Is it scalp hunting for people to question journalists and their stories? Isn’t it journalism’s finest tradition to question authority, to speak truth to power, to investigate and let the chips fall where they may?
Let me be clear on about one thing: the downfall of Dan Rather and Eason Jordan were brought about by Dan Rather and Eason Jordan, not bloggers. Bloggers just presented the words and deeds of these gentlemen to a wide audience.
But these scandals, and others like them, and the relentless fact checking of bloggers, have demonstrated that news media has been doing a lousy job for years. The problem isn’t that the news media is made up of fallible and biased people because that’s the nature of people, but that the systems the media touts – editors, fact checkers, oversight and review – simply have decayed to the point where they do nothing. The president of CBS news raised concerns and was ignored, and then circled the wagons when the exact same criticism came from outside the organization.
The wonder isn’t so much that Eason Jordan (or Dan Rather for that matter) was fired, but that he stayed around for as long as he did. He should have been gone as soon as he admitted that in fact CNN had knowingly, deliberately lied in its Iraq coverage under Saddam Hussein just so that it could continue to misreport the news from Iraq, after he had denied doing any such thing. Both men lost huge market share while destroying the brand, and yet somehow they managed to stay employed.
Bias isn’t so much a cause as it is a symptom – because the system is broken, the biases of the people involved are unchecked. The problem that is that the news media is simply unable to deliver accurate information, or correct the misinformation they flood us with. How many times has the Bush presented a fake Turkey at Thanksgiving story popped up? My personal favorite is the 43 million dollars we paid the Taliban, which has only faded because of another media bug, namely the inability to maintain focus on anything but one story at a time, so Afganistan has fallen out of the news taking the spectacular payment with it. Jason Blair put fabrication after fabrication into print not because he was a brilliant guy, but because the news media doesn’t routinely fact check what they present as facts.
What the news media doesn’t seem to realize is that more and more people are catching on to this, and simply do not trust the news media to present accurate news. And why buy or watch what you know to be unreliable? American manufacturers (especially car makers) learned this lesson a couple of decades ago and made adjustments. Americans have flocked to alternate news sources not because it’s a fad, but because they are looking for a better product. Until the mainstream media takes some real steps to safeguard the accuracy of the information they present, Americans will continue to desert them and look for alternatives.
