I think it's impossible for anyone to imagine the lack of drive or determination that's being encouraged and rewarded in journalism these days, and the extent to which editors and reporters fall, like a starving man on food, on "prepackaged news" that seems, by its language and presentation, to be objective and reasonable.
I went to journalism school, but I got out of newspaper reporting more than a decade ago, and that was part of the reason why. I was the environmental section editor for a very liberal newspaper, writing a story on an important local land use issue. I was having trouble setting up an interview with one of the main developers involved, and while I was nowhere near my deadline, my editor was pressing me to finish the piece. I explained I hadn't written it yet as I hadn't interviewed this guy, and he said, "Can't you just write the story and plug the quotes in later?"
How on earth, I thought, could I write the story without having done the frigging interview? What if the guy I interviewed had something to say that changed the course of the investigation?
I saw this over and over and over, and other than one brief stint working with a truly fantastic editor at a small, now defunct, newspaper (where not coincidentally I did my best work), found that many editors absolutely did not encourage or reward genuine investigative reporting. It was too messy, too likely to insult advertisers, too unpredictable, too unruly.
The reason that the right wing noise machine gets away with this crap is that no effective counter-machine is feeding them stories from a progressive point of view. No one is relentlessly framing and reframing these stories until the reporters start regurgitating them. It's the phenomenon that David Brock wrote about, that "our side" tends to be balanced, reluctant to advocate aggressively, and cherishes the appearance of objectivity. It results in us looking weak and our message getting drowned out.
It is also the problem that linguist George Lakoff talks about, that we have to be assertive and articulate and effective with our message, without being manipulative and conniving and corrupt. We have to be real, honest, and truthful, but still pound our message home. And frankly, most progressives are not comfortable doing that. Yet.
Just a view from my little bit of the kaleidoscope. I mean, what do I know... I mostly just write about dogs now.
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