Posted by: McQ on Monday, October 10, 2005 Jon Fine has an interesting article in Business Week Online about remarks by New York Times Editor Bill Keller about the state of the Times, blogging and his competitors. As Fine notes, he has very little to say about the Judith Miller affair: There's the situation with reporter Judith Miller, who recently spent 85 days in jail before divulging a source—with her source's consent—to "Plamegate" Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. There's the Times' notable silence on the matter, although Keller promised imminent exhaustive coverage on the story. (While he spent little time discussing Miller, during a question-and-answer session, Keller said that the complexities of the situation put the paper in the "uncomfortable" position of not being able to share important information one of its reporters knew.)Since when has the NY Times been in an “uncomfortable position of not being able to share important information” recently? As with most of the media, it can’t wait to share whatever it gets its hands on, and the sooner the better. I still haven’t been able to sort out this reticence by the Times. She’s out of jail, she’s been given (for the second time) the okay by her source to be forthcoming, yet we still have nada. "Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media," Keller said. "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."Where to start. I don’t disagree that mostly the news comes from the mainstream media. Nor do I necessarily disagree that bloggers recycle and chew on the news. Where Keller falls short during all this self-serving attribution is his failure to note that bloggers have also have assumed an obviously irritating role in raising the BS flag on the main stream media at times. While it can be argued that that is a function of “recycling and chewing on the news” it goes far beyond that. What bloggers have done, in many instances, is treat the news to a more balanced presentation (and that includes bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum). Facts and assumptions within a story which the MSM chooses to impart may, even inadvertently, slant a story a certain way. Where bloggers have come in handy is rooting out those facts and assumptions that weren’t present in the MSM’s version and making them available as well. So I’d suggest that the role of bloggers is more of an expansive one, in that the blogosphere has a tendency to keep stories alive that the MSM will drop and to delve much more deeply into them than does the MSM. They've also been able to give stories the visiblity necessary to finally be picked up by the MSM (stories it had chosen to ignore or barely mention). That makes the blogosphere an indispensable value added aspect of total news coverage. Which brings us to Keller’s second point: “A world worldwide network of trained, skilled [observers] to witness events" and write about them, and "a rigorous set of standards. A journalism of verification," rather than of "assertion," and maintaining an "agnosticism" as to where any story may lead.” Speaking of running up the BS flag, this may be the fantasy under which the NY Times operates, but it is hardly the reality. The most recent example of the Times “journalism of verification” comes with its repeating what have now been revealed to be rumors about the events in the Louisiana SuperDome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Although, admittedly, it wasn’t as bad as some, and in some cases noted that lack of verification, it still published what it couldn’t verify. Additionally, one can confidently say that “agnosticism” as to where the story may lead cannot coexist with the propensity to publish raw rumor. We’ve also been privy to the Jayson Blair version of the “rigorous standards” by which the Times has operated. Why someone wasn’t laughing in Keller’s face at this point is a bit of a mystery to me. Speaking of laughs, read this: Keller made repeated references to the extreme partisan nature of current discourse, and cited voices that he said urged the Times to "give it up. Embrace your biases," and write about them "openly." To this, he said "I object. It's like saying since genetics account for so much, we should abandon being parents." Still, he conceded that "a lot of people want journalism that thrills them by telling them what they believe."OK, stay with me here. Now a remark about Fox: Along the same lines, Keller termed the Fox News Channel's "fair and balanced" tagline "the most ingeniously cynical slogan" in media marketing.Yes, Fox is cynically biased, but not the agnostic Times. Of course a cynic might suggest that “All the News Fit to Print” really means “All the News We Choose to Print”. Talk about “ingeniously cynical” (not to mention a dollop of Olympian arrogance and impaired irony). If you haven’t yet gotten the feeling that Keller has a bit of an inflated sense of his role, the role of the Times and the role of the MSM, I’m not sure how to help you. Suffice it to say, he’s certainly of the opinion that the agnostic “journalism of verification” is alive and well at the Times and he only makes it better with his presence. Like other major-market dailies, the Times faces dispiriting revenue dynamics, and last month it announced it would be forced to shed newsroom jobs. "The cost of everything we do is going up faster than revenues," he said bluntly. "How long will this vessel stay afloat?" His unsurprising answer: A long time, or, more specifically, newspapers will be "alive and flourishing 20 years from now."Possibly. But not if they maintain the status quo in terms of a business model, or the arrogance they bring to the editorial room which has them believe that only “trained journalists” with a “rigid verification process” are the true and only purveyors of the news. With the number of times, recently, the purveyors of the news have become the news, a less arrogant and insulated observer might conclude that business as usual will not see newspapers “alive and flourishing 20 years from now”. |
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