Via Andrew Sullivan, reporter Matt Steinglass steps up to answer Brad DeLong’s perennial “why oh why can’t we have a better press corps” question:
I understand Brad DeLong’s frustrations with journalists failing to get complicated stories about economics and economic policy right. I don’t know anything about the specific cases in which he feels some reporters at the Washington Post weren’t trying to get it right. But as a broad response, I would have to say: for most of us, the level of detailed and scrupulous reportage which he expects on every story entails an amount of work that almost no journalistic institution in the world will pay us enough to do, anymore.
This isn’t really a complaint; it’s more of an observation. The quality of reportage, both financial and otherwise, is going to keep going down. And it’s going to keep going down because there isn’t a market for quality reportage. It doesn’t pay any more to interview 10 sources for an article than it does to interview 5 of them. And it doesn’t pay any more to come up with an interesting or accurate way to tell a complex story than it does to resort to a well-worn format such as “there’s a heated debate over”, present one side, present the other side, come back to somebody saying there’s a heated debate, ends.
It’s not so much that the answer to the question “why oh why can’t we have a better press corps” is “because no one will pay for one.” I’d say that the question should be “why oh why can’t we have better reporting”, and the answer is “because no one will pay for it”.
This is sort of right and sort of wrong. Yes, we have a system that doesn’t encourage good reporting, in part because there isn’t any “merit pay” for doing a good job as opposed to phoning it in. But there are plenty people out there in the world who do go the extra mile to do their jobs properly for reasons other than a desire to get some kind of merit pay. I’d even add that there are plenty of reporters out there who do this, just not so many at high-profile national outlets.
But let’s be candid, the system also discourages good reporting by putting people like Ron Fournier in positions of authority, and by giving people like Anne Kornblut and Aaron Ross Sorkin plum jobs. The point isn’t that these people are intellectually and morally bankrupt sociopaths (though they are). The point is that in addition to not motivating reporters to do a better job via pay, the current system also gives shoddy reporters jobs at high-profile national outlets.
So, yes, the problem is indeed systemic.
Mike Kay
Rachel Maddow has a great segment on the corruption of the AP and the general political media.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/
MikeJ
It’s not that there is no “merit pay” for doing your job as a reporter. It’s that eds accept substandard work.
Of course reporters are stupid and lazy. Editors don’t demand better.
Brian J
First, in regards to Andrew Ross Sorkin, most people seem to be angry with him because he’s too close to the people he’s covering, not that he’s a crappy reporter who mismanages his facts. His specific beat is mergers and acquisitions, even if he does discuss other areas of finance, and there seems to be a lot of time involved with dealing with personalities and specific companies as opposed to more abstract issues, like taxes.
But anyway, while I think DeLong and others like Dean Baker are sometimes go too far, a lot of times they are on target. DeLong seems to be more concerned with basic factual errors, while Baker’s issue is more with bias in the way issues are framed. I’d say DeLong has slightly more legitimate problem here, if only because facts are facts. I’m curious, though: if Steinglass went through DeLong’s archives, would he notice that DeLong goes after the same people again and again? He really, really doesn’t like Johnathon Weisman, formerly of The Post and now at The Wall Street Journal. Nor does he care for much of anything from the National Review. Yet, he’ll praise David Leonhardt of The Times. Maybe, just maybe, some people are hurting the reputations of everyone else.
Now, as far as paying for quality information, maybe he’s right. But I’d say that if there’s one area where people will pay for quality information, it’s in pretty much anything related to money–as in, business, finance, investing, the economy, or whatever else you want to lump together. It just needs to be worth paying for.
jimBOB
I’ve seen recent suggestions that it’s simply impossible anymore to support quality journalism with advertising revenue. There are too many media outlets for any of them to get away with charging a quality premium for better reporting, so media companies can’t use their news divisions as loss leaders. Thus the race to the bottom.
The era of quality advertising-supported journalism may turn out to be something of a fluke; in any case, it’s over with for now.
If we want better journalism, we could follow the BBC model and try creating it with public funding. The amounts of money needed to do this are piddling compared to the massive amounts currently shoveled into financial bailouts or the Pentagon or health care. Nevertheless, Americans have been so indoctrinated with moronic “free market” ideology that this may be impossible.
Blue Neponset
Steinglass’ argument is disingenuous. DeLong was complaining about the fact that reporters don’t know the definition of the term “heated debate”. You don’t need to interview ten (as opposed to five) experts to grok the term “heated debate”.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a reporter chooses not to understand DeLong’s simple point.
Brian J
@jimBOB:
You could make the argument that governments have supported the media in the past with all of the legal notices and similar things placed in papers.
You could also make the less persuasive argument that the government is currently supporting the media, as Citibank ads are usually plastered on the front of the major papers.
Tom Johnson
I made my living for ten years as a freelance magazine writer and couldn’t support a family on the money. My problem was I spent too much time on stories. Now, after 15 years doing other, higher paying things, I’m back on writing, and the money hasn’t changed — except that there’s less budget for travel.
I’ve got a business to run, so my vow is that when I’m paid $500 for a story I’m going to do $500 worth of work. That means two days for what will end up a feature story in trade publication. That’s a couple of hours with Google, five phone interviews (if I can get people to return my call in the allotted time), a draft and the extraneous bullshit that goes along with writing a story. (Fortunately, there’s not much of that because editors don’t check facts anymore, so there’s no time on the phone explaining how things were sourced.)
The work I’m doing is nowhere near as good as the work I was doing 15 years ago. It’s not as careful or thought-out, and I don’t really get to know the subject I’m writing about. Not one editor has complained. They have space to fill and budgets to meet. As for the readers…well, judging from the response most of what I write gets, they can barely comprehend what’s being said anyway.
Athenae
It would be entirely possible, were newspapers run intelligently. Many, many newspapers are wildly profitable, with better margins than Wal-Mart, even in this economy. But their ownership sees “less money” as “not enough money” and begins slashing and burning to become MORE profitable and thus the FAIL sets in.
A.
DougJ
@Tom Johnson:
Yes, that is why I think Steinglass is not completely wrong.
OTOH, reporters at the Times and Post are paid pretty well.
David in NY
I don’t think that the things Brad usually calls people out for are particularly abstruse or that they require extra time to prepare a story. They just require a basic understanding of the subject area (business, economics) of which a reporter specializing in the area should have some grasp. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I don’t know, maybe it isn’t apparent from the academic frontier, but in the corporate world, and also in the public sector, people will mostly do what is asked of them by their superiors. If people are told to do A, they are not going to do Z because they think it is the “right” thing to do. They will only go against the political and management grain when it’s really, critically and ethically important to do so because there is a proximate risk of something really bad happening. For example, asking an airline pilot to break the rules in order to get someplace on time despite the weather. In the case of the news media, nothing awful seems to happen in the near term, or even in the long term a good deal of the time, when the hard work of journalism is fudged in favor of a more newsotainment approach.
Also, too, moreover, in addition, the people getting the stories are not coached by fact-obsessed editors to get things right and cut through the crap. If anything, they are coached to talk about the crap, because the false tensions that live in the crap are what grabs audience share. And if the tensions and the crap are styled to attract a particular audience demo, and the plan works, and ratings go up, and ad rates go up with them …. profit. Profit. Which is the name of the game.
Good journalism is just not the name of that game. Ratings are the name of that game. That’s how they measure success, and that’s what they pay for. Journalism can’t flourish in that system.
So, you pretty much have this right.
But I think the problem goes beyond the system that lives in the media. The system includes the audience. If the audience does not ask for facts and accuracy, the media outlet has no motivation to deliver facts and accuracy. If the audience wants churn and churn with a certain slanted style, then that is what the media outlet is going to try to deliver. Which is why I keep saying, the media are followers, not leaders. If the audience demanded facts and accountability, I think somebody would figure out how to get that for them. I think the audience wants reinforcement of their already-established beliefs, fears, and prejudices. The media just mirrors the wants of its audience.
In my ever so humble opinion, presented in the most nurturing way possible, of course.
Mike Kay
@Tom Johnson: what kind of magazines did you write for?
DougJ
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I don’t think that churn and churn with a certain slant has to be mean inaccurate. I continue to believe that Ezra Klein’s stuff at the Post, along with Krugman’s at the Times, are about the best sources of info on financiall-oriented issues. And I think they also fall under the category — especially Ezra — of churn with a slant.
eric
the real issue is that big time reporters see themselves as of the same kind of the people they are covering. they are the same “class.” they perceive that their actions impact the way the us or the world runs. if you understand a broader conception of “ruling class” then you can understand why most reporters do not undermine that paradigm. “Capital” controls the payment of money to reporters. Look at the Monsanto story out of florida a few years ago and what happened to the reporters there. Look at the Dole (banana) controversy.
when was the last time you saw a story about a major military contractor that was entirely negative?
matoko_chan
well…investigation is not the purpose of journalism anymore.
they are more like fight promoters.
Because fights sell.
And an evenly matched fight sells best….to both sides.
That is why people like Tapper give airtime to dumb-as-dirt conservative failmemes and throw molotovs like hey, Obama called you teabaggers.
Violet
Another problem is that being a reporter, good or bad, isn’t a goal. It’s a low rung on the career ladder. People do it so they can move up the ladder to other cushier jobs like columnist and pundit. Why do hard work that pays very little when you can do minimal work and get paid a lot?
Having a job that entails expressing an opinion with vaguely sourced factoids (“According to my cab driver in Kabul….”) allows you to rake in massive speakers fees and give important-sounding interviews on Sunday shows. That’s a lot easier than pretty much any other kind of “journalism” job I can think of.
different church-lady
And the reason there isn’t is because the media outlets have destroyed that market themselves. They diluted it until it was worthless, and then claimed nobody wanted it anymore.
Zifnab
It’s not quite that simple. News media outlets compete amongst each other for advertising space. There’s no particular reason why GE wouldn’t pay NBC staff more to report at a higher quality if it brought in more eyeballs. UNLESS – the story NBC was reporting on went counter to the management at GE’s interests.
Furthermore, there are only so many eyeballs in the pool. If you’ve got a handful of news organizations – say, the big three cable networks – sucking up all the available ratings, you pull all the oxygen out of the room for alternative news sources.
Any new news venture is going to need start-up expenses, a fresh and skillful staff, and a rapidly growing readership base if it wants to get legs. But when you’ve already got over-saturation at the news stand, who is going to pick up Brand New Event Magazine when it’s in a pile of Time, Newsweek, Economist, and Atlantic?
The existing market has degraded. It didn’t have to suck, but the kings of the castle got lazy and let the manor fall to shit. But they’re still taking up space. Until we start seeing a serious derth of media content, you’re never going to have the market space to replace them.
The money exists, it’s just being chewed up on fancy graphics and holograms at CNN.
Southern Beale
Oh, bullshit. This shit makes me NUTS.
He’s saying they aren’t PAID enough & that’s why they do a crappy job? I mean yes, I’ve written about this a lot myself, at the way writers’ work has been devalued by outfits like Demand Studios and Forbes & the New York Times wanting people to blog for free, etc. etc.
But really this has ALWAYS been the case with the media. Working for a newspaper has ALWAYS been a sucky pay job. My dad was a newspaper reporter, my sister and I were both newspaper reporters (she’s a photog) and trust me, nobody gets into this industry for the money.
So I have no idea what Matt Steinglass is talking about. “It doesn’t pay any more to interview 10 sources for an article than it does to interview 5 of them.” What, like it ever did? What world is Steinglass living in?
It’s not that it doesn’t PAY it’s that you don’t have the TIME. It’s that corporate media outfits like Gannett keep laying off newsroom staff to increase their profits by a hair or two to please the shareholders and the board of directors. And that means the newsroom has half the staff to do the same work, and you simply don’t have the TIME to interview 10 people vs 5 people, on top of which we now have the web editions, so the mindset is, throw the basic story up there and we can change it later. Except you never do change it later because something else has happened or there are five other stories you’re working on that you need to flesh out so you never get back to that one.
This is why I pretty much ignore my daily fishwrap and just try to read as much as I can and then go to more thoughtful news sources like Harper’s to get the more complete picture.
It’s not about the money (except when it’s about the money). Got it?
Napoleon
@Brian J:
Also for years, starting not long after the revolution, newspapers were given highly subsidized mailing rates which helped in their spread and establishment.
Guster
@DougJ: That’s an interesting point. I guess ‘slant’ is one thing to offer instead of ‘payment.’ That is, I wonder if this problem isn’t magnified by the primacy of the illusion of impartiality.
Sly
I think its sort of all wrong, honestly. The notion that there isn’t a market for solid journalism strikes me as more excuse than factual analysis: there are plenty of people who want reliable information that will assist them in making daily decisions. That just isn’t available, so they turn to the most reasonable facsimile.
The issue, which most people within the industry tend to ignore, is that publishes found something off of which they could (and did) make a lot more money (and for a lot of wealthy people, not making as much money as possible is pretty much the same as losing money): Huge distribution networks and low cost products (i.e. shallow news). Quality journalism just doesn’t fit that particular sales model.
And that’s the problem most journalists will fail to see, because they’re viewing it backwards. They see a worthwhile news media as necessarily centered around a college of multi-billion dollar corporations. The product (and the consumer who wants it) exists to serve the business, instead of the other way around.
clyons11
It seems Mr Steinglass has committed an Honest. Indeed, why do more? Quality journalism does not pay better than shoddy shite – in fact, looking at the STAR REPORTERZ on the teevee, one can make the argument that shite has a much greater upside.
This would be OK by me (though I’ve always had a different understanding of “professionalism” than our nation’s journos, I guess) except that nearly every one of Mr Steinglass’ contemporaries preen about claiming they are truly Murrow’s heirs. This propensity seems to increase as one travels up the journalist food chain (Nagourney? Miller? Connolly? ET AL?). And this foolishness deepens if one becomes a Columnist. Also.
chuck
Summary: They keep selling us shit, and we keep eagerly buying it. The Christian Science Monitor was one of the last good papers in existence, and they’re online-only now.
Comrade Dread
Well, as I’ve said before, a reporter can hit his computer, do hours of meticulous research, interview multiple sources, and put together a factual, hard hitting article or they can take the press release they get faxed, change a few words and add a couple of “Some people say… while others contend” to mollify the Conservative and Liberal wings and be done in time for happy hour.
Both pay the same.
JK
Survey of the past 16 months of six Sunday television talk shows
h/t http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/9/864977/-Sunday-Snooze-Talk:-The-Skewpot
Athenae
And advertising revenue has never paid for quality journalism ANYWAY. It’s never been a vending machine. Advertising revenue has paid for sports coverage, travel sections, food sections, and lifestyle crap.
That revenue then supports the piece nobody wants to pay for, which is the news, and anyway, you don’t sell the news, you sell the eyeballs on the news, you sell access to your readers, you’re basically a pimp. I swear, half the people talking about this on an academic level have no idea how newspapers actually work.
A.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I must say, I don’t know if I have ever encountered anything as awful and consistently infuriating as Word Press.
Reposted because Word Press was written by imbeciles:
@DougJ:
I agree with you that churn with slant does not have to be inaccurate.
I am just saying that if the goal is ratings, and churn with a styled slant is the mechanism to get the ratings, then integrity goes by the wayside …. ergo, FoxNews. And ergo, David Gregory. And ergo, “Some say” lead-ins to stories about false dichotomies.
If we could get media leaders who could grab attention by getting things right …. we’d have Edward R. Murrow. People went out of their way to watch the guy. Alas, I am old enough to remember it. But anyway, I am saying, good journalism can get an audience. But if the audience wants to be told that global warming is bunk and that HCR is sociaIism, and FoxNews delivers the goods ….
Argh. I need a drink.
V.O.R.
Previously benign free-market forces have shifted and there may be some disruption in quality or content of service.
For your convenience, most quality reporting is being moved to niche and segmented providers.
The “mainstream” providers will still supply a majority of news, but it has been reformatted for easier widespread dissemination. This will allow us to continue serving you well into the future.
There are many benefits to our improved system, one of which is all mainstream news may be considered optional. Moving forward, we will take it as a point of pride to tell you nothing you really need to know via mainstream news, and to do so very quickly and in a maximally entertaining manner.
Consumers may always apply to the aforementioned niche sources for any information they deem critical. This will often be free of most advertising and available 24/7 via the internet.
Thank you for your attention. We apologize for any interruption of service.
– The Media.
Emma
Southern Beale: This. Absolutely. Also.
El Cid
It’s hard so say whether or not there’s a market for ‘quality’ economic reporting when there already is a market for dry-sounding but shitty reporting and the major billion dollar media has not been offering quality news-section economics / labor reportage for so many years that no one would be aware that the products were even available.
Culture of Truth
Are Kornblut and Sorkin that bad? Compared to Fluffy, they’re like Woodward and Bernstein.
El Cid
Like, were listeners to GE’s “Marketplace” program on NPR stations begging to hear the shitty, uninformed opinion of insider-promoted Megan McAddled?
Who was begging for this? When did ‘the market’ for such shitty analysis appear?
The Moar You Know
@chuck: And sadly, they finally lost me with their coverage of the California marijuana legalization initiative, which was one of the most biased pieces of journalism I’ve read in my entire life. What a disappointment, coming from them. I’ve revered and endorsed them for years.
No more.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Datewise, I going to guess it happened during the 1970s.
I think the shift happened when the big three networks started to look at their news departments as profit centers, rather than looking at them as professional enclaves whose main duty was not making profits for the company.
When cable news came along strong in the 1980s, this trend was institutionalized in the tv news business.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
If cost is the main barrier to entry for producing quality journalism, then why do the finance/econ bloggers (most of whom work either for free or for peanuts, and many of whom do so on a part time basis) produce such a consistently high quality product compared with the professional press? This is an area where the ratio of analysis to primary reporting needs to be especially high (because the primary data are relatively impenetrable to the average person), and when it comes to analysis the bloggers have run circles around the MSM and have been doing so consistently for years. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like trying to make sense of the housing bubble and credit markets crisis without calcrisk, nakedcap., ftalphaville, etc.
I think the “you get what you pay for” explanation for bad journalism makes some sense in other topical areas where primary reporting dominates over analysis, but this isn’t one of those topics. Inductive reasoning fail, IMHO.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I don’t think that “cost” is the right interpretation of the notion that “nobody wants to pay for good journalism.”
I think it has more to do with the fact that no organization is hiring and coaching journalists to practice good journalism, not for cost reasons, but for reasons centered around what the current practice is.
Plenty of young journalists would do good work for low pay, if there were employers willing to hire them to do it, and provide an atmosphere that nurtured that kind of work. There aren’t.
RevDave
The news business is turning into the music business – you have some big corporate sponsored “hit” makers who bend with the wind, a bunch of younger talented wanna bees who will do what it takes to get published, and then the rest – who make up a huge swath that runs from incredibly talented and interesting writers to the worst who now (like the music business) have the opportunity to self publish and let the free market “support” them.
I still find great writing all over the place – I now just usually find it from some link on some site that I sometimes visit.
ksmiami
Hello? But why read some half assed journalist’s interpretation of the economy when you can just read Brad DeLong??? The news media used to be a gate keeper of information that is now available directly from better sources…. also Brad deLong has a wicked sense of humor, the pieces at Calculated Risk are hugely insightful and Time / Newsweek is that middle of the road crap that is warmed over conventional wisdom that is usually totally wrong.
Catsy
Steinglass isn’t entirely wrong, but his proposed question-and-answer paints with too broad a brush. It’s a reasonable point to make, but on the whole I think everyone understands that reporters can’t be experts and that not every article can be richly and thoroughly sourced. The problem is that for the kind of he-said-she-said reporting that infuriates us most of the time, it’s a bullshit excuse. When a Republican says X and then later says he said Y or didn’t say X at all, it is the work of fucking /seconds/ to check Youtube and see if there is /actual video/ that will demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that said Republican is lying through their teeth. When a Republican says that a Democrat said X and there is video clearly proving that they did not, it is again the work of seconds to discover this.
Failing to do so isn’t about whether or not you’re being paid enough to go the extra mile and interview expert sources. It’s about whether or not you understand your job description at all. When you have at your fingertips the ability to know in moments whether or not someone is lying, and you choose the false equivalence anyway, you are not a journalist. You are an overpaid stenographer and /you are the problem/.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ksmiami:
Good point. Does anybody here actually feel that they are misinformed, they have no idea what is going on, and are at a complete loss at where to look to get information? Or do you feel well informed enough to pass judgment on mainstream media stories?
If the latter, where does that feeling of “being well informed” come from? Is it pure solipsism, or are you getting info from a journalistic source somewhere that appears to be in good working order? If the latter, then in some sense we are currently living in a golden age of good journalism and just don’t realize it because we choose not to call the people producing high quality work “journalists” because they don’t look like our stereotype of what a mainstream journalist should be. Their content may not be in the mainstream, but when was it ever? As a percentage of population, the better blogs and other non-traditional media producing high quality output (and the rare MSM outlet like Krugman’s columns) today probably have about the same mind-share as did the muckraking monthly magazines of the progressive era circa 1900. Which of course were (back in their day) a noticeable improvement (or so it appeared at the time) on what had been standard newspaper and broadsheet based journalistic practice in the mid-19th Cen.
So perhaps this is just another turn of the wheel in terms of agency capture and escape. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Mytimes
I’ve done the job for 35 years at a mid-sized newspaper and I’d say Southern Beale has it right. Write your stories, fast, post your stories to the website, fast, blog some factoids on the website to pump up the eyeball count, fast, fill up the news budget, fast, cover something on the beat of the woman who took the last month’s buyout or went in last month’s layoff, fast. You can’t go deep fast. Different for the big guys? Apparently not.
The Moar You Know
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Put succinctly, yes.
Anything that I see on the TV or read in a newspaper is wildly at odds with my own personal reality, and no more is this apparent when I read or see coverage of events that I actually know something about, or even worse, have been part of.
For all I know, the lizard people could really be running the show, and have been since 1981. No one could prove otherwise, to my satisfaction, using only evidence gleaned from what passes for today’s media.
Karen S.
@Southern Beale:
I’m not a religious person, but I say amen to this. I was never paid very well as a newspaper reporter, but I loved my job until management decided that we could put out just as good of a paper with fewer reporters and fewer copy editors plus more info boxes, charts, graphics and lists. More “quick hits” of information became the mandate. It sucked. I left.
D. Aristophanes
I work at a major tech publication that has moved its editorial assets almost entirely online and away from print since I’ve been there.
Here’s the thing — in the online world, page impressions rule the day. That’s what our sales force sells on. That means we are under extraordinary pressure each day to write stories that are hot on the aggregators (esp. Google News) and in bulk.
That actively discourages enterprise reporting. If you have to write 3-5 stories a day, you cannot spend the requisite time doing real reporting on any of them. Instead, you repackage press releases and have a few go-to sources that you can get a quote from in a couple of minutes.
It’s a mug’s game. In my world, the tech vendors can actively manipulate how stories they want covered get covered, to a much greater degree than before. They do this by timing news releases so that all the major tech pubs have to rush to report them ASAP to hit a Google News cluster, with the smaller players following along.
It’s disgusting. We still do some major projects for prints that are good and once in a while, it’s possible to find the time and the get-up-and-go to really chase a good story, wrestle it to the ground and break real news.
But it’s literally getting harder to do that by the day.
slag
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
On a foundational level, yes. Very much so. For instance, if I have a specific question about an issue being discussed or want to know all the pros and cons of a particular solution to an issue, I often do have a hard time finding that information. There’s no single trustworthy source I can find that serves the majority of my needs.
For instance, like DougJ, I find Ezra Klein’s reporting very useful in many arenas. But when he interviews Bob Corker and Bob Corker says that FinReg has changed since he worked on it and now it doesn’t do what it once did, I want to know if and how that’s really true. But I don’t know if and how that’s true if there’s no followup to that question (which there often isn’t). So I’m left with this vague idea of what’s going on without actually knowing what’s going on.
In the end, I want specifics and details of an issue but instead usually have to be satisfied reading two different broadly presented accounts of the same topic from two different perspectives. And that’s about as good as it gets. Which is not good enough.
liberty60
I recall reading an analysis a while back about how journalism was a blue collar, low paying job for most of history, but after WWII slowly grew into a white collar, college educated profession.
Which means that the pay scale demanded by people who possess master’s degrees from Columbia or Cornell require in turn a business model that encourages these “journalists” to jockey for plum positions of power and patronage from the very government officials they report on, in hopes of parlaying this into a book deal, or on-camera network position where they can sit in director’s chairs wearing sunglasses displaying their Clark Gable appearance while schoozing with A-list
celebritiespolicy-makers.CalD
I actually think it’s cultural. Our press and our politics are a reflection of ourselves and as long as people keep buying substandard products, there’s little incentive for anyone to go to the trouble and expense of creating better ones. Cable “news” shouting matches are cheap to produce. Investigative reporting and research cost money. As long as otherwise intelligent people keep watching CNN and MSNBC and linking to the fucking Politico, expect more of the same.
vtr
Quick questions: Are newspapers in Europe – the quality ones – having the same financial problems that U. S. papers are? If not, why not?
slag
@Southern Beale: Your account actually corresponds pretty well to the findings of a lot of motivational research. It’s been clear for some time now that money, in and of itself, is not a good motivator for people doing complex work. The paradox of the way we rationalize ridiculously high CEO pay in this country is that almost any good CEO will tell you that money is not a motivator. It’s often not a good motivator for innovation either. Dan Pink’s Drive offers a helpful pop discussion of motivational research with regard to this issue. In short, it illustrates why, on a broad swath of issues, libertarians are morons (not explicitly, of course, but it’s pretty clear).
Also, Dan Pink’s TED talk on motivation: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html. Again, this information is nothing new. But still we, as a society, haven’t changed our incentive structure to match what actually motivates people. Which is a big problem.
D. Aristophanes
@CalD:
Investigative reporting and research do cost money. And there are not a lot of media orgs today that are willing to hear a reporter say she spent the day looking into a story but came up with bupkus because there was no there, there. Yet that is exactly what’s needed to produce actually good stories.
There is no margin for error for most reporters — error in the sense of not getting something or several things published in a given day — which means that few reporters can spend their time doing anything but regurgitating easy stories to please sales with the page impressions they’ve sold to the advertisers.
This is a peril of the hyper-competitive media landscape. It’s far more cost-effective to churn out lots of consistent crap than to sink dollars into enterprise reporting and studious research that will only pay off sometimes and irregularly.
And with the rise of the news aggregators, breaking a story doesn’t even guarantee much more than professional respect from fellow journos. If your page rank is lower than the WSJ’s, then as soon as they jump on the story you broke, their version will drive yours into obscurity and be the one viewed by the most people.
A mug’s game. The whole system is broke.
daverave
Anymore… it’s the new Also. Too.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@slag:
I think this is as good as it gets. If you are aware that you can’t trust any single source, and that collating disparate info sources is going to be hard work, is going to take a lot of time, and has to be done from more or less from scratch on any given topic, you’ve gotten as close to nirvana as is practical in today’s world. Insofar as we live in the age of data, epistemology is queen of the sciences now.
The unpleasant reality is that there are no shortcuts. We can lay down in the Slough of Despond, or we can keep on trudging through, but we can’t go back to the sort of innocence we used to have when it comes to consuming information.
Walter Cronkite was the kindly old man behind the curtain pulling the levers that made Oz work, but he’s already departed in his hot air balloon leaving us behind. We may wish could have a set of magical ruby slippers and all we’d have to do is click them three times and just go back home to that sepia-toned era when we could pick out a few trusted journalistic sources and rely on them, but this isn’t Kansas anymore, and there’s no way to get back, and when I look down at my own feet now all I see is a muddy set of hiking boots – and a bunch of folks over to the right of me who keep clicking their jackboots together with their eyes closed chanting “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home“, but they don’t seem to be going away for some reason.
slag
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
It would never occur to me to imply that we ever had the sort of innocence you are suggesting. But with more information comes the need for more filtering. And as fun as it is to wax moralistically about epistemology and how we all just have to pull ourselves by our bootstraps while trudging the mines of Google for hours and hours to find out what’s going on in the world, it’s hardly a practical solution. You do realize that Americans aren’t exactly flush with leisure time these days?
Also, FYWM (Fuck You Wal Mart).
roshan
Anyone who got into the journalism biz (mainly the beat version) thinking that they are going to earn big bucks is really stupid. I don’t mean to say that journalism is not worthwhile (it absolutely is) and beat reporters shouldn’t be paid better at all. What kid grows up to be a journalist? Mainly ones who think that they need to expose systemic corruption and better the system for general populace by carrying out hard hitting investigative reports. The ones who complain that there is not enough money in reporting probably already knew that and still got into it. Maybe they were hoping to become the lapdogs that they are right now.
NobodySpecial
As long as Westinghouse, GE, and Disney own the networks, progressives will not get a fair shake on TV.
As long as 70 percent of newspaper circulation is controlled by less than two dozen groups, progressives will not get a fair shake in the paper.
As long as terrestrial radio remains nearly completely in the hands of Clear Channel, progressives will not get a fair shake on the radio.
That’s why we have a bad press – because the folks who own the media hate the idea of a fair press where they have to give progressives/liberals a fair hearing.
D. Aristophanes
@roshan:
Well, it’s also possible that you could be a 20-something who goes into journalism to expose crooks, etc. with the knowledge that it probably won’t pay well. But it’s also possible that:
1. If you came into the profession around the dot-com boom, the pay scales were wildly skewed high for a brief time and you might have been fooled into thinking it would be possible to practice great journalism and get paid pretty well to do it.
2. Now you find yourself in your 30s or 40s with a family or whatever that requires you to make more pay, but now all you have on your resume is reporting/editing jobs … so you’re stuck trying to do whatever it takes to get the bills paid, which can mean corporate shill journalism.
IMHO, there are lame individuals within the current media circus, but it’s the circus itself that really is the problem. And I don’t see a lot of ways to change it, other than plugging away with alternative media where you can (I blog so I can live with myself for what I do in my paid job) and hope you can eventually make a living out of doing what you really want to do.
Cain
@Tom Johnson:
That makes me sadder than you’ll ever know.
cain
steve
dougj could write a post about the westminster dog show and he’d tag it ‘good news for conservatives’.
because he’s a fucking moron.
Cain
@slag:
I don’t know about local newspapers, but I posted this some time back regarding opencongress.org. I found it very informative and very easy regarding what all my congressman have been doing, motivations, and I can read the damn bill if I want to. Plus a collage of blog entries, newspaper for that bill with an easy interface. I am very impressed.
cain
Cain
@slag:
Well, look at open source.. there is no money driving that either. But I will tell you what is awesome about it. Building something new, getting the prestige, and the glory of having done it and basking in its success as you nurture a community around it. Hard to do, but very addicting.
In my own personal life, I find that I prefer getting enough money to not stress over little things, but teh big things struggle a little, save, whatever to get it. It makes what you want that much more valuable. If I want a gigantic tv, then I should save a couple of years, and get it. If anything it builds character and value for the things you buy. Used to be an american value if I recall.
cain
slag
@Cain: That is a good source! I’ve been there from time-to-time for various reasons but never spent much time there until you mention it. It definitely has a lot of value. But I wish it would add more contextualizing information. Context is one of the big things I look for when trying to catch up on an issue. For instance, when I go looking at the Clean Estuaries Act of 2010, my first thought is: what problem is this bill trying to solve? And then I see:
and think: OK. I understand all those words. And I even understand how they’re fitting together in that sentence. But I still don’t understand, in any meaningfully nuanced fashion, exactly what problem this bill is trying solve.
If their Wiki Summaries were complete, however, I think they would include more contextual information that would help me with that question. It’s a good start though. And thanks for recommending it!
roshan
@D. Aristophanes: #57
From my POV whenever I think of journalists, I think of something like the Watergate reporting done in the 70s or someone like Glenn Greenwald. Journalism has never been a profession where you earn big bucks (I am talking about the news paper kind of journalism) except if you sit in the editors seat or on the management board. One way to earn big bucks is to really sell out and get the Koch foundation to sponsor you. Most of the folks in the media business have done an exceptional job of selling out. The ones left who complain about there being no money in it and have families to support have really made a bad choice of being in this biz (everyone makes a mistake, no issues with that). My main issue with journalism is the corporate control which won’t allow deep investigative reports done by anyone (even the underpaid staff) to reach the front page or any page for that matter.
slag
@Cain: Indeed. Open source is a good example. I think Pink addresses that in his argument. It’s a good one, too.
And I hear you on the money issue. There is such a thing as too little. But if money makes someone perform their complex job better, they are the exception rather than the rule. And no one’s ever going to cure cancer for the money. It’s just not going to happen.
Norwegian Shooter
Hey, buddy, come on. First, it’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. And he’s not “morally bankrupt”. His beat is morally bankrupt, as are plenty of his sources and topics. But he’s not that bad. His book is pretty good.
binzinerator
Free Market, bitchez!
Elizabeth J. Hinds
Reporters emphasize government transgressions (especially on TV: “The Fleecing of America” or “It’s Your Money”) instead of equally reporting on corporate transgressions. Why? My guess is that it’s partly unconscious bias, and partly because government is at least partially transparent, whereas corporations are by definition private, and very secretive. So the public gets mad at government, having been misled as to the source of many of our problems.
D. Aristophanes
@roshan:
Tell me about it! Anyway, I’m not so sure I think of ‘journalism’ when I think of Greenwald, much as I admire him. Certainly not investigative journalism of the sort we are bemoaning the lack of here. He’s a treasure, but he’s not out pounding the pavement.
Island in Alabama
@The Moar You Know:
I cannot remember a time during my adult life when this hasn’t been the case. I’m truly thankful for the Internet, and for those who use it to spread the truth.
mclaren
@JimBob:
Craigslist and the availability of info for free on the net has destroyed the revenue model for newspapers. Without the classified ad money, newspapers are collapsing left and right. And newspapers aren’t alone — magazines are going the same route, with book publishers close behind.
The definitive article remains Clay Shirky’s Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up.
If we want investigative reporting it’s going to have to be either crowdsourced or funded by the government. Since America has degenerated into a petrokleptocracy with giant monopoly corporations largely controlling government, it’s not likely that the U.S. government would fund investigative reporting that might reveal poison in our food, &c.
david Hatch
I can imagine a journalist taking pride in his/her profession regardless of extra compensation. What a cynical response. In Kornblutt’s defense, she has rather pretty legs.
Doug
What Brad is talking about are incidents like this one, when the New York Times published a story about the end of World War II in Europe, without even once mentioning the Eastern Front.
It’s like writing about moon shots without mentioning the Saturn V, like writing about Elizabethan drama and spending all your time on Marlowe without ever saying, oh yeah there was also this guy from Stratford. It’s really, really basic stuff that not only should any person whose profession is writing for the public know, but any editor along the chain should also know.
It’s not a matter of calling 10 people rather than five; it’s a matter of getting the basics right.