[Media-watch] FW: Miami Herald.com | 09/06/2004 | Cowardice in the newsrooms (FYI...ethel s.)

[David Miller]

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From: Ethels12 at aol.com
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:16:55 EDT
To: dahrma90 at yahoo.com, Editor at mail.truthout.org, rmcgovern at slschool.org,
david.miller at stir.ac.uk, hthomas at hearstdc.com, ted_gup at ksg.harvard.edu
Subject: Miami Herald.com | 09/06/2004 | Cowardice in the newsrooms
(FYI...ethel s.)

 Click here: Herald.com | 09/06/2004 | Cowardice in the newsrooms
<http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/edward_wasserman/95920
78.>  
       

MEDIA


Cowardice in the newsrooms



BY EDWARD WASSERMAN

edward_wasserman at hotmail.com


News is a messy and elusive form of information. Reporters don't just stroll
through a meadow of stories in bloom and pluck a bouquet. What gets reported
first depends on what journalists hear about. Then the story must seem
interesting, significant or both. It has to be something that the
journalists have the brains, will and resources to pursue. And they'll want
to know what rival organizations make of it, what sources they routinely
rely on say about it, and a multitude of other things.

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.

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.

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.

If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current
mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of
carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And -- here
it gets interesting -- will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting
story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to
play softball?

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.

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.

An angry, fearful time

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.

Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and
Lee University.



    




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