AT THIS POINT, IS “NEWSWEEK” REALLY JOURNALISM?
jim geraghty reporting
TKS
Seeing the way Newsweek has offered a weak apology, offered no further information about their backtracking source, and then promptly blamed everybody but themselves…
Does it still really count as a ‘news’ magazine?
I mean, for an opinion mag, doesn’t National Review or the Weekly Standard do a better job of offering a full picture of Iraq and other issues? Heck, if you don’t want a conservative example, how about the New Republic or the Atlantic?
Newsweek isn’t just skewed or biased. It pages are mostly brief and fluffy skewed and biased news nuggets. I mean, if you’re going to skew, at least give me detailed and well-written skewed news like the other magazines mentioned above.
I’ve worked a lot of places, and written for a lot of publications and newspapers with reputations and outlooks far from National Review. I think highly of a lot of people in a lot of places that aren’t perceived as “conservative” – the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, Congressional Quarterly. Reporters are like any other field – they come good, bad and indifferent.
But some of the biggest names in the industry are now in the business of confirming their own viewpoint, regardless of the facts. After a bunch of young guys were caught making stuff up — Stephen Glass at the New Republic and Jayson Blair at the New York Times – a slew of big-names have been exposed as touting, murmuring, or breathlessly reporting stories that didn’t turn out to be true or verifiable – Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and now Michael Iskoff and the editors at Newsweek.
In every one of these cases, stories that were fake, unsubstantiated, or unreliable, got through the highly-touted editing and fact-checking processes because the editors wanted them to be true. They ‘rang true’ to editors’ ears. Of course, they thought, Bush’s service record was ‘sugarcoated.’ Of course, U.S. troops would deliberately target and murder journalists whose coverage they didn’t like. Of course, U.S. interrogators would flush the Koran. You read the coverage of some corners of the media world, from the New York Times, to the American Journalism Review to the Nation to the Huffington thing and elsewhere, the reaction in the face of retraction is the argument that, “well, this story could still possibly be true – it hasn’t been disproven 110 percent.” They surmise that the retractions are the result of Bush administration pressure and vast sinister conspiracies.
Those of us who don’t espouse the mainstream media conventional wisdom have a responsibility to set a better standard. Let them sink into their echo chamber, and write for the audience that prefers to believe the disproven lie to the uncomfortable truth. This would be the same readership that audaciously calls itself the “reality-based community” and dismisses those who disagree as the easily-fooled rubes of “Jesusland”, then applauds the line, “only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
We’re writing for the audience that actually wants to know what’s going on, that doesn’t always assume that Pentagon officials are lying, that has a healthy skepticism of the word of a captured al-Qaeda terrorist, and that gives our guys in uniform the benefit of the doubt. (They’ve earned it.) When some of our guys foul up big-time, like Abu Ghraib, we want to know. But we don’t want the gruesome abuse photos hyped into endlessly displayed news porn. We know it’s a horrible sight, but it’s not quite as horrible as what we saw on an autumn Tuesday morning a few years ago.
We want to know more about Iraq than the endlessly repeated quote from the grumpy cab driver that “things were better under Saddam.” We want to know how their population is striding, bit by bit, to a genuine Arab democracy – even when it stumbles. We have faith they’ll get there eventually.
When the Schiavo memo turns out to be actually written by a Republican, we have to say, ‘Well, the Post and ABC botched it by saying it was ‘distributed by GOP leadership’, but they got a lot of key facts right, and our hunch that this was a Democratic dirty trick was off base.’ Of course some Media Matters folks will hype it. Let them.
We know what's going on. What was the one moment that things looked darkest for the Bush presidency in the last three and a half years? During the endless all-Abu-Ghraib, all-the-time abuse coverage festival from last spring. When references to the prison abuse scandal were cropping up on the Washington Post’s Sports, Arts, and Metro sections.
The Isikoff story – and the inevitable coming deluge of in-depth investigative journalism of additional tales of abuse from those utterly trustworthy al-Qaeda prisoners – are a return to the “good old days” of last spring. When Teddy Kennedy could compare the U.S. military’s handling of prisoners to Saddam’s torture chambers with a gleeful, hearty grin. When our guys on the front lines could be portrayed as sadistic, black-hearted villains. When the face of our guys wasn’t the stoic loyalty of a Pat Tillman, the pride and dedication of a Jeffrey Adams, or any other one of our heroes but the nauseating sneer of Lynndie England.
Boy, did those days feel good to the media.
Call that whatever you like. But don’t call it journalism.
nationalreview.com
cbsnews.com
nationalreview.com |
