Expertise

by digby

I have always enjoyed Michelle Cottle’s writing in the New Republic. She has an irreverent style and often looks at politics and culture with a fresh perspective that’s interesting and fun. So, I was taken aback by this recent article about the “democratization of journalism” in which she advises the media not to forget its prerogatives:

I realize these are unsettling times for the Fourth Estate. The web is changing the way people consume news. The Bushies, along with their conservative media colleagues, have spent the past several years trashing mainstream journalists as ideologically motivated and morally bankrupt. Jayson Blair has convinced readers we’re making it all up. Dan Rather has convinced them we’re all unpatriotic Bush haters. And every remotely controversial news story winds up sliced, diced, and julienned by an overcaffeinated blogosphere with a chip on its shoulder about the arrogant, self-satisfied, lazy, corrupt “old media.” It’s hardly surprising that polls show our public credibility headed towards that of Jack Abramoff.

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I realize it’s very popular–not to mention economically savvy–to talk about “giving readers what they want.” And I’m in no way suggesting that we ratchet back the “soft news” or “lifestyle journalism” pieces that keep readers subscribing. (Hell, without its Wedding Pages, the Sunday New York Times would only have two dozen readers.) But determining what merits serious, front-page coverage really should be left to people whose careers have been in the service of the news.

How then can we explain the decision by the Washington Post today to bury the story on page nine that a Bush administration verified that the president had, in fact, authorized Libby to leak selected parts of a classified NIE? Or how can we explain Judith Miller’s bogus WMD stories, or wrongly headlining the Florida recount claims, or front page giggling over Al Gore and earth tones, or succumbing to Lewinsky madness, or pimping Republican operative Whitewater nonsense? It was the choice of these front page stories, and many, many more, that led so many members of the public to mistrust the media’s ability to think for itself.

The mindless run-up to war is the perfect example. There was plenty of information at the time that could have allowed for a more thoughtful debate, but the Washington Post (just one example) chose to bury the information. Cottle scoffs at the press “self-flagellating” but the post itself admits that they did not exercise “serious, front-page” news judgment during that period:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper’s editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, “helped sell the story,” Pincus recalled. “Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper.” Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

“We did our job but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder,” Woodward said in an interview. “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier” than widely believed. “Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page.”

Overcaffeinated or not, the public (which includes bloggers) is well within its rights to question the press’ vaunted professionalism considering its recent performance. And considering that even today the flagship DC newspaper continues to miss the story, I think we are right to keep the pressure on. I know it’s unpleasant for them to be questioned, what with their superior credentials, experience and expertise, but the stakes are too high to ignore.

For my part, I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.

The smear jobs of the early to mid-90’s were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn’t invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.

But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we’ve ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in “wartime” (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.

I can see this. Millions of people in this country can see this. But the press has behaved for the last decade as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. Indeed, they have participated in this ongoing constitutional crisis, not by just turning the other cheek, but by actively taking the bait and running with the cheap tabloid distractions of the 90’s and then the martial fervor of the aught years.

Cottle believes that all this anger at the press is because we bloggers think we are qualified to be journalists:

And make no mistake. No matter how half-assed or silly it may at times seem from the outside, journalism is a real, grown-up profession in which, as with nearly every other job on the planet, experience and acquired skill matter. While that may sound obvious, I’m convinced that a sizeable chunk of the public can’t quite get past its belief that any idiot can be a journalist because, by and large, it doesn’t require the same sort of specialized or technical knowledge as being a doctor, chemical engineer, or CPA. (Just look at all the articles and blog posts cheering the death of the exclusionary, elitist big media and the rise of the web-empowered citizen journalist.) It’s a little like the disdain with which many people quietly view child care providers: It can’t take much skill or smarts to tend to a child, because look at how many clueless teenage moms do it every day. Likewise, folks figure that any idiot can form an opinion and write a sentence, so what’s so tough about being a journalist?

What an odd analogy. I see what she is saying and it’s certainly true that parenting, like journalism, takes skill. But is Cottle then also suggesting that there is some small elite minority of parents who can do it well?

I would suggest that just as there are many millions of good parents out there, there are millions of informed, engaged citizens who can read and think and see the world around them without having to be credentialed members of the press corps. And they see a media that is not doing a proper job of speaking truth to power.

Cottle concludes:

Certainly, journalists could stand to pay closer attention to what’s happening in the communities they cover–or, in the case of the national media, to venture beyond the rarefied cultural bubble of the New York-to-Washington corridor. But it’s absurd, not to mention counterproductive, to think any of us can win readers’ admiration by further undermining the notion of journalists as serious professionals with acquired knowledge and expertise. If members of the news media can’t take what they do for a living seriously, how can they possibly expect anyone else to?

I think the greatest “expertise” any professional journalist should develop over the course of years of reporting or editing is the ability to detect bullshit when they see it. The last ten years of collective mainstream political journalism proves that there is far less “expertise” in the professional media than the professional media thinks there is.

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