Okay, I'm departing from mom role here to rejoin the journalism tribe, and spout some media criticism.
There's a terrific piece posted this week by Jay Rosen, a well-known media critic and professor of journalism at New York University, on why the press has been so completely cowed by the Bush Administration. His thoughts are the latest in a conversational thread started by my other favorite media critic, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who posted a piece this week about the Washington media's reverence for Karl Rove--an example, Greenwald says, of the inside-the-Beltway media's biggest failing, which Rosen has identified as the desire to be "savvy." Being "savvy" means being close to the insiders, which means putting yourself in a position where you need the Karl Roves of this world so much you can't possibly write anything that would piss them off--a fact which Karl Rove knew and has exploited brilliantly.
Two days ago, Rosen elaborated on his original point, saying that the desire to be "savvy" doesn't begin to explain all of the media's failures (and by that, I mean the failure to aggressively question the Bush Administration's claims on everything from global warming to Guantanamo to WMD). The other part of the reason, he says, is the sheer audacity of what the Bush people have been doing in the name of "conservatism"--a radical rewriting of the Constitution, or at least a strong attempt to do this, in order to define the executive branch not as equal with the other two, but as more powerful. The other part of the explanation, Rosen thinks, was "a dearth of imagination. Most of the people in the capital press—the correspondents, and their bosses— could not imagine what it was going to take to maintain any sort of watchdog role under Bush. They never dreamed that their routines could be so ill-matched to the moment."
Well, yes and no. Yes, it was a dearth of imagination, all right--but not the imagination to come up with all new journalistic rules. It was the failure to imagine that maybe what needed to happen was to dust off the old rules.
Here's an example. I got in my car last week and turned on the XM radio to hear Bob Edwards on NPR interviewing Gene Weingarten, who was my editor in the Washington Post Style section some years back. I really like Gene. He is a funny, funny guy, and a wicked good editor. Edwards was questioning him about why reporters do some of the things they do, and Gene was being his usual outrageous, provocative self--that is to say, a self-described flaming liberal--while Bob Edwards played straight man. But one part of what Gene said really got me. It was the part where he said that every four years politicians roll out the old "let's pass a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning," and that journalists cover this dutifully while rolling their eyes "because everybody [in the press] knows what's going on."
Gene was being funny in this interview, but when he spoke those words he spoke the literal truth; I know this from my own experience. Flag-burning is in the top 10 non-issues of all time, right beneath Paris Hilton, everybody knows this, and yet journalists write this story straight every time it comes up. They feel it is their obligation. It's a classic example of standard old-rule fair-and-balanced reporting.
"Fairness" is an article of faith among all the reporters I know, and yet too often reporters interpret it as being fair to one's sources, not fair to the facts (and for that way of putting I must credit The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel). Yet, taken literally, merely being fair to one's sources absolves the reporter of one of his or her most important responsibilities, which is to get at the truth of the matter, to the best of his or her ability--to follow the facts wherever they might lead, even if the final conclusion pisses off an important source. Inside the Beltway, though, fairness to one's sources is usually the applicable rule--either that, or reporters are aware of the kind of shellacking they will take from certain quarters if they fail to give the nay-sayers equal time, even on a topic where there is significant scientific consensus, like global warming. What happens then is usually a mechanical kind of reporting--i.e., "I give one side three paragraphs and the other side three" sort of thing. I used to do this myself: I'd literally count the paragraphs in a story to see how many were one side of an issue, how many were the other. And sometimes, on your basic "should we raise the property tax or not" kind of story, when things are pretty yes-or-no, that kind of approach works okay. But now that I've left my newsroom days behind, I see that the only stories I ever wrote that I'm proud of today pushed past that. Those stories were fair to the facts. They were also really hard to write, because they offended people.
What would happen, I wondered, if a reporter simply refused to cover a press conference in which some Presidential candidate announced his or her support of a flag-burning ban? Or if a reporter wrote a story about the eye-rolling, a story which said, "Hey, readers, this is one of the oldest political stunts in the book and a howling non-issue generally used to deflect attention from something more important"? Anybody who approached the issue in this way would be looked upon by many of his or her colleagues as having displayed (gasp!) a "liberal bias." Under what passes for old-rule journalism today, it would be a faux pas equivalent to ripping one off at the country club. Yet, in reality, it would be a return to an even more old-fashioned concept: that journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
But these are interesting times we live in (remember the old Chinese curse?) and one of these days, somebody is going to do it. Maybe flag burning won't be the topic--I haven't heard anybody mention that lately anyway--but something else. One of these days a reporter will be courageous enough to write a story saying that Presidential "debates" are not really debates but a bunch of candidates presenting packaged sound bites, and that until candidates actually get to slug it out with each other they are theatrical spectacles not worth covering. Or maybe he or she will attend a White House press conference and press the Preside