Tue, Sep 2, 2008
The Denver media migraine
by Eric Boehlert
I had to chuckle when I read about the newsroom-wide email New York Times executive editor Bill Keller sent out to his staff last week on the eve of his political team deploying to Denver, and then St. Paul, to cover the political conventions. In his electronic memo, Keller praised the newspaper's coverage of the just-completed Beijing Olympics ("dazzling"), and, like any good newsroom manager, challenged the rest of the newspaper to match that excellence. Specifically, he called on his political team to reach the same journalistic heights at the conventions that the Times' sports department had achieved in Beijing....
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What we saw beamed out of Beijing, both in print and video form, was often memorable journalism. What we saw seep out of Denver was a farce....
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Imagine if a Times reporter filed a front-page story from Beijing about Michael Phelps and inserted a completely unsupported claim up high in the article that made Phelps look petty and selfish. Think Times editors would have printed it?...
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What was behind that type of half-baked Times/Politico/Matthews convention analysis? The answer is that it was based on nothing. The concocted Clinton storylines simply reflected what some journalists wanted to see happen, which then made it slightly plausible, and therefore news. (Speculating now trumps reporting.) To suggest that approach demolishes decades' worth of American journalism standards would be an understatement.
It's impossible to escape the conclusion that journalists for much of the week in Denver weren't informing news consumers about the unfolding event, they were purposefully misinforming people. (Bill and Hill might snub Obama!) Think about where journalism is heading when an entire industry knowingly adopts a false narrative and pushes it for days simply because it likes it; because it gives journalists a good storyline.
Fifteen thousand journalists in Denver and they couldn't even report what actually happened there. Instead, they invented a storyline of their liking. And (surprise!) it was one that demeaned Democrats.
And that's where the real harm came, because Denver wasn't simply a case of too many journalists chasing too few stories and having to fill up too much air time (i.e., being boring). It was a case of too many journalists embracing manufactured stories in order to fill up airtime....And guess what? All the bogus convention storylines poked Democrats. Do you think the same press trend will continue in St. Paul this week? Will journalists attach themselves to flimsy narratives that make Republicans look weak and divided? I have my doubts....
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200809020006
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