In case I just failed to get the memo instructing all front-pagers to weigh in, I think it’s worth sharing the thoughts of a veteran lifer on newspaper “impartiality”:
… Newspapers today are run by terrified beancounters. The industry is dying. They know it. They are casting about for any strategy to delay the inevitable and, personally, they are casting about for any parachute they can find. The beancounters owe their primary allegiance to “the company,” and not to the reporter in the field. The beancounter editors and sub-editors at many — if not most — major newspapers and broadcast outlets would sell their grandmothers to the Somali pirates for a bigger office and two steps further up the masthead, which will get them closer to where the parachutes are kept. Most newspapers — most especially, the New York Times — have forced upon their reporters what are called “ethics codes,” but which, in reality, are speech codes written to prevent the beancounters and careerists from having to answer angry phone calls from wingnuts. I am not kidding — under some of these abominations, a reporter literally could be disciplined for spouting off about, say, Willard Romney in a bar, if someone heard the reporter, and called the beancounter to complain. The campaign buses are filled now with young reporters who know full well that, given sufficient pressure from either inside or outside “the company,” their bosses do not have their backs…
__
… Should reporters in the field point out that Willard Romney is lying his ass off every time he says that the president has been “apologizing” for America? The answer is obvious. Of course, they should. The bigger question is to ask, when the Romney campaign calls some Sulzberger and bitches about “bias,” what are the consequences for the reporter, and what will the Public Editor’s reaction be?
Much more, of course, at the link.
srv
Defacto regulatory capture of the fourth estate. Which means Dowd and Noonan will always be employed because they protect the bacon.
Arclite
You know, the more I read Charlie Pierce, the more happy I am that he exists in this world.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: What is wrong with bacon? I like bacon. Real American bacon. The other stuff is tasty, but it ain’t bacon.
Jc
Ah – well, this answers my question in another thread then, thanks.
You – metaphorically – get a hand chopped off for doing your job, and if you do your job, every possibility exists u are out on your ass if there is complaint.
So, “the view from nowhere”, false balance, and entertainment (capturing eyeballs) are the only things that become safe to write.
Given that, given that 4 corporations “own” 90 percent of media companies – its not a shock is it, that news continues to fail?
Holden Pattern
This is something that most lefties don’t seem to understand. The money deck is stacked so that wingnuts complaining gets people fired, while lefties (even nominal lefties) complaining gets (a) ridicule or (b) people promoted.
Unless the left can bring comparable power to bear to destroy careers, this will be the case for the foreseeable future in the corporate media.
Linda Featheringill
@Jc:
A nice case of material determination.
I suspect that you are spot on with your analysis. Reporters are afraid of losing their jobs.
What does an ex-journalist do?
Mark S.
American business in a nutshell.
moops
…and this is where I finally step into this particular discussion. Charlie hits it pretty dead on. The reporter might fully know it is crap, but the Editor won’t print any more than “he said” stenography.
Now, the herd reporting issue is also real, just ask McCain, or Bush Jr. There is also the access problem. If you actually rat out a politician he can just stop talking to you. This trick works if the paper is willing to keep sending new reporters. If the Editor keeps the reporter on that beat, then the politician loses. But that is not the main failing. the NYT would be worth paying for if it did actual journalism.
MikeJ
Of course the problem is that the Times believes that if they’re to the right of Fox then Republicans and Democrats alike will like them. Republicans will never like the Times. Ever.
There is no actual downside for the Times to tell the truth, yet they still won’t do it. That being the case, you have to doubt their commitment to the truth.
Redshift
@Holden Pattern:
But there’s still an asymmetry there, like the asymmetry in freedom of action between people who don’t care about governing (only power) and those who do. The left would want reporters fired for failing to report the truth, and wingnuts want reporters fired for saying anything bad about “their” side. And these are very different types of demand.
amk
An impotent fourth estate full of fifth columnists is the price that an ignorant nation pays for unmitigated capitalism and voyeurism.
gaz
Pierce is fantastic. Why isn’t he universally syndicated? Oh wait. Pierce is fantastic.
=(
burnspbesq
If Molly Ivins were still alive, no one would bother with Pierce. He’s a very imperfect substitute.
In addition, the “newspapers are dying” meme has been popular for years, but so far there is no economically viable answer to the question “what comes after.” So they will limp along for quite some time. Inertia is a powerful force.
wilfred
Again, the NYT was instrumental in lying us into a catastrophic war that…
Oh what’s the fucking point. The fact that it continued to thrive after lying about Iraq and continues to do so about Iran is nothing compared to not calling Romney a liar.
People truly deserve the country they get.
chauncey1186
Slightly OT, but this is always too delicious not to post every so often.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMnjF1O4eH0
For the NASCAR set – you’re most welcome – and I hope you f**in choke on your twang when you realize your anthem was written by two gay dudes.
Yeah, it’s called kharma baby, and yeah, she’s a b2llbreaker too!
burnspbesq
@wilfred:
In what respect? Specifics and evidence please, or get off the court and let the varsity play.
burnspbesq
@Redshift:
Which begs a somewhat important question: who gets to decide what’s true?
wilfred
@burnspbesq:
Happily. In fact, it was none other than Arthur Brisbane who stepped in:
“I think the readers are correct on this. The Times hasn’t corrected the story but it should because this is a case of when a shorthand phrase doesn’t do justice to a nuanced set of facts. In this case, the distinction between the two is important because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli.Indeed, when discussing war and peace, the stakes are high, and sloppy news coverage can, as we saw with Iraq, help push a nation to war. Brisbane is right to recognize this.”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/01/10/401758/nyt-public-editor-iaea-iran-nuke-program/?mobile=nc
Now you can go back to sniffing jockstraps.
The Other Chuck
@burnspbesq:
I don’t need an arbiter of the truth. I just need, when Romney says “Obama apologizes for America” or when the teabaggers started screeching about death panels, for a reporter to have the temerity to FOLLOW THE FUCK UP and press for specifics. You know, ask actual questions that have the effect of revealing whether someone is a lying sack of shit or not.
moops
I’d be happy is reporters even managed a follow-up question. Journalism 101. Who, what, where, when, how, etc.
When a newsmaker says something grand, ask them to elaborate. You can still be an innocent lickspittle job-saving Boy-on-the-Bus if you do it right.
“Wow, that’s amazing! please go on, what speech are you referring to ?”
If he says “that’s your job”, then you have permission to go look it up. You can specifically cite where the candidate asked you to look up the details of this event.
If the candidate keeps feeding out an amazing tale, great! more copy, keep going sir! When did this happen ? Our traitor President you say, what a story you have given me, Where was this all said ?
I could be a journalist just landed from Mars and still draw out a fantastic claim by just using a skill I should have acquired in undergrad journalism.
AnotherBruce
@Jc: “The view from nowhere.”
I’ve never heard a better description of corporate media news coverage. I’d like to steal that.
MikeJ
@The Other Chuck:
Sarah Palin asked more follow ups than she was asked.
In what way, Charlie?
AnotherBruce
@burnspbesq: Oh stop it for crap’s sake, why even compare Molly Ivins and Charles Pierce? They’re both brilliant, but in different ways. Pierce is a substitute for nobody, and neither was Molly.
kwAwk
@chauncey1186:
As a NASCAR fan I’m sorry to have to break it to you that that song was written by Brian May who has been married twice and has three kids.
Just because you’re friends with a gay guy doesn’t make you gay.
Original Lee
This won’t fit in a single sentence of a story fisking Romney’s current memes. I wonder if the Times navel-gazing about fact-checking is at least in part because some of the best fisking is in video format.
AnotherBruce
So there’s a Ron Paul ad up at the top asking me to cast a “digital ballot”. I would do it if they would let me cast a “digit ballot”.
kuvasz
murakami
From TimesPublicEdit:
Arundel
@burnspbesq: Are you joking, or just being a jerk? Molly Ivins is forever fantastic and greatly missed, but here in January 2012 Charlie Pierce is also swinging a mighty bat, knocking it out of the park incredibly often. I think Molly would like pierce an awful lot, it’s dumb to compare them, because we have to live in the here and the now, today. That’s what proper journalism is, it is about the now, and Pierce excels at talking about now, today.
Which brings me to: there’s a hilarious symmetry between columns Krugman and Brooks just put up. K-Thug persuasively makes the case that the US is not and should never be run as a corporation, a business entity. While simultaneously Brooks runs a thing about the glory of CEOs, weeping tears for poor Romney, applauding his “success” at Bain Capital, and lamenting the vicious “assault” the poor guy is under. But that’s just at the end; Brooks fills his column with blather about leadership and presidents and aristos and.. I’d swear, you’ll be dumber after reading it than when you started. Team Krughammer here, it’s kind of entertaining how his vexation with morons like Brooks on the same page are sort of coming through, with good reason. Why David Brooks has multiple jobs talking shit and lecturing the rest of us peons about morals and sacrifice is an utter fucking mystery. He is such an obsequious jackanape, such a milquetoast fraud. But he’s in my paper, on my TV and radio, exorbitantly paid to spout utter bullshit. No doubt a few right-wing “fellowships” to keep him rolling in dough while he tsk-tsks our sloppy 60’s lack of morals and poor work ethic. A rotten fucker I’d love to see first in the tumbrils, honestly.
gaz
@burnspbesq: Shorter you:
Get off of my lawn!
MaxxLange
@“The view from nowhere.”:
“The View From Nowhere” is the name of a famous book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, of “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” fame. Nagel seems like a guy with a nice touch for a memorable line.
And, as said above: is it too much to ask Romney for ONE example of Obama “apologizing for America”?
amk
@Arundel: Now tell us how you really feel about bobo.
Catsy
@burnspbesq:
No, it raises that question. You’d think an attorney would have some grasp of what begging the question actually is.
This isn’t exactly difficult, you know. It doesn’t require a reporter or editor to read Mitt Romney’s mind, call Michele Bachmann crazy or infer Santorum’s motives for being a douchenozzle. We can start by mustering up some respect for the existence of readily verifiable facts.
Romney says that Barack Obama went around the world apologizing for America. Is that true? It’s a straightforward question of fact. If only there were a tool one could use to find out.
Romney says that he created X jobs. It’s a verifiable numerical claim. Is is true? I don’t know; perhaps I could look it up!
Republicans claim that voter fraud is a serious problem. How serious? Very serious. Well, if it’s that serious, surely there are some statistics one can cite about how often it happens and how many people have been prosecuted for it. Surely? Maybe you could ask the Republicans to show their work?
I mean, this is not fucking rocket science. I get that there are areas of nuance and that not all disputes have a black-and-white answer as to who’s right and wrong. But most of the right’s lies are trivial to debunk with a minimum of effort spent in the Congressional Record or the paper’s own goddamn archives.
MikeJ
@Catsy: Regarding your third example, that one is easily weaselable. All you have to say is, yes, voter fraud is rare (as far as we know) but the consequences of allowing any one to illegally vote on how to run the greatest country in the world are too dire to allow even a small risk. We put all sorts of redundant safeguards on nuclear power plants. A problem with any one of the safeguards would be rare but is too important so blah blah blah.
Now I think that argument is wrong in that disenfranchisement happens far, far more often than voter impersonation fraud, but the claim that it is a “serious problem” can’t be called a black and white fact.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Catsy:
Heh. That was an enormous target.
Arundel
I finally went to read the comments at the NYT, Brisbane’s stupid post about whether they should cover and excuse utter liars or not, and his follow-up declaring they were all too stupid to understand him.
And the commenters overwhelmingly handed him his ass, smartly, articulately and in full sentences before they shut comments down. I sort of find it encouraging that yeah, you had to ask whether you should give a pass to lying fucks and propagandists? Like, has that been so normalized you feel free to ask such a thing, you jaded media fuckhead?
The comments were damned encouraging, because wow, I think we’re all at saturation point with the pervasive extent of bullshit, all the time, from every media channel. Where vicious lies are whitewashed into “opinions differ”. The strong response- well it shows a great many people heartily sick of it, that Fox News is treated as legitamate and not lying propaganda around the clock.
Freedom of the Press is something actually in the Constitution, the one profession that’s honored and protected and enshrined as fundamental to liberty and truth, fundamental to a nation’s well-being. Seeing all these fucking lying whores who are all for sale , persuadable if the price is right, is a detestable thing. We really are slipping into a banana republic where the NYT public editor is so oblivious, asking this in the first place and defensively telling the peasants they are to stupid to understand. No, they fully understood, we understand, we’re just sick of your being courtesan to venal, malevolent liars out for money and power. What don’t YOU understand, Brisbane? You should be fired. Go lie for Romney or Clarence T freelance, you dickhead.
Yutsano
Maybe the BBC is on to something…
Amir Khalid
I’ve finally figured what bugs me about Mitt’s “I like firing people” crack re insurance companies. (Yes, I know I’m slow on the uptake. Bear with me.) It ignores the great difference between an employer-employee relationship and a customer-business relationship — specifically, in the balance of economic power.
A business has (generally speaking) many customers. When a customer is dissatisfied with a company, he stops doing business with it. The business is not cut off from a sole source of income.
An employee has but one employer (per job). When an employer is dissatisfied with the employee, the employer fires him. The former employee is now cut off from a sole source of income.
Mitt was, of course, insensitive to say “I like firing people” at a time when jobs are hard to come by. But when a politician suggests, as he does, that it’s anywhere near as great a blow for a health-insurance company to lose one customer as for an employee to lose one job, it shows how great his disconnection is from ordinary people.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
You may be “slow on the uptake,” but that analysis was worth the wait. Spot on.
scav
Arthur Brisbane’s very interesting day has made the Guardian too. The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance
Brisbane’s question on reporters’ duty to challenge misleading political speech has permanently altered readers’ expectations
trnc
Brisbane wasn’t asking a question. He was providing cover for his company’s laziness. If he actually cared about the answer, his response to the comments would have been, “OK, I get it. We’ll press more on claims and verify them rather than just printing the claim.” Also, in the closest thing I can find to a mission statement by the NY Times Co, I think “high quality news and information” implies at least nominal fact checking for any story.
“The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading global multimedia media news and information company with 2010 revenues of $2.4 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, NYTimes.com , BostonGlobe.com , Boston.com , About.com and related properties. The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”
amk
sully pissing and moaning over newt’s bain-pain killer ads on robney willard. His take ? It’s the fucking optics that sucks and willard sucks at managing the optics of it all. People lost jobs? So what ? That’s just fucking free market, dood.
Fuck all of cole’s heroes like gg, sully and other pos.
PeakVT
@wilfred: Thank you.
Valdivia
@amk: I am not defending Sully but I actually read that a little differently.
He thinks the ad is brutal and even if there are things that were exaggerated in it, he thinks Romney won’t be able to rebut it. And that he is the wrong person to be running in this economy. It’s not about the optics, I think his argument is that it’s the greed that fueled the work, which is deeper than optics.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@burnspbesq:
Actually, inertia is resistance to force.
Ejoiner
Oddly enough this sounds exactly like what me and my fellow teaching buddies say about our school/district administrations (vis-a-vis parents and higher level adminstrators) all the damn time. No one has the teacher’s back it’s always a matter of sucking up to crazy parents and bean-counting district/state bureaucrats. It’s crazy how much crap we crank out on paper to keep the school system running and how little actual teaching we get to do. Very similiar. Very sad.
Joey Maloney
@kwAwk:
…AND, who went on to earn a doctorate in astrophysics at the age of sixtyish. Which I find inspiring and incredibly cool.
Tony J
@Joey Maloney:
Yes, but… the hair. He and his wife have the same hair!
BO_Bill
Oh goodie. So it can now be revealed to us who pays Cole?
Mino
@scav: Ouch. Talk about shooting yourself in the head. Though a good joke, it’s not like readers weren’t telling the Times, “I see what you do.”
hildebrand
All of this has me thinking of Hunter Thompson.
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
“There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it “vengeful” and “primitive” and “perverse” regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. “That kind of stuff is opinion,” they say, “and the reader is cheated if it’s not labelled as opinion.” Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal “objective journalism.” Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called “advocacy journalism,” I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.”
“So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
Ben Cisco
Jonathan Capeheart is ready to try an intervention with the Obama-Clinton ticket proponents.
__
Of course, since the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem in the first place, I suspect the patient isn’t ready to hear it yet.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
The WH reporter I know described this exactly this way several years back. I was giving him/her shit about the usual stenographer, “why don’t you push back more”, lefty “we think you suck” attitude of the Village Press Corpse. In response I got pretty much what Charlie said.
It’s one reason why what WH reporters “get” out of any given administration’s press arm is quite different than what we *think* they should get.
Quite sad all around.
Danny
And there you have it. The nuts are winning their biased reporting by being able to exert superior pressure on the media. Being good little soldiers works. That’s always been the reason why any notion of presidential bully pulpits making things happen by magic was always a simplistic fairy tale: they work so much better when you have an army of mad as hell people willing to phone, bitch and make a big stink. OWS should start channeling some of the outrage and energy of their supporters into these kinds of activities – they work.
Kilkee
Shoerter Brisbane: the difficult question is, should our reporters be journalists or stenographers? This is not quite as simple as the public might assume….
We are screwed.
Southern Beale
Yeah maybe but really, I kinda think it’s always been this way. Check out this item of media criticism going back to the Nixon campaign. I read old newspapers and it’s a little disheartening to discover people have been lodging the same complaints for decades.
I happen to think it’s gotten worse, but the problem is the same. The good news is, we have alternatives now that didn’t exist in 1972. I’m listening to the BBC World Service on satellite radio. People here are all reading a blog. We have other ways of getting our news that don’t depend on the same gatekeepers and that’s why they’re flailing about like decapitated chickens.
WereBear
@Danny: Our problem with Outrage Generation is that it is not our default.
I’m convinced that with wingnuts, it is. They will turn red and start screeching over very little.
Danny
@WereBear:
Fair enough, so maybe we’re better than that. But what if our default is instead to bitch at “our” presidents and expect them to manifest our outrage for us – does that still make us better? And does it make us more successful at achieving our objectives? (Please indulge me while JAQing off)
Judas Escargot
OT, but this is the only open thread right now and it looks like I’m stuck in a lab again all day…
Tim Tebow may have Jeebus on his side, but Tom Brady apparently has some Salem witches on his.
Heh.
different-church-lady
How about going back to printing things with depth and worth reading?
Blog cheerleaders, info-utopists and dead-tree haters, please take note.
Wee Bey
@burnspbesq:
WTF? Yes, and everyone since has been an imperfect substitute for Mark Twain.
Oh, and in no particular order, begging the question is a logical fallacy not at all related to what you asked, inertia isn’t really a force at all and the reason newspapers are still around is because small- and medium-sized newspapers are still profitable. People who don’t know any better conflate things that aren’t related all the time — in this case the rise of internet news alongside massive newspaper consolidation and accrual of debt during two severe recessions.
Thinking, how does it fucking work?
different-church-lady
Twain? Piff — couldn’t hold a candle to Jonathan Swift.
Geeno
@Comrade Scrutinizer: While the former physics major in me likes this correction, I think you’re picking nits here.
Donut
Ugh, that Pierce post is depressing. I cannot fathom why any young journo school grad would want to take a job in a place where you know going in that the industry is twirling the bowl and the rules of the game are so fucked up. I mean, duh, in most work places, the boss doesn’t have most of the employees’ backs, that’s kind of a given if you’ve had, say, more than two jobs in your life. But Jebus, why the hell would you want to get a straight reporting job at the WaPo, NYT, or Time or Newsweek, or even any of the bigger dailies that have DC bureaus still…?
Tmill
Money Talks??? I’m SHOCKED, SHOCKED!!! 11