Power Line finds that the reports of anarchy in New Orleans were horrendously overblown, and that the media’s sensationalism diverted badly-needed resources to deal with non-existent crises.
It appears that the media is fundamentally broken. The misreporting of events during the Katrina aftermath aren’t an isolated incident. The trust network that the media used to have with the American people is breaking down, and for good reason. The media is supposed to be neutral, objective, and competent. Yet it would appear that it meets neither of those criteria. Instead, we’re subjected to a bunch of blow-dried blowhards commenting on absolutely nothing and contributing even less. At least when the media is fixated on the latest Blonde-Girl-Goes-Missing story du jour the impact of their inability to get the facts straight is minimized. When it’s matters of life or death like public policy, war, or natural disasters, the media is actively making things worse.
One of the problems is the rise of the professional journalistic class. Journalists who comment on military matters almost never have served in the military. They don’t understand military strategy. The vast majority of reporters covering Iraq never leave the Green Zone and rely on stringers – who often have ties to the terrorists themselves – to do the original reporting. The story that we get very rarely reflects the reality of life on the ground – which is why there’s such a fundamental disconnect between the people fighting in Iraq and the American population at large. You have a case of journalistic groupthink at its finest – the opinion that Iraq is a quagmire was established a long time ago, and the reporting from Iraq is designed to bolster that view. You could say that the evidence is being “fixed” around the policy.
The “embedding” of reporters into combat units helped by ensuring that journalists got the story from the ground first-hand, but sadly that program has largely been cast aside.
It’s this blend of inexperience and bias that is driving the mainstream media right into the ground. Exacerbating the situation is the institutional arrogance of the media. Since Watergate (and even before), the media cemented the idea that they were the “Fifth Estate” – they represented an unelected branch of government whose job – nay, duty – was to provide a check on political power. The problem with that attitude is that when you see yourself in that light, everyone wants to become the next Woodward and Bernstein – no matter what. When the media smells blood, it’s like a feeding frenzy of sharks, even though there may be nothing to the story. For liberals, think Whitewater. For conservatives, think the faked ANG memos.
The media is experiencing the inevitable result of their own institutional arrogance in the form of plummeting readership and ratings. The New York Times recently went through a round of layoffs. The Los Angeles Times is experiencing a similar fall in circulation. Ratings for the Big Three networks are down.
The trust networks that made anchors like Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings such monumental figures are being eroded by years of sloppy and biased journalism. Fox News exploited a major ideological hole in the media – everyone was too busy catering the liberal viewers that conservative viewers had nowhere to go – and Fox quickly realized that by portraying themselves as more “fair and balanced’ than the other networks they could steal back the viewers turned off by the biases perceived in the other networks. And indeed, that strategy worked. Fox is hardly a paragon of journalistic excellence, but it does have some of the finest political coverage, in large part due to old-fashioned journalists like Brit Hume.
And therein lies the secret to the media’s future: getting back to the basics. The media’s problem is that they’re less concerned with the hold fashioned idea of reporting Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How and more with trying to “speak truth to power” and jockeying to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, the media needs to adopt the philosophies of Sgt. Friday – “Just the facts, ma’am.” The fact is that most journalists are increasingly lazy and vapid, but emboldened by a sense of noblesse oblige that blinds them to the reality of life outside their own little world. If you want to “change the world”, you should be in the Peace Corps, not the press. The job of the press isn’t to change the world, it’s to tell us what’s going on and let us all form our own conclusions.
Sadly, budgets for reporting are getting slashed, editorial standards are declining, and the marketplace is fundamentally changing. Not to beat on that particular dead horse, but the reporting in the blogosphere is every bit as good as that in the mainstream media – provided you know where to look. For instance, Michael Yon’s reports from Mosul with the “Deuce Four” are some of the best examples of modern war reporting we have. Yon’s work is incredibly gripping – easily Pulitzer Prize material, and offers a perspective rarely seen in the rest of the media. That is the future of journalism.
And while bloggers are certainly not unbiased, their biases aren’t masked by a veneer of objectivity maintained in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. CBS’ faked Bush documents fiasco didn’t survive more than a few hours in the blogosphere. When the mainstream media has Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Dan Rather, and other reporters who routinely and strongly inject their biases into what should be straightforward reporting, it’s hard to argue that the signal-to-noise ratio of the mainstream media is all that much better than blogs.
The media is failing us in Iraq. They failed us after Katrina. They will continue to get things wrong, because the focus of media is no longer on presenting the facts, but buttressing a particular worldview. The very attitude of modern journalism is at fault here, and so long as that attitude remains prevalent, the continuing decline of the profession will continue unabated.
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has much more on the problems with today’s media:
Just give us the facts, I say. Give us the context. Those who control the narrative control the power. And the thought of Shepard Smith or Geraldo Rivera or Dan Rather driving public policy on a regular basis is simply to horrible to consider.
Indeed.
Absolutely unreal. The “party of personal responsibility” is now attempting to deflect government’s ineptitude at sending in relief to hurricane views on the backs of “the media.” You guys have balls, I’ll give you that, but the only people who would buy such an argument would include the fast-dwindling number of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity automatons, especially considering we all watched video footage of the city’s meltdown while everyone at the administration was desperately trying to figure out who their boss was.
It’s impossible to determine exact numbers of anything in such a chaotic environment. Just ask the Feds, who insisted no more than 5,000 New Orleans residents were at the convention center….until they managed to find the road into town and discovered there were nearly 30,000. Should the media have not reported ANY information about reports of unrest at the Superdome for fear that they might be “overstating” the numbers? I guess only if you believe the media’s sole reason for existence is to protect incompetent government officials at all levels responsible for this travesty’s magnitude.
You’re gonna be able to scapegoat the media with tens of millions of pseudo-patriots when it comes to Iraq, indefinitely convincing them things are going “better in Iraq than the media wants us to believe” because we’ve rebuilt a few schools and hospitals that we previously blew up. But it’s gonna be a harder sell to suggest New Orleans is the media’s fault. Only the “purple Kool-Aid, cult o’ Bush” crowd could find “media malpractice” in a situation when the media and Harry Connick, Jr. were able to a Louisiana road map showing the way into town even when it eluded the Bush administration.
Whatever fault one may find with the mainstream media, and there’s plenty of it to go around, suggesting that standards are higher on the “bathroom wall” of the blogosphere is tantamount to saying the kid listening to his parents’ conversation through a glass next to their bedroom door is better informed about the conversation than their parents. The only people who take the blogosphere seriously are the people who personally host blogs. While that number is increasing, until it reaches 51%, the blogosphere will never receive any serious respect. Maybe if bloggers ever find the ambition to get off of their computers and head on-site to the scene of the crises that the real media covers, their Monday morning quarterbacking about misconduct and “evil agendas” wouldn’t ring so comically hollow.
If the professional Bush apologists at Powerline are serious about thrusting Big Brother on the media (gotta love those “small government-loving” conservatives) based on potentially overstated reports of crime at the Superdome, their beloved pointy-headed bureaucrats have one significant challenge to overcome before their investigation proceeds…..finding them. Considering it took four days for FEMA and Homeland Security to find the road into New Orleans, I don’t expect John Roberts and Norah O’Donnell are too worried.
Yes, because the problem was finding New Orleans, not that the city was flooded, there were no passable transportation routes, and the storm prevented anything but limited pre-position.
Christ, the justifications and willingness to abandon all sanity and reality just to crucify Bush is astonishing.
And if you don’t think the blogosphere matters, ask Trent Lott. Or Dan Rather. Or Eason Jordan.
The legacy media is slowly dying, and it doesn’t take a stunning intellect to see it. However, it does take a willingness to see reality, which most of the left wing (which appears to be a superset of the media) has trouble doing.
“Yes, because the problem was finding New Orleans, not that the city was flooded, there were no passable transportation routes, and the storm prevented anything but limited pre-position.”
Yet, somehow, Harry Connick, Jr. was able to drive into town…..along with those know-nothing media stooges. White Republicans in the suburb of Gretna across the Mississippi River from the south side of New Orleans were certainly able to cross the non-submerged bridge and erect an armed police barricade to prevent their black Democratic neighbors from seeking salvation. Unless Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff were afraid of the NASCAR dad barricade, entering the city that way was entirely possible.
“And if you don’t think the blogosphere matters, ask Trent Lott. Or Dan Rather. Or Eason Jordan.”
The blogosphere matters….so long as you pretend that nobody ever has to leave the comfort of their computer keyboard to deliver everything the public needs to know. Until the blogosphere takes it upon itself to provide direct links to conditions in Iraq or New Orleans, it merely serves as an echo chamber or a hemorrhoid for the real journalists doing all the heavy lifting.
“Legacy media”? I don’t think you even understand the context of that term. When they talk about “legacy airlines”, they’re inferring to the pension and health care costs for retired airline workers. How could that term possibly apply to a “legacy media”? Overlooking your predictable anecdotes about the inevitable sunset falling on the “legacy media”, do you concur with the Power Line suggestion that CBS News, rather than incompetent government, be held accountable for the post-Katrina nightmare in New Orleans?
Wrong definition.
http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/
http://messopotamian.blogspot.com/
Etc…
Given that they made no such charge whatsoever, either you need remedial reading comprehension or you’re only reading what you want to read and not the argument being presented.
Again, from the article they linked to:
[New Orleans Police Chief Eddie] Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities’ response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.
“Yet, somehow, Harry Connick, Jr. was able to drive into town….”
Who in his right mind compares one individual getting access into one part of an area larger than Britain with military units and search and rescue teams?
“entering the city that way was entirely possible.”
Oh right, Mark did.
Wonder why Connick and the press didn’t rescue everyone since they were on site.
“getting access into one part of an area larger than Britain with military units and search and rescue teams? ”
Just how damn big do you think New Orleans is? Your comment reminds me of George Costanza on Seinfeld telling Jerry that the Italian state of Tuscany is as big as North Dakota. You’re sorely in need of an atlas my friend. Put it on your Christmas list. 🙂
Yes, because obviously a storm 300 miles across is only going to hit one town. It’s not like the entire region was effected or anything.
Sheesh…
While Sav’s size ratio may be off, his point is spot on. It is ridiculuous to compare the ability of one individual to get from A to B with a relief operation’s ability to do the same. Where do thousands of trucks park? Is the road stable enough for a convoy? Is debris that an SUV can get around choking off roads? Where will the relief workers be set up? Is there a place for them to sleep? On and on and on, and many of these questions can’t be answered until after the storm is over, since no one knows where the damage will be. Did FEMA make mistakes – sure. Do mistakes equal incompetence? Absolutely not, unless you have an agenda or are incredibly concrete. Mistakes are going to be made virually every time hundreds of people are making decisions imapcting thousands of people, especially when dealing with an issue for the first time (like a city below sea level flooding due to a levee breach). And the repurcussions of those mistakes are going to be even worse when the groundwork leading up to those decisions is so poor , i.e. the state and local “response” performing so inadequately. The fact that the federal government was able to mobilize over 50 thousand relief workers into that area in less than six days is a tremendous accomplishment to be lauded, yet in our blame culture, all we want to do is point fingers when things don’t go exactly as we want them to. I lived about two miles from Columbine, and I saw the same mentality there – the bodies weren’t even buried and everyone was already shouting about the parents, rock music, video games, etc. Life is full of tradgedy, bad things happen, and while I understand when the ctual victim engages in blaming, it is appalling when armchair pundits not only question but disparage other people’s competence and motivations with next to no knowledge of the issues, except from what they are being shoveled by geniuses like Brian Williams.
Perhaps I should have made clear that the area impacted by the storm–i.e. much of Lousiana, large swaths of Mississippi and parts of Alabama–is larger than Great Britain.
As I asked before, why didn’t Connick Jr. or the press rescue the survivors before official help got there? Because they weren’t equipped or capable of doing so. It’s one thing for Anderson Cooper to get into one block of one town of one city of the disater area with a mic and a camera man. It’s another for professional recue operations to get into all the affected–not to mention flooded–areas in a heartbeat.
I can’t help but be delighted at the way Mark derailed the point.
Which was the media’s horrendous reporting which gave us a view od a situation much more horrible that we could imagine–but that’s okay, because the reporters could.
The huge numbers of murders at the Dome and the Convention Center? Nope. Bodies ain’t there.
Randall Robinson’s ridiculous assertion of cannibaluism? Nope. But damned if it didn’t get reported.
Baby rapes? Nope. Armed gangs taking over the shelters? Nope.
Almost all of the social dissarray that was highlighted–and blamed on Bush(naturally) didn’t happen.
That’s the point.
And it’ll get ‘investigated’, ‘probed’, and ‘researched’ until the media’sa behavior can ALSO be blamed on Bush or on Republicans–failing a swift resolution in that style the issue will quickly disappear.
Why? Because the general public will be asking itself ‘if they screwed up so bad about La., what are they doing in Iraq’?