Mainstream Media Reporting — The Truth Gap

Source: Decline of the Empire

People went wild when the public editor of the New York Times Arthur Brisbane asked Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?  The public editor is an ombudsman, so it’s his job to interact with the hoi polloi (the public). In short, Brisbane has no clout. Thus the entire exercise is like masturbation in so far as it feels good but no babies could possibly come from it. Still, I think DOTE readers will be amused by this tempest in a teapot for what it reveals about Fair & Balanced reporting in the media.

I’ll quote Jay Rosen (Press Think — “the ghost of democracy in the media machine”) on Brisbane’s question. His reaction was called So whaddaya think: should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?  As usual, quotes within quotes (from Brisbane in this case) are highlighted in light blue.

Somewhere along the way, telling truth from falsehood was surpassed by other priorities to which the press felt a stronger duty. Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, was unaware of this history when he asked users of the Times whether reporters should call out false statements.

Brisbane’s post … exploded onto the web today, startling user after user, and journalist after journalist, all of whom reacted with some version of: Why is this even a question? Alright, I’ll tell you why.

Brisbane wrote: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” For example:

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Brisbane said he gets a lot of mail from “readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” Then he got to the meat of his question, which was to us, the users.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

The comments at Brisbane’s blog post are blistering. They reveal the deep divide between “traditionalists” in the press, of which is Brisbane is one, and current users. I will just quote one to give you the tone. Matt Talbot in California:

“That this should even be an open question is a sign that our supposedly independent press is a cowed and timid shadow of its former self.”

There will be plenty more said about this column because a lot led up to it. For now I want make one observation, and let that stand as my reaction.

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by a majority of newsroom professionals.

This is worth highlighting in a different font.

Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.

Rosen is talking about Fair & Balanced reporting. Like on climate change science, for example.

No one knows exactly how it happened, for it’s not like a policy decision came down at some point. Rather, the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false. One way to describe it (and I believe this is the correct way) is that truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities. Other things now ranked ahead of it.

But wait a minute: how can telling the truth ever take a back seat in the serious business of reporting the news? That’s like saying medical doctors no longer put “saving lives” or “the health of the patient” ahead of securing payment from insurance companies. It puts the lie to the entire contraption. It devastates journalism as a public service and honorable profession.

And so officially, this event (“truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities”) never occurred, even though in reality it did. Because no one was ready for that devastation. Therefore no reckoning (wait: how could this happen?) ever took place. Denial was successfully maintained, even as criticism built and journalists inside the fraternity announced what was happening. Professional practice even shifted to take account of the drift.

Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, skipped onto this scene seemingly unaware of these events. And he basically blurted out what I just explained to you when he asked the users of the New York Times: so whaaddaya think… should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?

Yes, that is what he said. Look at his post again. He tells us that readers are “fed up with the distortions and evasions” and they “look to The Times to set the record straight.” This seems to be their number one priority, he muses. “They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” (Which is what always stopped us before.) And so Brisbane wants to know: should we run with that? It would mean changing our practices, but we could do it. Hey, what do you guys think?

And then came the reply, which was… devastating.

As far as it goes, Rosen’s summary is pretty good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The mainstream media is one of our favorite whipping boys, and why not? They deserve a good whipping.

What is missing in Rosen’s description is the propaganda function of the corporate-owned media. If you give equal time to lies, and thus assert in effect that truth is a relative thing, then The Truth, in so far as we can ascertain it, no longer exists in media reporting. Somebody’s self-serving bullshit can then fill this truth vacuum, or as Stanley Kubrick would have put it in Dr. Strangelove, The Truth Gap. This is the essence of Fair & Balanced reporting. In short, it serves little purpose outside of propaganda.

There are exceptions to this rule but they are rare—for example, see the New York Times reporting on shale gas economics as discussed in my post The Shale Gas Scam Goes Public. When exceptions are rare, which is why we notice them, they only serve to prove the rule.

Thus “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” means in effect that the special interests who have the gold make the rules, for they can fill the Truth Gap in our value-free media—”it’s all relative”—with all sorts of propaganda messages which are never seriously challenged.

If Truth is relative, then Truth does not exist. And where there is no Truth, there is only somebody’s bullshit. The powerful few can set the agenda. And certainly there is no Democracy.

Have a nice weekend.

Bonus Video — Dr. Strangelove

Read more at Decline of the Empire