When MSM big-shots become unglued
Rathergate.com
Speaking of the Media Research Center, its merry minions of chaos caught a hilarious exchange on Hardball Wednesday night between host Chris Matthews and CBS’ Lesley Stahl. Both lamented the blogosphere and how the new democracy of ideas is bad for Americans.
It’s funny, because it almost reads like a parody if you frequent Rathergate.com and other media bias sites. But it almost makes you want to cry in disbelief that the people who have a significant say in what you watch on the news think the way they do. In the end, though, I find solace in the fact that maybe two people are watching MSNBC at any given time.
I won’t touch on the political biases in their talk — you can visit the MRC to read it for yourself. But allow me to present these howlers about how fact-checking the media is bad for the public.
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Matthews: “Let me ask you about the news industry itself. And its taken a lot of raps, because we have such a wide definition of what news is today, with, you know, stuff coming across the cable industry. And it’s coming out of blog sites and stuff that is unedited in a lot of cases, which is my big problem with it. There’s no editors around. What do you make of what we’re doing right now?”
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Why does the MSM continue to cling on to the idiotic notion that editorial oversight automatically equals responsible journalism? Visit my essay during “Sunshine on the Media Week” that lists a whole bunch of reporters and editors getting caught in lies and major-league mistakes. All of them had supervision. Every single one.
Rathergate.com is unedited. Oh, no!
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Stahl: “Well, it’s contributing to the public’s continuing dislike of us and mistrust of us. And we’re all in this bowl together. 60 Minutes correspondents are the media. So are the bloggers. They’re the media.”
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I’m glad that Stahl is around to set me straight. So America’s deep and overwhelming distrust of the mainstream press is not the fault of lousy reporting, infotainment (Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson), political bias and error after error. It’s those darned bloggers that are pointing out the problem.
I must say, it is fun watching the messenger shooting the messengers. It gets better — the MSM has a tendency to take any criticism and twist it into an attack on the free press:
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Stahl: “But even all the different people who come on your show. I was even thinking of this coming over here, because you’re trying to elicit my opinions. And I’m not supposed to have opinions.”
Matthews: “Yeah.”
Stahl: “And I thought, why am I doing this show at all? I’m supposed to be that person who is completely unbiased. And your job, and we, we love to come on and talk to you.”
Matthews: “Yeah.”
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No, Ms. Stahl, that’s not what America wants. I’m a journalist, and I run a media bias blog. So read very carefully — Americans don’t expect you to be an android. They don’t mind that you have opinions. They mind it when you and others inject them into your news stories, either through commission or omission.
But that’s not the only subject that Stahl shows a lick of hypocrisy over. She takes a second to fondly remember the good old days of fairness and accuracy before the bloggers and talk radio sacked Rome:
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Stahl: “We went back to our booth, we called around, we checked, we went out and gave a very carefully vetted, reported, checked report. People now, with 24-hour television, the ability it go on the air from anywhere at any moment, you’re just, everyone is shooting from the hip, everybody. And it’s a little scary.”
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Wait a minute, here. Doesn’t Stahl work for the network that gave us Memogate? So, tell me how 60 Minutes Wednesday “gave a very carefully vetted, reported, checked report.”
Wait — I can read about it here ( rathergate.com ),
here ( ratherbiased.com )
and here ( rathergate.com ).
Dan Rather and fired, disgraced producer Mary Mapes “shot from the hip.” What moral or professional authority does CBS have to lecture anybody about fact-checking and balanced journalism?
Matthews asked a question of Stahl whether the media is losing its capability to hold big business accountable. Both fretted that the watering down of the media’s believability and credibility means that the feet of the powerful won’t be held to the fire. Let me ask the following of both of them: If the media’s job is to hold the power brokers accountable, why has the media done such a poor job of holding itself accountable?
I’ll give credit to the media for helping crack Memogate and CBS wide open. But what about former CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s comments? The media kept silent about it until they were forced to report that Jordan resigned. And that’s just one high-profile example of the media hushing up to protect itself.
Despite this fledgling new era of the public holding the media accountable, and despite many media elites beating their chests in public about transparency and openness, why do so many newspaper ombudsmen act as PR flacks defending rotten journalism? Why is it easier to secure a small business loan than it is to negotiate the voice-mail hell of newsrooms to get a one-sentence correction run?
Stahl ended with a very valid point about the role of the media in a free society. For every piece of bad, biased journalism, there is a rock-solid journalist who writes a story exposing government waste, exposing a crime or a legitimate health hazard. And if this downward slide in media believability continues, people will ignore stories that they need to know to make informed decisions.
But that is the closest that Stahl and Co. ever come to the epiphany that could save the struggling business of journalism — to survive, journalism needs to look inward and fix itself, not lash outward at the consumers of journalism or the legions of pajama-clad bloggers, left and right, who are watching the watchers.
Until then, interviews such as Stahl’s are incomplete without a sympathy violin playing in the background.
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