Looks like the mainstream outlets are beginning to acknowledge what’s been obvious for a long time — Fox News is not a legitimate news organization. When they went all in as a network on organizing, promoting, and endlessly covering the “tea party” movement, they jumped the shark. They’ve been biased in an obvious and embarrassing fashion for a long time, but that was the moment that (to me) they committed to manufacturing news rather than simply reporting it. I’m glad the Obama administration has seemingly cut them off.
Matthew Yglesias has a very smart post on the news business that really captures the problem for people in the news business. Mainly, that the Web and Google are bad for the news business, but not really bad for people following the news. I honestly don’t know how good the national news coverage is in my local paper, much less the international news, but I really don’t care. The local paper does a good job on local issues, and for national and international news, I have the New York Times, the BBC, and whatever washes up on Google News. If I want to know what’s going on in Israel, I read papers from Israel. The structure of the news business that’s going away made sense when you had to go to the library to read national papers, but in this day and age, I can read anybody’s local paper. I’m with Yglesias, now is the best time ever to be a news junkie.
Cooks Illustrated editor Christopher Kimball laments the demise of Gourmet in a New York Times op-ed today. Unfortunately, in the process of reminding us what was good about Gourmet, he decides to case aspersions of the darned old Internet along the way:
The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.
To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.
I’m not sure why I’m linking to this, the latest in a huge long line of ignorant straw man arguments against blogs (and now, Twitter) by people whose lofty perch is threatened by the democratization of the media. In response to his argument, I’d make three points:
Columbia Journalism Review has a great interview with Rick Perlstein explaining why the media shouldn’t be all over the ACORN story. In short, conservatives want to raise ACORN’s profile because they are embarrassing. If you can get people to equate ACORN and the White House, then any dirt you dig up on ACORN tars the President by association. The current ACORN mania really isn’t any different than the repeated attempts to equate Barack Obama with Bill Ayers during the campaign.
Matt Thompson wrote a really good blog post a few weeks ago that I didn’t link to because I assumed everybody saw it, The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get. It explains why people can watch the news on TV or read the newspaper and still not really understand the issues of the day. The argument is that the media tends to cover what’s happening right now without providing useful context or explaining the significance of the news.
I wanted to go back and link to Thompson’s article because it provides useful context for Matthew Yglesias’ explanation of why this is a big problem:
The bias toward process stories is not ideological in its intent, but it’s strongly ideological in its impact. Creating public confusion and ignorance while obscuring what’s really happening tends to favor elites versus people of modest means, it favors the status quo over change, it favors insiders over outsiders, and it favors narrow interests over the public interest.
This is why I read blogs. There are plenty of blogs that are just as focused on the day to day goings on of politics as any newspaper or cable news show, but I don’t read them. (It’s why I don’t subscribe to Think Progress any more.) I strongly prefer blogs that focus on digging into the substance of issues, and the good news is that there are plenty of them out there. Oddly enough, the newspaper that to me represents the worst journalism has to offer, the Washington Post, also employs one of the best public policy bloggers around — Ezra Klein.
Dan Baum’s serialized account of his firing from the New Yorker is garnering a lot of attention, and rightfully so. The New Yorker is interesting, period, and Baum is an engaging writer.
But his side of the story is not the only one. Former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg speculates on the other side.
I really liked this bit, because everybody needs to understand it:
“The biggest disappointment was learning that, after all, it’s not only about the work on the page. That the writing life is not a pure meritocracy, or a refuge from office politics. All that crap still matters. Even at the top of the heap. Perhaps especially at the top of the heap. Who knew?”
My reaction to reading this observation is: If I were your editor and you ever said anything like that to me, I’d seriously consider firing you on the spot. No reporter can afford this level of naivete, and no editor’s budget should be spent on it. Reporters have to understand the world pragmatically, as it is, in all its mess and compromise; how can you trust a reporter who doesn’t even understand how his own profession works?
It’s not just reporters who have to understand the world pragmatically if they want to succeed.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody.
I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter — Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy.
His Tweets are well written, often funny, and almost universally informative. If you’re interested in politics at all, you should start following him immediately. When people protest that they don’t see the value in Twitter, Knoller should be part of the explanation of why they’re wrong.
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