This internal Washington Post chat transcript raised a few eyebrows last week, but one thing struck me and didn’t seem to get brought forward, so I thought I would point it out…
Jonathan Yardley: The comment of mine two paragraphs above has been leaked, presumably by someone in the newsroom, to the New York Times. Katharine Seelye called me an hour ago pressing for further comment. I declined, stressing that this is a confidential internal critique written solely for the news staff of TWP and refusing to authorize her to quote from it. She called back half an hour later to say that her editor had told her to go ahead and quote from the comment anyway. I told her I expected her to make plain that this is a confidential internal document and that she is quoting from it over the objections of the person who wrote it. She said she would. We’ll see.
I hardly see any point in having critiques and comments if they are to be publicized outside the paper. How can we write candidly when candor merely invites violations of confidentiality? Many readers say they distrust us. Well, now I find myself wondering if we can trust each other.
This is just so amusing I almost don’t know what to say.I guess he expected professional courtesy…can you imagine what the press would be saying if someone in the White House or Congress were to make the same claim?
Oh, wait – they have, in this interview with Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post:
Some have charged that the press has gone too far in ferreting out information, but Downie comments: “If you take careful surveys of this sentiment, you find that people are upset for one of two reasons: it [the press] has held up in a bad light someone or something they care about, or the investigative stories get too far into ordinary people’s privacy, and readers feel personally invaded. But if you ask the same people who are offended by these stories if they want more investigative reporting, they always say they do.”
Downie is aware of the responsibilities that go along with investigative reporting. “You’re always balancing the public’s right to know with the right of privacy,” he says.
I don’t think that he’s talking about “critiques and comments.”
“More Investigative Reporting” means leaving the Green Zone and spending a month in the Kurdish hills.
Or traveling the full route from the ports to Baghdad 30+ times.
Or, heck, figuring out how many armies actually use White Phosphorus.
What I’m saying is, the disconnect is in what “Investigative Reporting” means. One side thinks ‘Repeat Watergate!’ is the mission, where the other is asking for Ernie Pyle.
I think the only people with a high opinion of the media nowadays is the media itself. They place themselves on a lofty pedestal that no person could ever reach. Why they engage in this self-aggrandizing behavior is beyond me.
Lately it seems that they are getting more and more fearful of bloggers — I think some of the media outlets see the end coming.
Any newsman at all would betray his mother, grandmother, and favorite cousins for a “good story.” None but the most corrupt and power hungry survive in the news media.
Al, shouldn’t that be Gomer Pyle?
There are principled reporters, to be sure, but with increased media concentration we are seemingly more likely to be fed infotainment by writers who whore and pimp their ethics.
No Tom, the problem is what reporters see as their role.
Reporters see their role as being a part of the DNC, and thus the vitriol against Woodward and Miller, who don’t toe the partisan line in doing EVERYTHING through the decision tree of “how can I hurt the Bush Administration the most?”
The nation DEPENDS on a free press; but when the Press becomes merely a partisan adjunct, the credibility of reporting is non-existent. When Murrow came out (rather late) against McCarthy, it meant something because Murrow was publicly non-partisan (though surely he had private political opinions). The same goes true for other moments such as Cronkite opining against the Vietnam War.
When Dan Rather pushed fake-but-accurate it meant he was nothing but a political shill for Kerry, and the general reaction of the press (particularly in keeping away from Able Danger, Iran’s nuclear program, bin Laden’s aims etc) have undermined the credibility of the Press.
When we need the reputation for the Press the most to act as a check on the Administration it will not be there. Thrown away in naked partisanship, and thus leading to discounting of every bit of reporting.
With regards to Murrow. I read that he had his own agenda. Laurence Duggan a friend of his was accused of being pro-communist. It turns out that he was a communist spy and people died to keep this a secret. But of course Murrow probably did not know this at the time.
This has its paralels with John Kerry in the 70s. Who would have trusted him if they knew then that he had visited the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris not once but twice while the war was still in progress. And was parroting the NV line to congress and the MSM.
I’ve interned at a few publications during my undergrad and have seen the endemic dysfunction that seems to be the big elephant in the room – be the room a magazine’s or a newspaper’s. To be frank, so many of the people are just lazy; procrastination is expected, and managed by a minority of people who do the 80% of the work thing.
Walking into the office in the morning usually finds only these super-functional 20% doing the work. The rest of the lazy ones just acquiesce to the bandwagon as it means their current employment.
Perhaps I am being cynical but its important to point out that these patterns are not unique to small operations; businesses with more important “obligations” still have staff that stumble into work at 3pm, having gotten way too high in the morning and early afternoon, wreaking of cannabis and McDonalds, plopping down in front of their computers and getting one or two things done before they stumble back out. There is rarely any unifying hustle and bustle that draws everyone in because the manufacturing of the media product simply does not demand it. It demands an approximation, or simulation of an explanation of an event etc, not analysis that can weather any critical eye, let alone inform or even persuade for that matter.
Top down is dead. Long live bottom up.