NEWS, GOOD AND BAD
GlennReynolds.com
May 18, 2004
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A lot of people complain that the media report nothing but bad news. That's not quite true, but it does seem that the bad stories get more attention than the good. And that often leads to considerable distortion.<font size=3> I remember a few years ago when a rather mild hurricane struck New Orleans. All the news channels showed a tree that had fallen across a major intersection. It was the same tree on every channel, and a friend in New Orleans reported that it was pretty much the only tree to fall in the city. But the news stories made it an emblem.
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It's important, of course, for bad news to get reported -- because you have to know about problems to fix them. But good news is important too, because it shapes our view of the world, and a view of the world that's based only on bad news is sure to be distorted.<font size=3> That's led the crew at The Speculist to start running a regular feature collecting good news on all sorts of topics because they think that the mainstream media don't pay enough attention to the subject. Looking at the grateful reactions in their comment section -- and at the declining viewership and readership of most news outlets -- I think they're onto something.
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When challenged on this, members of the press tend to get defensive.
You want us to only report happy-face fluff? they respond.
Well, no. Just actual news.
The New Orleans example is a good one -- the downed tree wasn't the real news. The real news was that the hurricane hadn't been that bad. But they wanted arresting imagery, even if it gave a false impression. When you play that game -- and we all know that they do -- you're not in a position to get on your truth-teller's high horse.
If the news media are negative in general, though, they've been especially negative in covering the war. Lately, even news media people have been complaining about coverage from Iraq again. John O'Sullivan writes in the Chicago Sun-Times that the willingness of press in America and Britain to run with fake abuse photos from Iraq is revealing:<font size=3>
Neither the media's vaunted "skepticism" nor simple fact-checking on the Internet were employed by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too good to check." As Mark Steyn argued Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe they were real. Indeed, it is worse than that -- since the fraud was discovered and the Mirror editor fired, he has become a heroic figure in British circles hostile to Blair and the war.
Admittedly, reporters and editors make mistakes. But when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the United States or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something.
Namely, which side they're on.
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And it's not the side of the truth, whatever they claim. Likewise, Abe Rosenthal, formerly of the New York Times, observes:<font size=3>
Since the latest torture story, many editors have failed to present background stories about the millions killed by Saddam.
They worry about being accused of minimizing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, if they recall in print the masses of people Saddam slaughtered.
These journalists are truly embarrassing.
And James Lileks notes:
This smothering gloom, this suppurating corrosion – this isn’t us. This isn’t who we are. If it is, well, we’re lost, because it contains such potent self-hatred that we’ll shrink from defending ourselves, because what we have built isn’t worth defending. Thanks for the push, al Qaeda! We’ll take it from here.
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You can imagine an enemy propagandist wanting to accomplish that, but it's striking to see American media working to establish such a mood on their own.
And they are. And they're responsible for it, because -- when their own politics are threatened -- they act differently. Media folks are constantly cautioning one another not to report stories about minorities that give the impression that black people tend to be disproportionately involved in crime and drugs, or that gay people are likely to be pederasts, or whatever. News organizations are exquisitely sensitive to the implications of reporting only bad news where "victim" groups are concerned.
Which means that if they can do better when they want to, then on subjects where they don't do better, they must not want to. And why not? Beats me, but I'm sure it can't reflect well on them, and I'm not surprised that more and more Americans are tuning them out. What business has ever succeeded by making its customers feel bad?
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