James, Fetch Me My Hankie; the Barbarians Have Triumphed

Gatekeeper anxiety in journalism has now reached its Fatalism phase. Over on Romenesko's letters page yet another whither-journalism debate is raging on, with such overt blame-the-audience explanations as, well, "It's the audience," and "Do they read?"

A more strictly elitist look at elitist handwringing can be found in The New Yorker, where Columbia University Journalism School Dean (and New Yorker staff writer) Nicholas Lemann has penned a lengthy, interview-filled, admitting-we-have-a-problem essay, misleadlingly entitled "Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?" (Misleading because about the only "mad" person Lemann quotes is Karl Rove; the rest is mostly bewildered guessing from beleagured big-city editors bravely suffering the indignities of occasionally unfriendly e-mail.)

Though there is much of tangible value in the article (including long, cherry-pickable quotes from New York Times Editor Bill Keller), Lemann's inability to recognize the resentment-stoking influence of journalistic elitism sinks to the level of farce, as in this beautiful sentence:

My grandfather, who was a pediatrician in the town of Perth Amboy, would sit in his easy chair on Sundays reading the Times in a spirit not dissimilar to that of someone taking the sacrament.

Well my grandfather, who was a painter and drywall-man in the town of Portland, would sit in his Archie Bunker chair on Sundays cussing and spitting out his teeth at the Trail Blazers on TV in a spirit not dissimilar to that of someone taking a crap…. Anyway, class resentments aside, Lemann's conclusion sounds a paranoid, blame-the-audience note that may set the tone for elite response to anti-MSMism:

Journalism that is inquisitive and intellectually honest, that surprises and unsettles, didn't always exist. There is no law saying that it must exist forever, and there are political and business interests that would be better off if it didn't exist and that have worked hard to undermine it. This is what journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry about: what if people don't believe in us, don't want us, anymore?

ADDENDUM: See also the Columbia Journalism Review's "Let's Blame the Readers."

Comments

[carter]

The problem with the mainstream media is so much of its journalism is uninquisitive and intellectually dishonest. The only time an article "surprises" anyone is by accident.

[Jor]

You know, when you noted that Rove rattled off complaints -- I assumed it would be the standard fair we heard a hundred times on the right-wing blog echo-chamber. But the mischaracterization of republican organization was ridiculously outrageous, and probaby wound up hurting the democrats. I don't think this is an issue of bias -- Salon had a post-mortem that basicaclly said the exact same thing (Republicans had far superior orginzation). This is incompetence. Never attribute to malice what can be equally attributed to stupidity. And givne the sheer number of idiotic stories the times has published (or ignored), I really think it would be hard to make a case that they are "liberal media".

[Jor]

Matt, can you point us to a decent source of media criticism on the right? Something that puts media errors into context of other errors, than just yelling bias at every story full of incompetence?

[Adam]

When is the Eason Jordan story going to make it into the MSM?

[gaius marius]

it's not a "hankie", you savages -- it's a kerchief. 🙂

[Jeff Smith]

It really is truly stunning how different the
self-image of these people as noble crusaders
going against the power with their "inquisative"
and "intellectually honest" journalism is from
the reality of a bunch of B- political science
majors toadying to the establishment while all
the while suffering from a very bad case of
self-esteem.

Jeff

[gaius marius]

one truism -- if you embrace elitism, the populists (and populace) will eventually revolt.

the word "eventually" excuses a lot of rigor, mr welch, but i find this an interesting bit of pop psych. are you sure? or are human beings essentially hierarchical, seeking not an escape from elitism but simply new elites?

i'm a middle-class fellow like many, and i know some in the upper crust and many others changing tires. and the one thing i can say about them (and myself) is that we are all animals, all irrational, and all crave social validation (even and sometimes especially when we deny it). validation springs from society, and society if it is not anarchy is hierarchical.

these folks who assault "elitist" msm are not slaying evil dragons. they are not fleeing elitism. they have found new elites -- in some cases, republican neo-populists; in others, The People.

i think it pays to examine what made the nyt and aspects like "objectivity" and "professionalization" aspects of the model in the first place. what did mass journalism look like before this meme was put into place? i suspect that the chaos of scandal-sheet yellow journalism is exactly the kind of market-driven rumor mill you're (unwittingly?) advocating a return to.

as i've said before, the idea that choice will lead to a better media is ridiculous. gatekeeper media is bias-prone and tailors news to fit an audience. but it at least is not confused unverifiable streams of pseudoinformation which people tailor to suit their own mystical haze of consciousness.

in the end, greater freedom to choose is likely to mean greater freedom to choose what you wish to hear, reinforcing previous conceptions and delusions, rather than comparison shopping for quality of information. most people (being only animals) cannot critically evaluate what they're consuming; awash in data of varying quality, they assemble their own 'reality' to suit their inclination. the overwhelming tide of choice thus yields a haze of primitive mysticism -- which, when manipulated effectively, leads to the mass politics practiced by the totalitarians of the 20th c just as quickly as the cooption of any media giant.

[Todd Fletcher]

When has a pampered elite ever got itself out of the way gracefully?

[dhex]

"gatekeeper media is bias-prone and tailors news to fit an audience. but it at least is not confused unverifiable streams of pseudoinformation which people tailor to suit their own mystical haze of consciousness."

this rocks me like a hurricane.

you really should work in a newsroom sometime.

[joe]

Let's just cut to the core of the issue: objectivity and efforts to report truthfully are fundamentally elitist.

The process of deciding what is factual and what is not is, by itself, discriminatory. And this discrimination falls the hardest on those people whose worldviews are most at odds with objective reality.

So by attempting to accurately and objecitvely portrat the world as it actually exists, the MSM is involved in an elitist project to taylor the news towards a Factual Elite, to the detriment of Ordinary Americans.

I don't need some fancy pants journalist from Harvard to tell me that the 2001 tax cut was skewed towards the wealthy. I believe that most of the benefits went to single mom waitresses. If the media was more democratic, the things I know to be true wouldn't be censored, just because some limp wristed, coastal elitist, Hillary-loving snob used some fancy pants middle school arithmetic to demonstrate that what I know to be true is objectively wrong.

[curious]

But if the Factual Elite are incorrect on some of their assumptions, what mechanism is in place to change their view?

As an example, the comments made by Harvard's president were reported in many media outlets as being incorrect, when in truth he asked for more research in an area of study in which there is room for scientific doubt.

The blogasphere is one tool to police the Factual Elite, but it would be better if there were some way for the F.E. to be evaluated by their peers from time to time.

[Franklin Harris]

a bunch of B- political science majors

I had a 4.0 in political science, I'll have you know.

[Phil]

So by attempting to accurately and objecitvely portrat the world as it actually exists, the MSM is involved in an elitist project to taylor the news towards a Factual Elite, to the detriment of Ordinary Americans.

If the bulk of the media actually did that, you might have a point, but they don't. What they do, on any given issue and in the name of "balance," is find some self-appointed "spokesperson" for each side of the issue and let them say their piece, with little real effort devoted to analyzing whether or not one or both of them is full of shit.

What "the world as it actually exists" is is left as an exercise for the reader.

[gaius marius]

you really should work in a newsroom sometime.

lol -- indeed perhaps i should.

i don't deny that newsrooms produce things that are not factual. but they do, do they not, have infrastructure dedicated to factchecking and editorial control such that, when properly implemented, makes some attempt to quash the really egregious stuff?

the democratizated media of the web are, in the main, not inhibited by these institutions.

it's not that newsrooms are paragons of virtue, mr dhex, but that despite their weaknesses they are more reliable for quality information than the alternative.

But if the Factual Elite are incorrect on some of their assumptions, what mechanism is in place to change their view?

peer review, i should think. the biases of papers are well known to us; when cbs publishes a fraud as fact, we find out because of competitve peer review. gatekeeper media is not inherently the enemy of competitive media; it is the enemy of fraudulence.

[joe]

"But if the Factual Elite are incorrect on some of their assumptions, what mechanism is in place to change their view?"

If a writer or paper puts out factually bad work, every other journalist and newspaper whose credibility and status depends on getting the story right and being objective will have a huge incentive to run down the bad work, and publicize their competitors' errors. The newspaper that ran the bad story has a huge interest in correcting its error, in order to maintain its credibility. In addition, if the writers and papers criticizing the story have guarded their reputations as fair and trustworthy sources of information, they will have the credibility to make their critiques stick - as opposed to a partisan blogger, for example, whose every critique can be dismissed as biased.

Of course, all of this depends upon the "old media" shibbotheth of one's reputation for fairness and credibility, rather than one's reputation for getting attention and making the case for one's favored positions, serving as the measurement for effective journalism.

[R C Dean]

but they do, do they not, have infrastructure dedicated to factchecking and editorial control such that, when properly implemented, makes some attempt to quash the really egregious stuff?

I dunno, do they? If so, its an awfully porous system, and one that seems to be porous in a particular way.

If a writer or paper puts out factually bad work, every other journalist and newspaper whose credibility and status depends on getting the story right and being objective will have a huge incentive to run down the bad work, and publicize their competitors' errors.

If that's the case, then why is their a virtual blackout on Eason Jordan's multiple, unsupported accusations that the US military is targetting and killing journalists?

[joe]

Phil, I would say that finding spokesmen for each side and letting them have their say, the lowest form of "fairness" and "objectivity" and a pet peeve of mine, is far better than finding a spokesman for one's preferred position, letting him have his say, and not worrying about providing balance.

But really, this is not a critique of the reality-based, objectivity-striving journalism that reigned for the latter half of the 20th century. The willingness to uncritically print the statements of partisan spokesmen, rather than dig for the facts and nail whoever comes out on the wrong side of them, is an outcome of the truth-is-relative philosophy of "new journalism."

I trust someone who strives to be truthful and comes up short, over someone who tries to be dishonestly convincing and succeeds.

[joe]

"If that's the case, then why is their a virtual blackout on Eason Jordan's multiple, unsupported accusations that the US military is targetting and killing journalists?"

Accusations that I have yet to see in any mainstream media. The blackout of such poorly sourced accusations is exactly the response that a responsible media outlet should have.

I'm sure the anti-war blogs are repeating his charges with little criticism, however.

[Dave Weigel]

When is the Eason Jordan story going to make it into the MSM?

You know, after the election I was joking around with some friends about the coming dearth of conservative enemies. They controlled all branches of government, after all, and their cable news network was #1. So what were they going to get outraged about? Random journalists and college professors?

And so my sarcasm is defeated by reality.

[dhex]

"i don't deny that newsrooms produce things that are not factual. but they do, do they not, have infrastructure dedicated to factchecking and editorial control such that, when properly implemented, makes some attempt to quash the really egregious stuff?"

yes and no.

it depends entirely on the structure of the paper and how much ideological blindness seeps through. my wife used to work for a major ny daily until leaving to pursue her phd, (i worked for the same one years before) and her stories around the election were telling. there's a deep level of ideological blindness which prevents even reasonable dissent on certain issues.

hence in nyc you have the times vs the post vs the news, each having their own obvious biases, bents and target markets. this is, however, somewhat rare.

more importantly, there are just stories the MSM won't touch one way or another that are important, but they're important to communities who don't spend money on advertising, who aren't seen as a target market, etc. hence the creation of small market papers, alternative weeklies, community papers, etc.

i'm not going to say that blogs are the answer. or alternative weeklies. but neither is the ny times.

[Shannon Love]

I find the idea that a handful of journalist and editors are somehow capable of functioning as "gatekeepers" laughably funny. No matter how brilliant they may all be as individuals, the sheer complexity and breadth of issues they must cover renders them all idiots. They appear so knowledgeable about random subjects because they parrot what others tell them. They have no idea whether it is true or not. (Don't get me started on the average journalist grasp of math, especially statistics. Most of them couldn't figure a standard deviation if there life depended on it.)

Journalist of the past only seemed functionally omniscient because they had the biggest megaphone and nobody could challenge them. Now we can challenge them and it is increasingly revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

The internet creates a hailstorm of hypothesis, rumors and conspiracy theories but it destroys most of them as quickly as they arise. Stories that survive are likely those that many different people, from many different perspectives and areas of expertise find credible. Stories on the internet are not chiseled in stone by powers that be before seeing the light of day. They evolve in an organic fashion becoming increasing accurate with the passing of time.

Legacy media is lucky to get a half dozen people working on one story. The blogsphere can recruit thousands. Is it any wonder that the blogsphere is often spanking legacy media?

[dagny]

What the past couple years have shown is that all levels of media are prone to sloppiness and, in some cases, to semi-intentional sloppiness stemming from someone's bias.

What the traditional media is asking us to do is to play a statistics game. There's no possible way that media consumers have the capability of finding out factual data or evaluating sources, they say, so they should just trust that the New York Times has less of a probability of being wrong than the average weblog.

[gaius marius]

The internet creates a hailstorm of hypothesis, rumors and conspiracy theories but it destroys most of them as quickly as they arise. Stories that survive are likely those that many different people, from many different perspectives and areas of expertise find credible.

which, ms love, i'm sure we can agree, is not the same as finding evident truth. people in the main -- not being rational, of course -- still think jfk was killed by the mob despite not having a shred of evidence to show it because quite simply it is a compelling narrative.

what people believe and why is an extremely complex dynamic having to do with imagination, social acceptance, propaganda -- and just the lightest touch of reality and reason. institutional factchecking, properly operated, is a protection against ourselves at our weakest.

again, msm lets plenty of fantasy leak through the dike -- we're human, after all -- but the blogosphere is tantamount to the active demolition of flood control. there's no need to glorify it as some utopian actor for truth. its a regression, by lowering the barrier of entry, back to the village rumor mill. the most compelling rumors -- those with enough fantasy to spark the imagination, and just enough truth to be believable -- will be the ones that last, factchecking be damned.

[MikeP]

On the topic of fact-finding and truth-revealing, Shannon Love said everything very well.

Couple the media's inability to come up with an objective understanding of the world with its bias, and you see the real problem with the MSM.

But the bias of most of the MSM is not liberal as are most of the the reporters, and it is not conservative as are most of the owners. It is profoundly centrist, and that is why it so irritates libertarians.

The media at its best tries to find and to be the voice of the people. The voices they actually find, however, come almost entirely from government -- either in the form of the party in power or in the form of the opposition. Unfortunately, the representatives of both these parties believe the government has the power and the competence to solve the problems of society. They simply differ on the particular problems and the particular methods.

When everything reporters hear from "both sides" comes from this slant, it is not surprising that the results take this bias. Add in the notion that government is plain unable to solve most problems better than free-market institutions, and it is easy to see why the MSM looks so bad so much of the time.

Blogs look better because there are so many of them, and we can cherry pick the right answers from different ones at different times. But, additionally, reporters on the blogs aren't stuck simply talking to the two sides of government to get their opposing opinions and then averaging them into, "Different forces among the elected representatives of the people have different approaches to solving this problem."

[joe]

Mike P,

"Joining us tonight on the Newshour are John Peterson from the Center for Analyzing the Budget, and Peter Johnson from the Budget Analysis Center."

[james]

As a suscriber to two daily papers, I guess I shouldn't take that addendum article too personally. But blaming individualism and the market for declining circulations is a farce. So we're bad citizens, learning how to make livings instead of learning about our collective obligations to the greater good. It appears the true bias of the MSM is toward promoting everything government and trashing anything private, or should I say, personal. The self-reflective blind spot of these elitists is amazing.

[Stevo Darkly]

i'm a middle-class fellow like many, and i know some in the upper crust and many others changing tires. and the one thing i can say about them (and myself) is that we are all animals, all irrational, and all crave social validation (even and sometimes especially when we deny it).

Not me! (Oh boy golly, I hope the other people at H&R thought that was kind of funny!)