Comedy and Cluelessness from the Elite Media

Like many of you here, I was drawn to blogs -- and ultimately to doing my own writing -- by the extraordinary feeling of frustration I felt with mainstream media -- newspapers, magazines, and television -- starting with the 2000 election, an emotion that seemed to grow exponentially with each passing year.  I think that this sense was magnified by living in DC since 1982 and traveling in circles that included a fair number of journalists and Hill types, a world where anyone on the left who actually believes strongly in anything is deemed instantly suspect.  

For a brief moment I hoped that the unmitigated disaster that was the Bush Administration and the shameful role that media played in giving him a pass might have brought about a bit of a sea change.  That and the fact that traditional media are in such deep trouble led me to think that some sort of collective reappraisal might well be possible.  But alas, as I think Toast expressed here a few weeks ago in comments, it's like the last ten years didn't happen.  The mainstream press is as smug and clueless as it has ever been, as insular and arrogant and useless a group of people ever assembled anywhere.  And all the while it is heading toward what appears to be inevitable oblivion, its leading lights alternate between a sad ass, helpless pity party and the addled notion that they somehow remain the cool kids who will determine who gets to be in the club.  Two recent incidents have brought this home in the starkest of terms -- the McChrystal scoop by Rolling Stone and the firing of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post.

The reaction within corporate media to free lance journalist Michael Hastings' expose of the attitudes toward civilian leaders expressed by General McChrystal and his staff on their Bud Light Lime fueled expedition through Europe was priceless.  First there was the eye-rolling, hippie punching, with the two words "Rolling Stone" used as though a punchline in and of itself, notwithstanding the fact that Rolling Stone has long featured serious and thoughtful journalism.  This was followed by outraged whinging over what was assumed to be Hastings' tricking poor old General McChrystal to speak candidly in a setting that the eunuch reporters of Washington would have presumed (without so saying) to be off the record.  I hate to give Politico the links, since it personifies just about everything wrong that exists in mainstream political journalism, but this article captures the conflict perfectly.

There is simply a fundamental misunderstanding by these long-time beat reporters about the nature of their jobs.  They see themselves having a role in protecting their sources in order to continue to have access to these sources that they can in turn continue to protect such that the real news never quite gets out.  I would propose that they consider a kind of journalism that doesn't involve contact with those at the top at all -- or at least not until one is ready to run a story for which comment might be sought.  I would submit that little of lasting value ever comes out of these clubby, off-the-record as the default setting, relationships.  Indeed, it seems to me that much more is obscured rather than illuminated through this kind of psychological embedding.  

I will take up Weigel again tomorrow, but I'm running out of steam.  But let me just say that on this subject I am one hundred percent in agreement with Glenn Greenwald and his appropriately bludgeoning takedown of the horrible Jeffrey Goldberg.  It is hard to comprehend a world in which Dave Weigel is an unacceptable partisan and Jeffrey Goldberg is deemed an honest, objective, and reliable exemplar of reporting.  Surely madness lies that way.    

Comments

[big bad wolf]

i also endorse the substance of greenwald's piece.

still, i do miss editors. greenwald's piece is so purple that its substance struggles to surface. if one doesn't know goldberg or if one is not a greenwald person, it could be tough to stick it out through all of the heavy-handed editorializing and disparaging labeling. one can have a point of view, i think, without a bludgeon. an effete, aesthetic objection, i recognize. were i not to be killed for being old and overweight and useless, i would be killed for my overclass leanings.

on the other hand, i don't think anyone edits the news anymore either. here's what i learned about hurricane alex tonight: "Bands of heavy rains inundated roads in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, a worrisome sign with Alex expected to dump as much as 12 inches of rain in the region, with perhaps 20 inches in isolated areas." how, i wondered, does a storm recognize an isolated area?

[low-tech cyclist]

I would propose that they consider a kind of journalism that doesn't involve contact with those at the top at all -- or at least not until one is ready to run a story for which comment might be sought. I would submit that little of lasting value ever comes out of these clubby, off-the-record as the default setting, relationships. Indeed, it seems to me that much more is obscured rather than illuminated through this kind of psychological embedding.

A thousand times, yes. That's one of the big takeaways from Bill James' groundbreaking work as a baseball commentator: he didn't interview players and coaches, and yet his view of the game was far clearer than that of those who did.

For years after James' Baseball Abstract broke into the big time, I thought that we needed something like it for politics. The blogosphere is doing that. The MSM is like the traditional baseball reporters, taking the coaches' pearls of wisdom at face value, and never questioning whether a future Hall of Fame player actually knows what he's talking about.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

Possibly I should have said I endorse the substance of Greenwald's critique -- I am either old enough or bourgeois enough to share your aesthetic concerns. I did not use the term bludgeon idly -- I find reading his stuff to be a slog even when, as here, I totally agree with him. He's got one style for all occasions and heavy-handedness is its primary characteristic.

l-t c,

I like the Bill James analogy. I'd like to think that Josh Marshall and Ezra may be exemplars of a new style of journalism -- fact and policy laden, but from a definite and disclosed point of view. Assuming that the Post has the wisdom and the balls to leave Ezra alone.

[Joe]

Sir C, I think you're going to need a new view of journalism to get effective jounalism. We will need something like the European model where news outlets are idealogical and a portion of the media will always be actively hostile to those in power. The current set-up gives too much of an incentive to cozy up to power and spew propaganda. An overtly idealogical media will change the ballgame considerably. The problem is that the Right already has this. What the country needs is something akin to the Guardian as a National left wing locus for media.

[litbrit]

I think it's time to resurrect that great term from the Bush II years--the Barbeque Media.

They didn't get it then, however, so I doubt they'll get it now.

Perhaps we need to spell it out for them, nice and slowly: Hey journalists, listen up: you won't be able to report objectively, comprehensively, and ethically about the hand that feeds you grilled sirloin burgers and hands you imported microbrews.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i felt that the media was fubar when i heard tim russert testify during the valerie plame hearing that he handled all his communication with the objects of his story as off the record unless it was stated and agreed upon beforehand.

the press has truly and certainly gone down the rabbit hole.

i have viewed my role as a blogger to be something along the lines of a revolutionary era pamphletier. i am self published, unedited (except for when deborah feels energetic and charitable) and free to write my thoughts however specious, cruel, snide, or what the fuck ever.

i try to live up to the idea of "poisonous scribbler" with pride, and of course, good food.

i'm off to palm springs for the next five days, my visits will be spotty to say the very least.

(minstrel's rule of packing for places like palm springs:

take half as many clothes and twice as much money)

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

I think you're exactly right.

D.,

Yeah, the whole spectacle of these people falling all over themselves to curry favor with those in power is really nauseating.

mhb,

Words to live by.

We are experiencing a few days of extraordinarily nice weather here -- after the hottest June on record. The high today should clock in at a nice dry 80 with a breeze. It just never happens here in July.

[big bad wolf]

i do love the guardian. i used to subscribe, just because it was so much fun to read. i wish we had one. an ideological media would shrink the echo chamber, reduce the number of those currying favor with power, and help voters grasp that cutting the baby in half is not actually the point of that old story.

the tricky thing is that the reader has to continue to think and read about areas of interest outside of the news arena. facts don't conform to any ideology, even ours, and part of the fun of reading something like the guardian is going, ah, no, i see what you're not saying or citing or giving context to and much as i'd like to agree with you, i think that needs to be fleshed out or refined or conformed to the data if we expect people to accept it. that's a necessary task that will not go away if the media environment changes.

i also think that a successful ideological media tempers its language. fox plays to the base. i'd like to see a left media that reached beyond the base. blogs can yell and scream all day if they want. it's fun and it gets the base fired up. (what is the base supposed to symbolize? are we building on it? if so, well then that means the base must bear weight, must hold up others. seems like a base should be strong not whiny). an effective left media would show, not yell. or more accurately, it would reserve yelling for the times it is judged most effective. people like to believe they come to their conclusions on their own, that they are independent, that they decide, not accept. so i think a left media has to give people facts and a smart, supple slant, not facts and a bludgeoning.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Before I get into the meat of the conversation -- hopefully later this afternoon, I couldn't resist making two 'meta-comments.' One was that this may very well highlight why I think Sir Charles and I are frequently so complementary. To my eyes, we have 'opposite weaknesses.' I'd argue he has too strong a temptation to look for an 'over-arching theory' to explain a specific phenomenon. I, on the other hand, frequently analyse the same phenomenon by breaking it into so may parts that by the time I'm done, even if someone can trudge through the analysis, it has become so complex as to be useless. But, since we both are trying to get the same place, our different styles seem to balance out nicely.

The other 'meta-comment' and this is really OT 'story-telling' but I can't help it, deals with 'getting into blogging.' I'm a little different because blogging has always been a 'familiar world' to me. I can almost say I was a blogger long before the word existed, because I was a moderately active, very obscure member of science fiction fandom dating from about 1965 through the early 70s. And if I could go back and hand you a sample of a month's work of fanzines that were produced then, you'd look at them and shake your head at the familiarity of the style, the tone, even some of the 'verbal tricks and abbreviations' that some would trace back to 'chat rooms and slow modems' would be there, long before computers existed. Even the topics would be familiar, music and politics and social chatter as much as science fiction -- some fanzines would have a 'point of pride' that they never actually discussed SF.

The only interesting part about this, i guess, is how the differences that do exist so depend on the 'means of production and distribution.' Producing a fanzine meant typing it up on mimeograph stencils (maybe a half dozen in all were professionally or semi-professionally printed), running it off, collating and stapling it, and mailing it out. (And this was at a time when even electric typewriters were financially out of reach for most fans, and since 'cutting a stencil' was a very physical process, irregular typing pressure was very visible.) And correcting mistakes wasn't 'hitting backspace' but instead rolling up the stencil, smearing the mistake with 'corflu' (correction fluid, which filled in the hole in the stencil), waiting a few seconds for it to dry, rolling the stencil back and retyping it. Hell, even the job of collating and stapling a twenty page zine with a 300 circulation -- both larger than average -- meant holding a party and getting all your friends in to help.

(That last is why there were few professionals or married fans with kids, why they were usually high school or college age. Putting out an issue of a fanzine could use every bit of free time you had available for a week. And you knew that the only people who would see it were those you chose to send it to, there was no library for people to come across it. So the limited circulation and the time frequently became too much for someone who was getting started in a profession, or who was spending his time as a professional writer or academic.

Oh, and there was no advertising, and while there would usually be a price listed, about 90% of fanzines were traded between publishers for their own zines or sent to friends who might be interested. "Sticky quarters' was always the least preferred means of payment. Which mean the cost could mount up, with mimeograph machine, buying a stencil a page -- or two or three if you were so bad a typist that corful wouldn't help -- buying the paper, and mailing each one out.

And the biggest difference was the 'response time.' A discussion like any one we are having here could take months -- even if you used an 'apa' a set-up where, instead of each person publishing his own zine, a group would all publish one zone and rotate the chore of publishing so a different person would publish every week or two weeks, or would bundle together individual two or four page mini-zibes usually devoted to commenting on the previous bundle. (Thre trouble with apas is that they'd usually limit distributions to the two dozen or so members, with maybe a few extras for particular people.)

Yet with all these differences, if you looked at them, you'd see formats, styles, writing tricks that have remained consistent. You'd see, if not blogs, very recognizable 'close ancestors.'

[End of boring historical ramble, you can turn your brains on again.]

[oddjob]

It just never happens here in July.

When I left my house this morning to catch my train I immediately noted how it was so cool it felt like a day in May rather than the first day of July.

[kathy a.]

ah, prup -- the remembered scent of mimeograph fluid! we used mimeos in college for notices and such. i was a yearbooker, which we thought of as a year-long photojournalism project. "cut and paste" meant literally cropping photo prints with a steel ruler and exacto knife, and carefully affixing them with rubber cement. our copy [text] was produced with a compugraphic headline machine, which was about the size of an industrial photocopier and produced type on photo paper -- something like those drugstore photo printers.

it goes without saying that we did not have the glories of the internet then; conversations of the sort that happen here [and all over the place] happened in dorm rooms, cafeterias, rambling letters, etc. it was years after graduation before i knew anyone with a personal computer, and many more years before i had one. but that revolution has been a tremendous boon.

wandering back to SC's point -- there always were bad journalists, but one of the treasured objectives of journalism has been to go after the truth, fearlessly. independent journalism has been very much diminished as news organizations have conglomorated, as "infotainment" for profit has become more important to corporate publisher/owners than reporting. i really like that the internet has allowed us to find other sources; to check facts; to pick apart the twisted ways of modern journalism.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

kathy: yes, the smell was something else I remember. But to get back on topic, I think there are a whole number of factors, as I implied.

All of you will stress the corporate nature of the new version of the media, but I think you are partially missing the point by not looking at what it replaced. Traditionally the media, newspapers, magazines, radio, television all started out as 'entrepreneur' fields. All of the people we think of, for good or ill, as the shapers of modern media were people who invested their own money, remained in charge of their publications, and were capable of taking risks -- either risks on their own news judgment or risks based on their confidence in picking employees.

No they weren't selfless idealists, they were interested in making money too, but that was usually secondary. Whether they wanted power, influence, had ideas to push, or simply wanted to produce the best possible product, these other motivations enabled them -- at times -- to take the editor/reporter side over the accountant side when there was an argument.

It was true for Graham, Sulzberger and Hearst, Greeley and Bertie McCormick, Turner and Murdoch, Stanton and the CBS crew, Ross and Shawn, Luce, take your pick from the hall of heroes and villains. They all were people who were concerned with what they were producing first, and willing to gamble their own money on their own judgment. Maybe they were good, maybe their judgments and ideas were awful, but they were willing to back them and shape their publications towards them -- again, sometimes the only idea was to do as good a job as possible.

But, except for Murdoch, the entrepreneurs have been replaced by 'suits,' people only concerned with the bottom line, people who don't understand the 'product' they are producing to the point that they are vegetarians trying to run a deli counter.

And, because of the net, because of the decline of the 'old media' -- at least to the point where, while it might remain profitable, there are no longer the chances for the 'big gambles' of the past, there won't be many new entrepreneurs trying to enter the field. The people with a true feel for the news will work through the net, through their own blogs, or through sponsored blogs, or eventually through setting up their own news organizations like TPM.

So the people who remain are simply guessing at what will be the most profitable. (Maybe their own 'class interest' or the fact that they are white upper middle class men, mostly, or the fact that accountants and money managers skew Republican and they have the say that is heard make them biased towards believing 'conservatism sells' but the key word is 'sells.')

That's one part of it, I'd argue.

[Sir Charles]

Jim,

I'd argue that an equally big part of the change is the way that elite journalists see themselves nowadays versus how they did in the past. The people who are writing at the Times and the Post and the main newsmagazines are often Ivy League educated and hail from the upper middle class -- they are not the ink-stained wretches of yesteryear. They might be liberal in terms of social issues -- although they aren't always comfortable about that as it makes them less than real Americans -- but in terms of economics they tend to identify with capital much more than with labor. They tend to buy into free market orthodoxies as much as any group you'd ever want to meet.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

There's another factor that I think matters. At one time, if you wanted to be a reporter, you found an editor, impressed him, went through the shit jobs and finally got your break. Then, about firty years ago it became necessary to go through the "School of Journalism" route -- at least partially because so many people wanted to become Woodward and bernstein that they University served as a weeding out.

So there's a whole generation of reporters who did go to journalism school -- maybe Ivy league schools, paid one hell of a lot of money and time, to join the 'exclusive club.' (And a lot of them may still be paying off student loans if they didn't get really good paying jobs.)

And then along comes the net, and all these 'citizen journalists' are there, and breaking stories, and doing the things they always wanted to. And they don't have to have done their apprenticeship, they didn't cover obituaries or garden parties or hooker busts. And they didn't spend tens of thousands for school -- and it doesn't matter, these bloggers are getting the same credentials, the same invites, the same prestige as they are.

And let's face it, the real journalism is on the left. All the conservatives do is make things up, but TPM, MMfA, and the rest really do the work of real reporters, and so do pure amateurs.

Can they not have some sort of buried resentment towards us?

[Joe]

BBW, I think that the Blogosphere opens up the media atmosphere quite abit rendering the possibility of "epistemic closure" on the Left unlikely. Unless you really want to close yourself off, opinions and commentary which aren't completely ventilated will be tackled in the rough and tumble of outside Blogospheric sources.

The key to an nationwide print and electronic media entity like the Guardian would be news gathering and a large platform amplifying that news gathering about things people on the Left do (or should) care about. What we lack are widely broadcast news stories about civilian casualties in the Middle East; the effect of drone strikes in Pakistan; the effect of mass imprisonment on whole portions of our society; the effect of the American Drug War on Mexico; news stories reporting on the poor response to the BP disaster. Entities like Mother Jones, Rachel Maddow, and the American Prospect do this incredibly well. But they just can't match the volume produced by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the various opinion organs of the Right.

[Sir Charles]

Jim,

Absolutely. That Goldberg piece with all the anonymous Post staffers attacking Weigel and Ezra was just redolent of that kind of resentment.

Joe,

I think you're right. Although the question in my mind is what will a TPM look like in ten years.

[big bad wolf]

joe, i agree. there are two keys, i think. the first is widely broadcast. all the examples you give are things i think of as nearly beaten to death they appear so frequently, but that is my misimpression. my circles and my readings cover them endlessly, but we don't get the word out widely. the second, as i said earlier, is to get it out in a way that interests and convinces people. there i think maddow and the american prospect are good models---serious but engaging . we have to get beyond the model of the past, narrow and righteous. i can't tell you how many years i kept my subscription to the progressive because i felt i should have one, though i hated the damn thing. it made me feel browbeaten---and for the most part i agreed with most every article. finally, i gave it the ax and it felt great (i admit that i would have axed it sooner if it had not, in those days, the late 80s/early 90s been one of the few places to read extra molly ivins). i can't imagine what the progressive must have felt like to someone who came to it to learn. we need broadcast media that make people want to hear about us and the things that interest us on our side. i hope we figure out how to create and keep them

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

That sounds a bit like my "Dissent" subscription. Well, that's not entirely fair, but each issue was pretty hard to get through.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Not only do we have the problem that Progressives sometimes act like being popular or getting people to laugh is somehow not 'suitably serious' but they also seem to be afraid of actually advertising when they do something popular.

As a Mets fan, I frequently have to suffer through FNC and FBC ads during the games. Why don't I hear an ad for KO? Why -- a suggestion I sent to Steve Benen to pass on -- not have his ads be the "Worst Person in the World" segment from the previous night rebroadcast, with a couple of seconds of 'framing' -- which would also expose a lot of unsuspecting people to true Republican idiocy.

For that matter, i don't ever remember seeing ads for Jon Stewart or Colbert, certainly not that both gave a flavor and included some commentary.

There are a lot of venues to run these ads on. Baseball games, music stations of all kinds except heavy rap, and maybe there too, even on all-news stations.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Another problem is that there is simply so much news, so many sources in the blogosphere to keep an eye on -- how we coukd get all this into one place.

For example, C&L's Jon Perr, -- who I've only recently started reading -- has an incredible piece on how the Republicans' blocking of the $50 billion state aid package is likely to result in 'Doomsday' because of the number of states that were counting on the aid in their budgets and now have to make even more Draconian cuts,

All that cutting could mean the loss of 900,000 jobs -- in the public sector and in private companies that rely on state business, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

To come back to this thread, Jamison Foser, who seems to be stuck on the holiday shift at MMfA, has come up with one of the most interesting arguments for why 'Beltway journalism' tilts conservative. After discussing Jon Chait's comments about his experience with Journolist and his discovery that he was 'a lot less liberal than I had thought' Foser goes on to say:

This relates to something I’ve long argued: Many journalists think they’re more liberal than they really are, which leads them to produce journalism that favors the Right. When a slightly liberal person who thinks his reporting should be as down-the-middle as possible mistakenly believes he is very liberal, the result is going to be reporting that often favors conservatives. It’s a classic case of over-compensation.

In a town in which the Brookings institution and The New Republic have long been considered liberal entities, a lot of slightly-left-of-center journalists haven’t, as Chait says, spent much time around people with “hard-left or even traditional liberal views.” Both the “Left” and the “Center” are further to the left than they think. That might not matter as much were more journalists to adopt Jay Rosen’s suggestion that they transparently report from their own perspective rather than trying to report from where they think the center is.

Interesting. What do you guys think?