David Sirota: When Journalism Became Transcription and Reporting Disappeared

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/26/786/

When Journalism Became Transcription and Reporting Disappeared
by David Sirota

Bill Moyers’ PBS special last night on the media’s complicity in pushing America to war was so powerfully upsetting that I am forced to resort to using mid-1990s NBA metaphors to describe it, if only because describing it without a metaphoric buffer is just too depressing. This production was the documentary equivalent of Tom Chambers famously jumping over a screaming Mark Jackson and hammering down one of the greatest, most in-your-face slam dunks in history.To call the media’s complicity in the Iraq War a conspiracy is an insult to conspiracies, because it wasn’t hidden - as Moyers shows, it was all out there for everyone to see. The problem was, Beltway reporters didn’t want to see it. As New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller famously admitted, in the lead up to war most self-respecting Washington journalists who wanted to stay on the White House Christmas card list refused to ask tough questions because “no one wanted to get into an argument with the president.”

What’s really disturbing, however, is not even what this documentary says about the past - but what it says about the state of journalism today.

In interview after interview after interview, we hear top journalists and opinionmakers declare that they believe journalism is no longer about basic, hard-scrabble reporting or getting scoops. As the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus says, most reporters today actually try to avoid getting scroops because they “worry about sort of getting out ahead of something” and - gasp! - making their friends inside Official Washington mad at them. So rather than, say, do the real work of reporting news, journalism has become a profession that is almost entirely about PR, transcription and packaging Establishment spin for news copy. This is why, for example, many of the highest-profile political “journalists” like Joe Klein and David Broder never bother to actually report anything anymore - but instead spend most of their time pontificating on horse race polls and campaign gossip, expecting us to believe that’s real “news.”

This kind of attitude, as Moyers shows, goes straight to the top. Take, for instance, NBC’s Tim Russert - the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC NEWS. I stress the word “news” because, remember, “news” is supposed to be reported in the trenches, not transcribed in a television studio. Russert loves to brag about coming from Buffalo (often ending his shows with some irritating quip about the Buffalo Bills) because he believes it gives him some sort of working-class cred and more importantly distracts viewer attention from the fact that he is a longtime Washington insider and multi-million-dollar journalist. And at one point, he brags to Moyers that “I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo - I know who my sources are I work ‘em very hard.” But then when Moyers asks him why he gave Vice President Cheney such a free pass to come on Meet the Press and spew blatant lies about Iraq’s WMD - lies that news organizations like Knight Ridder were exposing but people like Russert were ignoring - we get this gem from Russert:

“There were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.”

Moyers quickly noted that at least some reporters “didn’t wait for the phone to ring,” and that CBS’s Bob Simon said that sources debunking the WMD case “would have been available to any reporter who called.” And that makes Russert’s entire sob story fall apart like a house of cards. Russert wants us to believe that he’s just “a blue-collar guy from Buffalo” who works sources very hard. Yet, apparently, “working sources very hard” means not even picking up the phone to make a call, but instead sitting in a comfortable Washington office waiting for people to call him, and in the meantime giving Cheney as much airtime as he wanted to spew lies.

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[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. This is brilliant. Bookmarked.

[Morgana LaFey]

3. I've come to expect that from Sirota

AND Moyers, of course. So glad he's back.

[mark414]

2. bill moyers committed more acts of real journalism

in the preparation of this documentary than the entire Washington press corps did in the long buildup to this stupid fucking war

and they all still have their jobs............