QandO

September 09, 2004

Those bad old right-wing blogs
Posted by McQ

It seems that journalism has a new bogey-man to hear Edward Wasserman talk about it.

Plus, news is a collaboration. It's a team effort, and regardless of how strictly the team is run, news reflects the collision of values, perspectives and passions of the people who create and produce it -- and their guesses as to what the reality they're chasing actually consists of.

That's a long way of saying that journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, that it always involves compromise and that there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process of producing it.

But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And I think that commitment is now under assault.

What Wasserman, who by the way is the "Knight professor of journalism ethics" at Washington and Lee University, doesn't note is that while there may indeed be "the collision of values, perspectives and passions of the people who create and produce it ", those passions appear to some observers to be firmly on one side of the political spectrum. That means that the collision isn't about balanced news, its about how far left it goes.

The assault, he laments, doesn't come from within, but without:

The attack doesn't come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. There's a transparency of motive here that, as long as they retain some minimal respect for fact, may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all of us.

An interesting point with the "transparancy of motive". Its absolutely true that one side of the blogosphere seems to "attack" the old media more than the other. And yes, its motive is transparant, much more so than that of the old media. It does have an ideology which appears to be different in many respects than that of the old media, hence the assaults on what the old media says.

In other words, its not much different than a so-called right-wing blog taking on what some left-wing blog says. The difference is both blogs acknowledge where they stand. The old media won't.

The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. By that I mean those that aim to deliver a broadly informative report on current affairs to a demographically diverse audience that isn't defined by some overriding ideological predisposition. These are the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations, and they're losing their nerve.

I understand why. It's hard now even to write for publication without being uncomfortably aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.

Wasserman apparently believes that the delivery of the news is in fact neutral in todays old media venues. He seems to think that their product "isn't defined by some overriding ideological predisposition." I'd simply say this is a position without merit. Too many instances have been brought to light where what was portrayed in the old media was far from neutral in its presentation. What bothers Wasserman, and apparently the old media, is they're now being called on it by a "free-floating cadre of rightist warriors."

My question to Mr. Wasserman would be, if the old media is ideologically neutral, why is it only 'rightist warriors' who are making this assault?

But its this next bit that really sets me off. Wasserman relates a possible story (carnage in Iraq) and the apparent trend now to include something positive as well (softball in Iraq). In his explanation he finally identifies his bete noir:

Now, both stories may well be integral to news of Iraq. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the softball story is nothing but a Pentagon publicist's brainstorm seized on by right-wing bloggers -- and the pressure to tell it comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.

Yes "right-wing" bloggers, for heaven sake ... this is all about Wasserman's dislike for a "hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience". Per Wasserman this splinter of the audience is effecting today's news product, and Wasserman calls that "cowardice" by the old media. What he fails to mention is that these bad-guy, 'right-wing' bloggers aren't attacking just the tilt of the story, they're also attacking the facts of the story and finding them, in many cases, to be skewed or partial. What the bloggers are demanding isn't that bad news be balanced with good news, they're demanind that whatever the news report all the facts correctly and report them without spin.

To Wasserman, that's an unconsionable assault on the profession of journalism, and he simply doesn't feel the old media should cave in to it.

The underlying problem is that news then becomes a negotiation -- not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news reports become offerings -- payments really -- in a kind of intellectual extortion.

It simply horrifies Wasserman that somehow bloggers have managed to insert themselves into this "negotiating process". He ignores that fact that those engaged in the previous "negotiation" were a far smaller sliver .... the closed world of journalists. What bloggers have been able to do is expand those who produce and present the news, and they've been remarkably successful. As he must understand, no one makes anyone read a blog, and some blogs now have larger "circulations" than some newspapers. Instead of embracing the new media and acknowledging its impact and presence, dowdy old media types like Wasserman demand it be ignored.

Wasserman sees its existance and effect as a loud, unchecked and intrusive assault on their monopoly. He calls the old media's apparent new-found desire to balance its reporting as caving in to "intellectual extortion". He understands that something is different, he just doesn't understand why. He translates this attempt by the old media to check itself against the emerging new media as "cowardice" in the face of this extortion.

The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, and independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.

Resisting undue outside influence is part of what news professionals do, even when that influence comes from the public they're honor-bound to serve. It's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is.

In his conclusion, Wasserman appeals to these news organizations to reject outside influences which are apparently corrupting them and their product. He assumes they have a better handle on getting the story right than a bunch of "zealots" who're dealing only idealogically. What he doesn't understand is that while the old media can, in effect, reject this new outside influence, its rejection will have no effect on bloggers.

You see, it never enters Wasserman's mind or arguments that in many cases those zealots have destroyed the "factual base" of stories Wasserman's "journalists" served up to the public. It never occurrs to Wasserman that what he is witnessing is the changing of the guard in terms of how news is produced, now and forever more.

He sounds as any priest would have sounded after Guttenberg made the bible available to all and forever took its exclusive interpretation away from them.

They, as does he, lamented and condemned the "zealots" who dared question what had once been exclusively theirs.

What he needs to understand, is the "zealots" are here to stay, and the "negotiation" process now includes them, like it or not.

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