Really? No kidding?
I’ve always said that if people really knew what was going on in the Middle East then Bush would have an approval rating in the upper 80s while Democrats couldn’t be elected as dogcatchers. From AP:
[Associated Press CEO Tom] Curley said in a speech that news organizations should quit thinking like gatekeepers of information and reach out to people who are accustomed to receiving news in real time online and customizing the ways they see and read it.
“Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one,” Curley told a fundraising dinner for the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, a program at Columbia University for business journalists.
At the same time, Curley said news organizations were partly to blame for the troubles they are experiencing in adapting to the new realities of the news business being wrought by the explosion of Internet use.
“The first thing that has to go is the attitude,” Curley said. “Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal.”
Curley gets it. The question is whether the people who work for him or who work in other organizations get it. I think that’s doubtful. When Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story, journalism schools became jam-packed with students who wanted to change the world. However, The job of a reporter is to report facts, not to change the world.
However, it was only months ago that the Associated Press was filled with Photoshopping photographers and made-up stories to make it appear the war was failing. They saw no need to fact-check or verify their stories because they were trying to shape opinion, not report the facts.
The American mainstream media is not called the Dinosaur Media for nothing. They turn non-stories into mountains and ignore stories that do not fit their world view or, especially, their politics. The surge in Iraq has been an unimitigated success but most people don’t know it. Despite a booming economy, half the country believes that we are already in a recession and two-thirds believe that a recession is either happening now or coming soon.
American mainstream media reporting is falling to pieces. The New Republic, once a respected magazine, still refuses to recant the stories of Pvt. Scott Beauchamp, who has admitted to fabricating stories of atrocities in Iraq. Oh, and his girlfriend wife was the editor for the story. The New Republic believed that American troops were committing atrocities in Iraq, looked around for someone to back up their opinion, then failed to do any vetting or fact-checking of the story.
The Dallas Morning News did the same thing by digging up Larry Burkett to lie about President Bush’s National Guard record. Just 5 minutes of Googling would have revealed that Burkett had dramatically changed his story about Bush’s records from 2000 to 2004. Never mind that Burkett was unabashedly partisan. I begged and begged the Dallas Morning News to investigate Burkett and his discrepancies for months. It wasn’t until Dan Rather had broadcast the story and it was falling apart at the seams that the Dallas Morning News finally took me seriously.
Curley has good ideas but can he really implement them? He’s going to stonewalled every step of the way by every two-bit reporter and photographer who works for AP. My gut feeling is that the mainstream media has passed the point of no return. Newspaper circulation and nightly news viewership will continue to drop, newspapers will fail, news anchors will change, but the mainstream media will still ignore the real problem.
Correction: 12/7/2007 — It was Scott Beauchamp’s wife, not his girlfriend, who was the editor for his stories. There were conflicting reports at the time I wrote this post, and I chose to go with the ones that described Reeve as Beauchamp’s girlfriend. I was wrong and I should have mentioned at the time that there were conflicting reports. This brings up the question though: What the &^%@* kind of respectable publication would let the wife of a “reporter” be the editor and fact-checker of his stories?
Update: 12/7/2007 — the Washington Post reports that The New Republic recanted their stories written by Beauchamp several weeks ago. I read the “recant” when it came out, and it really isn’t much of a recant at all. In fact, they titled it the Fog of War as if the haziness of battlefield reporting were to blame intstead of the crappy reporting, fact-checking, and political bias of their magazine. In true liberal fashion, they try to shift the blame to others rather than owning up to a mistake, as I did above. They never answer The Big Question: why did The New Republic wait many months after their reporter recants his story to issue an apology?
I give credit to the Washington Post for publishing this story but am still amazed by how little credit they gave bloggers. Even the liberal Slate Magazine cites and gives credit to conservative bloggers for destroying Beachamp’s story. The mainstream media just can’t come to terms with the reality that bloggers are their fact-checkers now and they no longer in charge of what gets reported and how it gets reported.
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