One of the things I dislike the press for is the way they hound people who have suffered a profound emotional experience – the loss of a child, displaced by a natural disaster, victim of a terrible crime. David Gelernter wrote eloquently about the hounding in his book Drawing Life. And when called on it, they always tell us not to shoot the messenger, they have no choice because it’s what the public wants.

Jill Carroll came home from being kidnapped in Iraq, and after a couple of brief statements the press has respected her request to respect her privacy. What about the clamoring of the public that must be obeyed? I guess that can be ignored for a fellow member of the press. Too bad they excercise such restraint for other people.

I was complaining about the news media the other day at work. I started with the local newspaper, the Post-Dispatch. I was relating that I had to disregard any item in it that was “news” because the high likelyhood of its inaccuracy. I was told there were other sources of news. I then said TV news wasn’t any better and that cable news focused far too much on sensational but trivial stories (yes, even Fox). Just get your news from the internet I was told. The trouble is that even on the internet most of the primary sources are the very same news organizations that have been misinforming me for years and show no inclination to stop. You have to check everything against primary sources, which is a time consuming pain in the rear.

What I want is a reliable newspaper I can read in the morning. I love the idea behind them, it’s just the execution that stinks. I want to be able to flip on the TV and be informed by accurate and relevant reporting. This current passing off opinion as fact just drives me nuts, and does so because I care about the news. If I were indifferent, I wouldn’t care that the press can’t do its job.

In other words, I’m having what he’s having:

I want to be able to read the New York Times or watch CNN, or listen to NPR and be able to trust what they’re telling me. Since I can’t do that, since the media is no longer fulfilling their basic function, I have to blog, and I have to read blogs. It pisses me off, because I had better things to do this decade than be my own news service. I don’t like having to read transcripts of press conferences because I can’t trust the media to even write down what was said correctly. I don’t like having to spend hours finding real experts on the web to analyze how this or that media expert has distorted the facts. I don’t like having to pore through the blogs of journalists, soldiers and Iraqi citizens so I can get some inkling of how things are really going, without the hype. Even though I do it, I don’t even like having to download the Brookings report once/month in order to see what the numbers say about how the war is going.But I have to do all that, because its the only way I can truly be an informed citizen.

Is that really too much to ask for?

And I feel this anger too:

But I[m pretty sure the message behind “The Unit” wasn’t that the press is the cause of global terrorism. I haven’t watched the show or anything, but I’m just guessing that the message is that terrorists are the cause of global terrorism. Not American foreign policy, not economic inequity, not religious oppression, but terrorists themselves. You know, the killy, murdery, explodey kind.That’s a nuance that’s lost on the Express’ Chris Mincher, though. “The enemies are nothing more than terrorist caricatures with beards and guns,” he writes. “Their goal: killing. Their purpose: to be shot. Their motivation: unknown.”

Maybe Chris longs for a TV show or movie that personalizes terrorists, that tells their story, that makes us empathize with them and think that maybe they’re just not that bad after all.

Sometimes a bad guy really is just a bad guy.