Monday, January 27, 2014

It's simple: Report what they do, not what they say


A bit of a preface: Throughout 50 years on and off in journalism, I have been very conscious of attempting to remain objective and adhere to the concept of fairness. This went so far as I still won't join clubs or organizations just to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. As a result it has taken a long time to come to the conclusions here, to violate basic ideals drilled into me during my journalism education and experience.

Last week there was a news story about Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell outlining all the ways he planned to block any program advocated by President Obama and the democrats in general. It took me back to something I was attempting to make some sense of during the craziness before the government shutdown last fall.

One morning during that period while wrestling a puppy and trying to maintain at least some of my own morning routine,  as I usually do I turned on the TV news.  Accidently I went to the Fox news channel instead of CNN or MSNBC, but didn't realize it.  Mostly it is on and I am going through web pages and sites I watch without paying much attention to the TV.

But as I was scrolling down facebook it began to dawn on me that all the shutdown reporting was about republicans and tea party people saying how awful the president is because of the conflict.  After a time it began seeping into my consciousness and drew a little more attention.  There was no logo on the screen but I began questioning whether I had turned on Fox by accident, and when I checked which channel I was on, sure enough, I had. It amazed me that even considering all the criticism of that news network, they made so little effort to report objectively, and that made it so easy to recognize what network I had blundered onto.



This was purported to be news, not one of their talking heads features, when it was just one long diatribe against the president.  Whew. Given Fox news does that, it seems to me that news is then weighted three-fourths against the president.  That's because while Fox makes no excuses for what they do, the more legitimate press in an effort to show fairness in reporting gives equal time to the president and to the wackos in the House of Representatives who have stalled the government.  Equal time.  But, in the process they give legitimacy to people like Michelle Bachman who said at the time the whole thing is indicative we are in the Christian end of days. Since the Nixon days it has bothered me that in the effort to be fair, the press lets all kinds of weirdos speak and thus gives them credibility.

I recall day after day editing stories about Nixon and Watergate and the coverup and knowing all those people were lying.  Who could believe no one knew about something as outrageous as burglarizing Democratic headquarters or the cover-up that followed.  And day after day, I had to allow those lies to go into print. At the time it came out that part of the Nixonian political philosophy was that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes truth. People throw around the term Nazi these days to point out anything they don’t like, but that philosophy was actually first promoted by Hitler's public relations guy Joseph Goebbels who really was a Nazi.

Nixon's gang was just a small group of out-of-control political criminals.  Today's batch is even worse because they are not really violating any laws and thus have a mask of credibility.  We have people actually running our government like members of congressional science committees who insist the world is only 6,000 years old, that climate change is some sort of media plot, that Obama is bringing us to the end of days, and their ventures into women's rights and anatomy;  people who stop the government in its tracks and then blame and confront a park ranger over following orders they forced into creation.

And, the press gives them credibility by granting time on camera equal to what  responsible members of government receive.  I've attached a couple of internet memes on the subject here that help explain the issue.  Though it goes against every ideal ever learned in journalism school, perhaps it is time to let intelligence take hold and report what is really going on.  There is a way to do that without going too far overboard.  Most of what gets reported, is what I call lip flap, people talking, often saying little of consequence.  In my own work, and when I am able to work with others, an easy choice is report what people do, not what they say.  And, if they are doing nothing, like John Boehner was doing in not allowing a House vote, report that.  Not what he says, but the fact that he is not allowing that vote.

Republicans are whining the president will not negotiate.  Report the history of that.  How many times have GOP representatives refused to negotiate and if they do they don't negotiate in good faith.  It wasn’t too long ago that in another confrontation, every step the president took toward the republicans in an effort to reach a compromise, the GOP took a step backward away from him with a new demand and eventually nothing was settled. Why would someone enter new negotiations given that history?  Several people have likened it to Lucy pulling the football away every time Charlie Brown goes to kick it.

In the end it is almost childish.  The stand is against affordable health care.  This is law: it was passed by both houses of Congress, signed into law by the president and confirmed by the Supreme Court.  Then it was the main issue in the last presidential election which the president won by more than 5 million votes.  It is the law of the land.  GOP lost.  Accept it and move on.  As one pundit put it recently and I wish I could remember who, they lost so what did they do, they kicked the ball into the woods.

Still according to McConnell it will come up for a vote again this year. There is so much going on, so many serious issues to address, why even bother to report  a wacko threat to kill the affordable health program, especially now that it has survived its rocky start and is working for millions of people, many of whom never had health insurance before. It would be an interesting story to search the number of column inches devoted the web site's startup difficulties  and now to how many are devoted to its successes.  Where is the fairness in that case?

Every day on those news shows I see the wackos spouting off anything they can think of that goes against the president, yet offer little in the way of a factual basis for the charges. We have even had one political candidate saying the president should be executed. In my old civics class that was termed a crime, yet this guy maybe got a stern talking to by the Secret Service and that's all. Of course we don't know because in the interest of fairness we heard that he said it, but not what the consequences were.

All this fairness effort by the press and TV (they are two different entities) does nothing but attempt to fool the public into thinking the opposing views carry equal weight. How is it that something like 97 percent of scientists involved agree the climate is warming and at least partly a result of human actions carries equal weight with Donald Trump who says it is a liberal (read commie pinko radical) hoax?

I may be something of a Pollyanna here but I think the majority of Americans are intelligent enough to see through all the lies upon lies that the speakers hope will become truth. What remains is for that intelligent majority to do something about it, and to demand better and maybe some unfair reporting from the enabling news media.


The American Revolution had its roots in non-traditional reporting, just go back and read Thomas Paine for an example. The Thomas Paines of this century will be found on the internet, where fortunately reporting is not bound by the fairness doctrine

2 comments:

  1. Tim, I came to blogging thru academia rather than journalism, so I had somewhat different standards. But I began checking the journalist standards out. I concluded that pretending to be neutral is the real lie. Just because someone doesn't support a party or candidate with money, doesn't mean their heart is neutral. Writers should disclose their bias and then write however they want and let the reader choose what to read.

    My personal preference is to try to be objective and offer evidence for what I saw. But I see nothing wrong with other folks using their blog to write their opinion. It's up to the readers to figure it out.

    Fox, though is a different story. They call themselves 'fair and unbiased' so that's hardly declaring their allegiance. But their viewers are getting the news they want to hear. And the comments I see on some so called liberal blogs are just as mean and personal as anything Fox does.

    Got here through your intro on the FB Alaska Bloggers Group. Good to meet you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve, I couldn't agree more. Attempting objectivity is not achieving objectivity, there are just too many nuances of it. It is one reason I liked the now old "New Journalism" of the 70s. The writer interjected himself into the story allowing him to give his experience with the subject and expose his non-objective thoughts as well.

    ReplyDelete

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

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"… there's a fearlessment about him …"

"He's got to have the lead if he's going to win this race." "

"Kansas has always had the ability to score with the basketball."

"NFL to put computer chips in balls." Oh, that's gotta hurt.

"Now that you're in the finals you have to run the race that's going to get you on the podium."

"It's very important for both sides that they stay on their feet."

This is why you get to hate sportscasters. Kansas beats Texas for the first time since 1938. So the pundits open their segment with the question "let's talk about what went wrong." Wrong? Kansas WON a football game! That's what went RIGHT!

"I brought out the thermostat to show you how cold it is here." Points to a thermometer reading zero in Minneapolis.

"It's tough to win on the road when you turn the ball over." Oh, really? Like you can do all right if you turn the ball over playing at home?

Cliches so embedded in sportscasters' minds they can't help themselves: "Minnesota fell from the ranks of the undefeated today." What ranks? They were the only undefeated team left.

A good one: A 5'10" player went up and caught a pass off a defensive back over six feet tall. The quote? "He's got some hops."

Best homonym of the day so far: "It's all tied. Alabama 34, Kentucky 3." Oh, Tide.

"Steve Hooker commentates on his Olympic pole vault gold medal." When "comments" just won't do.

"He's certainly capable of the top ten, maybe even higher than that."

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"The game ended in the final seconds." You have to wonder when the others ended or are they still going on?

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