solicit/turn tricks, and a guy giving head in the men’s room for a few bucks. Don’t let anybody tell you that the entrepreneural spirit is dead in the US of A.
Tokyokie
@Brachiator: I don’t disagree with that assessment. If reporters of the ’40s and ’50s shared a blue-collar ethos with cops of their day, they also largely shared the racist views common to that era as well. I was just making the point of the transition of newsrooms from being populated by workaday types to folks who view themselves as professionals more along the lines of lawyers and doctors, which, I can assure you, they most certainly are not.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
RE: newspapers are profitable
That’s not what I’m seeing. A mid 2011 story notes,
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/122090/state-of-the-news-media-2011-new-revenues-have-not-arrived-but-new-challenges-have/
The LA Times recently had another quiet set of layoffs and buyouts, which included the talented film journalist Patrick Goldstein. And the paper is still losing money and readership at an alarming rate.
Hypatia's Momma
Oh, wow. I remember this song from when the Beatnigs played at Lipps Underground. Great album.
Maude
@Linda:
It doesn’t use card numbers, it uses a pin number provided from the application. You print out the slips of paper for the patrons and hand them out. The patron can’t hack the session timer and has to use the pin.
It works.
Linda
@Maude: Does the pin change with each use? Because that might work.
Brachiator
@Tokyokie:
But much of this may be related to the fact that journalism became more of a profession, and a well paid one, in the post war years. And instead of rising through the ranks from smaller papers or menial jobs in news rooms, the succeeding generation was more likely to be college educated. They went to the same schools and colleges as the men and women who became doctors and lawyers. And as news rooms and national and foreign news bureaus became more professional, the staffs had to become more professional as well.
And the old school workaday types you write about were more likely to be a relatively narrow band of white men. Race, gender, class worked together to ensure that even the workaday types were not particularly representative of the larger working class.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
Sure as hell no one would complain about receiving attribution either. It’s good practice, and it costs you nothing, so why not?
Even in the piece you link to, David Roberts writes this:
Jewish Steel
The original definition of “sophisticated.”
Brachiator
@Linda:
Wow. I thought that the biggest challenge was keeping people from reading porn online at libraries.
I would love to see a thread here on the current state of libraries. Do younger people still use them to the same degree? My local libraries try to do much to be Internet friendly, wi if and plenty of places to plug in laptops. They also try to keep their computer services up, especially for job seekers.
I keep promising to try to download ebooks from the library, but I still haven’t figured it all out yet. I do wonder if ebook readers and tablets have helped or harmed libraries.
A guest on a tech show was a librarian who went by the handle librarian in black, with I think a website by the same name. She had much interesting to say.
On the other hand, the saddest comment I heard was a talk radio host who said that now that we have the Internet, we don’t need libraries anymore, as part of a rant against a bond measure to help libraries.
Maude
@Linda:
Yes. The session manager is on the intranet, not the computer. They can’t get to the log on screen of Windows and click on public access to get the the user desktop, to use the computer or internet.
You can look up the information at Fortress. Has a neat little logo with a guy in helmet that looks like he’s about to yell, pull up the drawbridge.
If a patron “loses” the slip of paper with the pin, they have to come to the circulation desk to get another.
You print out the pin numbers and cut them into the little rectangles.
Our library has used this for years and even to patrons that are tech savy can’t fool it.
Have a look at the site.
I forget what they call the application, but it’s a good site. It has support. I’m not sure what it costs.
I used to do free tech on public access computers and my end users were mainly teens. There was one that would try to pull a fast one and I would block him and we’d go around like that for months. I enjoyed it.
Yutsano
@geg6: More student newspapers are migrating online and more textbooks are showing up on e-readers and tablets than ever before. We’re seeing a huge change in how information gets to people and not a lot of adaptation by the old media dinosaurs. It will be very entertaining to see who eventually ends up taming that beast.
Tokyokie
@Brachiator: Journalists, even though they’re now usually college educated, still tend to start at small papers and work their way up. But except at the top levels, the pay is still pretty miserable. It’s roughly the same as for teachers, probably a bit less at small-town papers. Outposts like The Washington Post and The New York Times pay well, but compared to the cost of living in those locales, probably not that well. The really big dough is pulled down by sports columnists who host call-in radio shows and by commentators who appear on TV. Nobody who relies solely on a newspaper newsroom gig for income is getting rich.
Maude
@Brachiator:
Our library is a municipal library. The others in the county are part of the County system.
The local doesn’t do ebooks, they can’t sfford the lending program called Overdrive. You would have to use the county. It can be accessed via the internet. There’s wifi in the local.
It depends on what ereader device you have.
iPad, go to iTunes and download Overdrive. Fill out your info for the lib and start borrowing. You can now use Overdrive for Kindle.
For Nook, Overdrive hasn’t let Nook have direct Overdrive access. You need to authorize your device with Adobe Digital Editions. It’s an application on a computer. You use a back usb port, not one for a memory stick, not enough power. You open Adobe, plug in your Nook or whatever device that has to use Adobe and Adobe will see it. You get authorized to borrow. Fill out the library info and you can borrow ebooks. It sound harder than it is.
In New Jersey, Christie has cut funding for libraries. The Camden Library is gone.
Fake Irishman
@Julia Grey:
Gannett is actually rather notorious for being one of the most corporate entities in the newspaper world.
Read Bagdikian’s Media Monopoly for some info on what Gannett does to its employees and coverage (it’s not just an indictment of them). When I left Rochester in 2004, the Democrat and Chronicle’s Newspaper Guild local hadn’t had a contract for more than a decade.
That’s not to say Gannett is the soul of evil — their outlets certainly do some good work, but it is as insanely focused on the short-term bottom line as any other outlet.
Scamp Dog
@geg6: It’s not just young people they’re losing. I’m 52, and I’m considering dropping my sub to the Denver paper. The news hole is getting smaller, and the op-ed page is largely right-wing propaganda, leavened with light-weight pseudo-libs like MoDo and Gail Collins. What’s stopping me is the comics and puzzles, they’re the last bit of value.
Tokyokie
@Scamp Dog: Although newspapers are still getting the vast majority of their revenue from print products, they continue to diminish the quality of those print products, because that’s where the expenses are. Diminished quality results in diminished ad revenue, which spurs more cuts. This vicious cycle is most evident at Media New Group (which includes the Denver Post) and McClatchy properties.
Linda
@Brachiator:
In our system, the young’uns use the library because many of them are poor, and don’t have access at home. Some just don’t want their parents to know what they are reading. Many older people use the computer to get email from their kids. The sadddest folks are those who have to apply for jobs online, (because it’s easier for employers, and doesn’t EVERYBODY have their own computer?) and don’t even know how to keyboard. Many are my age (mid 50s), and we make appointments to sit one-one with them to help them get email addresses, create resumes, etc.
And yes, we have right-wing radio assholes who try to get people to vote down levys because Everything Is On The Internet, so you don’t need libraries. One of these asshats uses a suburban branch library with his wife and kids weekly. One of our people confronted him, and he said something like, “hey, it’s just the show, etc.” Too bad we have dumb rules about employees kicking patron’s asses.
Brachiator
@Maude:
Damn. That’s just sad.
Ray Bradbury called libraries “the people’s university.”
Thanks for theinformation on Overdrive.
Brachiator
@Tokyokie:
The veteran reporters and editors in the larger markets, Dallas, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, NY, Los Angeles, etc were pulling in very comfortable salaries. This also includes some folks at alternative weeklies such as the Voice, Reader, LA Weekly, etc. of course, changes in media are kicking everybody’s butts now.
The revenue model for newspapers has been broken for a long time. Revenue from display ads started declining in the 80s, and then Craigslist came along and just killed the newspaper want ads. And the Internet and maybe social media might deliver the final knockout punch.
Geoduck
Re: bosses caring about newspapers. Here in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer was the more left-wing paper, despite being owned by the Hearst people. The consensus was that because to Hearst the PI was just a far-flung outpost of the empire, they didn’t keep as close an eye on things, as long as it was making money. The Seattle Times, on the other hand, is directly owned by members of the local aristocracy, who take it all VERY personally. And now the PI is reduced to a WWW-only operation, and the Times keeps tottering along, endorsing Republicans at election time in the Soviet of Seattle.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
@DougJ:
I have to agree with WaterGirl. DougJ is probably right that most people have never heard of the guy who wrote the piece quoted, but the fact that his name (David Roberts, FTR) wasn’t mentioned up front led WG to assume that Fallows (who was the via link) actually wrote the piece quoted.
It would have taken all of a dozen extra keystrokes to name the author, would have helped him get a little bit better known (at least among the BJ community), would have avoided a bit of ambiguity, and most importantly, would have given a nice shout out to the author of a thoughtful piece. He deserves that kind of acknowledgement here as well as in the pages of The Atlantic.
Brachiator
@Linda:
This is a very interesting and surprising nugget.
I had a computer virus on my home PC when I was looking for a job, and the local library was a life saver. They even have sessions to bring people up to speed on using the computer for job searching.
Also, I know people who have computers but who had to stop their cable and Internet service because of tough times. Computers at the library serve as their safety net for email and other services, including job search.
J
@Brachiator: & Linda: I hardly need to be convinced of the value of public libraries, but I found this exchange informative. Three cheers for libraries and librarians!
LevelB
The media is not interested in being ‘fair’. They want to give the appearance of fairness. When I started working for the Feds in 1984, we got some new vehicles, with whitewall tires. As God is my witness, we took those cars to the dealer and paid to have the tires reversed on the rims, so taxpayers would not think we had wasted tax dollars on whitewalls. When you strive for the appearance of a thing, to suit folks who won’t accept your offering no matter what, it is suddenly what Spongebob calls “opposite day”. (yes, I really am that old)