How bad is modern American Journalism? It's so bad that the burning question of the day on the intertubes and elsewhere revolves around whether or not they are even necessary in order for a candidate to run a successful political campaign. They are so bad that the Beltway Media (BM) itself is reporting and discussing whether or not they should have any influence! I am not making that up. Imagine a world where you are so awful you feel compelled to have roundtables discussing your own lack of relevance. This is plowing new ground in inanity.
The issue falls into the arena of consumer expectations about journalism and whether or not those expectations are being met. The once revered Fourth Estate, as celebrated by Edmund Burke, has devolved to a debased and derided community based in the shabby run-down town known as No There There (NoTT)
We have been brought to NoTT through a steady diet of non-substantive reporting in venues once known as responsible news outlets. There has been a turn from a tradition of hard fact based news coverage to a flabbier, softer form of innuendo and gossip commentary that is the new industry substitute. What the industry apparently doesn’t realize is that we can tittle-tattle and rumor monger and get things wrong quite competently among ourselves without their help. They used to be the remedy to our inadequacies. In a complete up-ending of that old tradition, the press are now the ones who seem to be getting a lot of things wrong or addicted to peddling half-truths and we have to confer within our ranks to correct and verify THEM. Far from being the “last word” on any given topic , they are becoming the “least word”.
Let’s grasp the nettle and address the current Hillary Clinton situation and how her current “scandals” have been addressed by the BM. There are many stories about many potential scandals. And that’s the problem. They are all potential scandals. We are reading a lot of stories where the major thrust of the article is "hmm. . . this is interesting and potentially awful" and that's where they stop. The by-liners are writing the introductory paragraphs to a story or a report but that's it. Because they don't have the rest of the story. They went to press too soon. If they were bakeries they would be closed for trying to sell half-baked loafs filled with lots of unhealthy additives.
For historical context, let’s all imagine Woodward and Bernstein writing an article about a break-in at the DNC where the major thrust of the article is "some speculate that the break-in might be the signs of something more sinister going on in the Nixon White House" and leaving it at that. But W&B didn’t do that, did they? They delivered the product that Americans used to get as a steady diet – real investigative journalism.
Compare that to today's product. Authentic journalism requires legwork and tedium and verification and multiple sources and the underlying intelligence and skills to then fit all the pieces together in a coherent way that readers will "get". It's hard work. It takes time and money. It also takes the rarest of ingredients – integrity and courage assisted by the will and persistence to pursue the truth no matter where it leads or who it touches.
Are we ever going to get to that level of reporting, again, ever? It strikes me that most of the journalism that we get today involves media types passing around intriguing morsels among themselves but almost no one wants to do the actual work required to crack open any potential, actual story. I picture them all sitting at the bar after work saying to each other - "you do it" "no, you do it" "I did it last time" "you've never done it", etc. What we are getting as consumers of the BM for the most part are snippets of something, but no one could ever mistake the snippets for a well-written and researched story that takes a reader from A-Z and fills in all the steps in between.
Real journalism is powerful. Real journalism can change society. Real journalism is the pre-eminent change agent. Real journalism occupies a legitimate place as the Fourth Estate, the essential role that monitors, criticizes and reveals the machinations of government to the governed.
Daily Kos and bloggers and social media occupy the real estate known as the Fifth Estate, another valuable piece of the puzzle. While the Fifth Estate has value, IMO it can never become a permanent adequate substitute for a fully functioning Fourth Estate; we tend to be factionalized and partisan for the most part. We preach to our own choirs. We like to dominate and control the discussions and obfuscate or escalate as necessary to promote our goals. Just like the Puritans, we dislike deviation from dogma and we are big on shunning, banning and shaming.
What happens when the Fourth Estate works as it’s supposed to? We’ll have to go back to Watergate to find an instance when all sparkplugs fired and the engines and cogs of governance and the governed synced and worked together as they were designed to. As a result of the comprehensive reporting and follow-up of a third-rate burglary, fueled by public outrage, the Watergate hearings were convened and Congress investigated and exorcised a cancer that had taken root within the Presidency that was an actual threat to our Democracy.
"Threat to our Democracy". That sounds so hyperbolic now, doesn't it? What is amazing is that no one considered it hyperbolic back then. Both parties and the American public were scandalized and outraged enough that the end result of two reporters nosing around was a President flying away from the White House in a helicopter to the modern substitute for the island of Elba. Yeah, that happened. I am thankful that I was alive to experience it.
A nation-killing side effect of the lazy I-Can't-Believe-Its-Not-Journalism diet we have all been consuming of late is that it has made us terminally jaded and incapable of sorting real scandal from manufactured scandal. Everything is an outrage and we’re either all outraged all the time or our indignation reservoirs have been pumped dry. Many people are so disgusted by the spectacles offered up to them daily that they have simply retreated from it all and decline to participate.
Meanwhile ongoing civic cataclysms such as Citizens United, actions that un-hyperbolically “threaten our Democracy” are unmet and unchallenged and allowed to rain havoc down on all of us, because unlike the Seventies, we have no responsible press to pull the threads together and weave the story, no cohesive group of politicians who value country over contributions, and no populace capable of expressing collective legitimate anger and recognizing scandal when they see it.
I could have never imagined during the throes of it, that I would one day look back at Watergate in a misty -eyed nostalgic reverie as being the epitome of the “good old days”.
Okay, now let’s all check our Facebook.