Posted by
Doctor Demex on Monday, September 25, 2006 4:59:20 PM
After Watergate, journalism, or at least journalists,
changed in ways that seemed profound at the time. They claimed to
be objective reporters, but privately hoped to be crusading
reporters. They told themselves that they were crusading for the
truth, but their Vietnam disillusions made them seek certain results
regardless of the truth. In addition to teaching their students
to ask the traditional questions (who, what, where, when, how, and
why), journalism schools began teaching their students to assume the
answers to the questions were probably lies. After all, if
President Nixon had something to hide, then certainly Joe Citizen did
too. And who in his right mind would deliberately say anything to
a reporter to make himself look bad? If reporters badgered their
interviewees long enough by asking the same questions over and over as
rudely as possible, they would eventually get an answer that could be
made out to seem inconsistent with the previous answers. This
inconsistency could be evidence that the reporter's target had really
been lying all along, as expected, or that he was merely becoming
fatigued, frustrated, and annoyed. The reporter could then write
a story focusing on the inconsistency, confusing readers and whetting
their appetite for more stories that might yield a scandal (and a
Pulitzer for the reporter).
Esteemed NBC newsman John Chancellor famously referred to the "news
media" as the fourth branch of government. What he meant by this
was that in our democratic republic, where citizens must make informed
decisions in order to govern themselves, the source of almost all their
information is what is today called the mainstream media.
Providing information made the mainstream media indispensable to the
functioning of our free society.
In a sense, there is indeed a valid relationship between journalism and
government, particularly between big journalism and big
government: Both thrive on telling the people how to live and
what to think.
This is really nothing new, if one checks original sources, as did Bill
Bennett in his nifty little history, America, The Last Best Hope, one
sees that even the best newspapers throughout history published
rubbish. In his letter turning down the mayor of Atlanta's
request to spare the city, General Sherman noted the problem: "You have
heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by
falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other
quarters, the better."
Maybe if something like today's blogs had existed in 1864, Atlanta wouldn't have burned.