Wherein I Agree With Matthew Yglesias About The MSM’S “Status Anxiety”–UPDATED
January 15, 2009 / 9:55 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierThe Mainstream Media, it be troubled. As in, there are photographers like this Twitter guy who did on-the-spot citizen journalism (Was his picture less newsworthy because he wasn’t a reporter by trade? At this writing over 56,000 people have viewed it.) and there are commentators like me, who report and interpret real-time events like the debates or President Bush’s last speech to the nation. I can read the transcript and watch the President speak tonight and then comment on it (the President has aged and looks weary despite his optimistic talk). How is that different than the paid commentators?
Here’s the thing. I’ve never actually heard a crack investigative reporter tell me that the essence of good journalism consists of your work appearing in a non-blog venue. Similarly, I’ve never heard that from an intrepid war reporter. I think those people understand that if you uncover a major secret and write about it in a blog, or in a magazine, or on a newspaper that it’s all the same. Similarly, if you risk your life to get a first-hand account of events in a confusing war zone nobody will care if it’s a blog from the battlefield or a TV report. That’s because those people are doing journalism at its best and they know that their work stands or falls with the information contained therein.
But what Mike Barnicle and Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan do isn’t like that. I say this as someone who likes their show and watches it almost every day, just like I hope people like my blog and read it every day. The three of them, and Joe Scarborough, are all in the same boat with me—we’re providing what we hope is an informative, entertaining product that’s fundamentally derivative of work being done by other people. But a passel of TV chatters and newspaper columnists and guys are accustomed to basking in the glow offered by people doing real reporting. There’s a lot of status anxiety. And this gets to be its worst, in my view, among the kind of people who do the sort of pseudo-reporting associated with following the President of the United States around. Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, I’m a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then that’s journalism. Similarly, if I travel around with the president and then read the pool reports that my colleagues write and then write about that: Journalism. But if I read the newspaper account of where the president went and then write about that: Cheetos.
It’s a little silly.
It is silly. It’s silly when I hear Sarah Palin say it. It’s silly when I hear Sean Hannity say it. It’s silly when I hear reporters say it.
The truth is a little scary for those in the news field. The best and brightest bloggers don’t get their following by being unfair Looney-Tunes (Andrew Sullivan excepted). They get their readership by trying to present the facts from a point of view. The main difference between me and Matt is ideological, not, I suspect, a desire to present the issue fairly. That is, we come from different ideological standpoints, and we’re clear about our biases, but we want to present the issue fairly so that people can leave informed and form their own opinions.
How is that different from a journalist sitting in front of a camera or who happens to be in the White House press pool? With C-Span and other live feeds, I can see all that nonsense in real-time from the comfort of my high-back and laptop table. It’s not different.
One experience that stayed with me from the joint Blogger appearance on the BBC for election coverage with Jane Hamsher was that we worked essentially the same. And, we worked essentially the same as the news people themselves. We used the same data. We came to the same conclusions in points of fact. We came to some different conclusions about what the facts meant. And when the BBC reporters wanted to call a state that had not closed their polls yet, we bloggers nearly stroked out. There was no way we could report that, even though we both felt the outcome was certain based on the data. It’s called fairness and integrity. The best bloggers possess it, just like the best journalists possess it.
But bloggers go one further: they don’t pretend to be unbiased. They don’t feign objectivity. They present the facts from a point of view just like people in the news media do. Evidently, the Mainstream people tacitly admit that they’re biased. Sam Dealey in U.S. News says:
With the inauguration of America’s first black president less than a week away, it was inevitable that the self-obsessed media would insert their own diversity into the occasion. Sure enough, in his Monday Washington Post wrap-up, Howard Kurtz laments the lack of black reporters covering the White House as “a pale reflection of America.” Summing up the piece’s prevailing sentiment is the Post’s Michael Fletcher, who is black. “It feels like you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility,” he says.
Whoa, hold on a minute: Hasn’t the mantra from media types all along been that journalists are objective?
If we accept that black reporters will have a different take from their white colleagues on Barack Obama, does it follow that one of those views is more “accurate” or legitimate than the other? And now substitute “conservative” for “black.” Doesn’t this underrepresentation argument concede the point that conservatives have made all along about press bias? After all, it’s hardly a secret that most reporters and editors are liberal or left-leaning.
Oh yes, the liberal reporters and editors are biased, too. That they don’t admit it just means that they’re also delusional. The willful ignorance won’t save their profession. NYU professor Jay Rosen (whom I’ve sparred with on Twitter) has been prescient about the demise of Newspapers (and I would add, Talking Head) journalism. You can read what he wrote in 2005 about “laying the newspaper down to die“.
What can the MSM do to survive in this atmosphere? Do better. Be more informative. Be fair. Be more interesting. Be less sensational. Don’t take the audience for rubes and pretend at objectivity. State biases, connections and ways that your reporting might be slanted. That is, practice full disclosure.
The media still has the advantage. They come into people’s rooms every night. A long tail of people have to come find me or Matt Yglesias or Jane Hamsher or Twitter celeb photographer Mr. Krums online. We have to be sought out.
The irony of the Press’s blogger obsession is that they believe objectivity is their competitive advantage yet they so clearly lack it about their own profession.
UPDATED:
Well, I spent a wee paragraph explaining how the MSM could save itself. Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media says it’s too late:
It’s not stopping, either. Newspapers are the first to go, because they depend primarily on classified advertising, or what might be called “nearly classified advertising” – such as the display ads for jewelry and perfume in the Style section of a newspaper. Magazines are already feeling it as well. Look at a copy of Newsweek or Time next time you’re out. They are still hampered by the fact that it’s expensive to print on physical paper. Meanwhile, their virtual competitors can deliver “impressions”: people who see the advertisements, for far less, and provide content that’s literally up-to-the minute. In response, many magazines – especially trade magazines that don’t require glossy images – are already moving to web-only very.
What then? This won’t stop. Advertising-paid television is on the same track. I don’t have any use for broadcast TV any longer, I depend on cable. And I’m one of millions. And I know people who get all their television from YouTube or Hulu, by Netflix and by download.
To some extent, the television networks are protected by the relatively high cost of production. But that won’t last. Last night I was watching Ed Driscoll’s piece “The Red Queen’s Race“. Ed appears to presents it in the sepia-toned set of a Victorian mansion, but in fact he shot it entirely in his home studio. The whole “set” is digital. Steve Green shoots his PJTV segments in his basement. Mine are shot in my office. And blip.tv gives you access to an amazing variety of original content, made by semi-professional creators who will only get better with experience.
We’re only a few years – two to five is my guess – before the networks are in the same position as newspapers and magazines are today: their expensive, capital-intensive business model on the brink of destruction.
Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » “STATUS ANXIETY” in the mainstream media. We’re seeing more and more of that these days. …
Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » JOE THE PLUMBER ANSWERS HIS CRITICS: And with more class than was displayed by Mr. Sanchez, who com…
Pingback: Thank you, President Bush - UPDATED | The Anchoress