You rarely need to be a ‘real journalist’ at this point, because ‘real journalists’ are in name only. They happen to be on the payroll of a news organization, that’s all that makes them different from you and me. Too many reporters don’t actually do reporting and haven’t for quite some time.
Vast amounts of ‘news’ is based on books, studies, surveys, reports, polls, conference presentations, speeches, testimony and, of course, press releases — all written by someone else, based on research (a sphere of activity that once included real reporting) done by someone else at a university, bank, think tank, government agency, non-profit, advocacy group, and so on.
These documents are semi-digested and spit out as news (“Survey discovers ….” “new book says…” “researchers conclude …”) and so on. These are dressed up as “stories” through the expedient of getting a few quotes from a generally short list of experts (who of course produce their own reports, studies etc. and will need press time to promote them in the future, therefore cooperate with this whole artificial process).
If the reporter is lucky, the item may be controversial enough to get various groups of experts sniping at one another, thus providing material for a second day or more of “news” requiring little additional effort to “report” (e.g. the McClellan book — doesn’t that seem like so last month?) and on it goes.
A lot of reporters only get out of the office to pick up a copy of one of these items at an event where they will meet numerous clones of themselves and, if lucky, score enough quotes to write up the item quickly without having to do any additional phone calls or e-mails. It’s extremely easy to get through the day (news cycle), week, month, year … in this manner. Sure, they are going out of the newsroom, and meeting people, and getting quotes … but is this really ‘reporting’ in the sense that it requires some vast professional training and experience to do? I don’t think so!
Also, folks, notice if you will how often a story that requires quotes or anecdotes about ‘real people’ (lifestyle articles, career advice) features freelance writers, book editors, marketing managers, novelists, public relations consultants and the like. In other words, all people from the reporter’s larger sphere of media acquaintances. I think these types appear all out of proportion to their real incidence in the population.
Sure, you can’t quote your colleague at the next desk (that’s ‘unethical’) but you can quote a guy you met at a party given by that colleague at the next desk, so long as he works at some other place, who will very likely be another media type.
Add these two categories, plus the obligatory stuff (the plane crash, the four-alarm fire, last night’s game, the daily stock report) and there isn’t a whole lot left in the newspaper.
Don’t blame the recent years of cost-cutting; it’s a popular villain in the newsroom, but all this stuff has been going on way longer than that. Most journalists became over-paid, over-rated and lazy about 20 years ago, and it is their abdication of actual journalism that got them to where they are.
And no, I don’t mean they weren’t critical enough of authority; many journalists are so critical, so bitter, so relentlessly negative and angry so much of the time, a career of it warps the mind. I mean what I said: lazy and (given what they brought to the job) over-paid.
They, not publishers, outsourced the thinking part of the job to others — the consultants, the professors, the think-tankers, etc. as it made the job easier. That’s a reality. Most of them have only a superficial understanding of what they allegedly cover; you can see that by examining their substance-less work closely.
A few factoids interspersed with quotes in some story-like order … if you have ever done it yourself, and dear readers, I have, you discover at some point early in on your career that even if you don’t understand the issues or material, you can still produce a plausible ‘story’ by just picking out some numbers, facts etc. from the source material, interspersed with a handful of quotes at what look like appropriate points. Every journalist I have ever known, has admitted this mutual discovery to me.
There’s no there, there, but it qualifies as a ‘story’ for the purpose at hand. And if it’s ‘polished’ enough then possibly (you hope) readers will get through it without realizing how little meat there is to it. And until recently, it worked just fine for most journalists. Even if the readers were vaguely dissatisifed, where else could they go?
If you as the reader know anything about the subject at hand, you can often see that they haven’t a clue but have just produced a piece of ‘journalism’ full of formulaic phrases (“for now …” is my favorite) according to what they learned in class. Certainly, nobody expects a reporter to know exactly as much about finance, medicine, etc. as the people they interview (otherwise, they would likely be doing those jobs themselves) but the depth of ignorance is in many cases appalling.
The reporting on energy is a particularly sad case — it hasn’t changed much since the 70s. I believe Mr. Ibrahim would agree. A senator from an oil-producing state (bad); a quote from an environmentalist group (good), well, there’s your story. Or, the lights go out because utilities don’t invest enough (bad); when the utilities do want to invest, which would be in power lines or power plants to produce and distribute more electricity (that’s what they invest in!), both are bad (brain cancer! coal!) Clean natural gas is ok, as long as you don’t drill for it (bad), move it through a pipeline (bad) or deliver it via LNG tanker (really bad, it might blow up in a fireball).
Have a look at this formulaic doozy from the SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/10/MNI6116RIU.DTL&hw=energy&sn=002&sc=881
No wonder people in the Bay area can’t think straight about energy issues.
How many of those who cover energy as part of or all of their job for the mainstream media (I don’t mean Platts or the like) have read EPACT 2005 or the accompanying documents such as CRS studies, FERC and NRC reports etc.?
EPACT is free online and flawed though it is (five years in the making), the nearest thing we have to an official national energy policy, and its basic goal is to raise the supply of all kinds of energy in the US (fossil fuels and nuclear now, because that’s what we have the most of immediately at hand) while also supporting solar, wind, fuel cells, efficiency and the like as PART of the effort. Reading it and all those other documents would, however, mean slogging through thousands of pages of dense technical, legal and tax issues. Too hard! Call your friendly local environmental group!
Medicine is the same:
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/05/28/how-do-american-journalists-cover-medicine-not-well/?mod=googlenews_wsj
The bottom line is that most reporters are clever rather than truly smart; quick with catch-words and “nutshell” concepts rather than outstanding writers or thinkers. Far too many of them also relied on bluster, bravado, the ignorance of the public, the near-monopoly on channels of information, the comfortable assurance of groupthink, the absence of any oversight except for ‘professional discipline’ (uh-huh), and the power to batter and destroy people who didn’t cooperate with them. Far too many of them were mean-spirited, small-minded and resentful of people who were accomplishing things in the world, while they merely wrote about it.
Their problem is that, media sneering aside, Americans have more education and access to more information than before. So, the people they cover know more about the subject in most cases than they do, and many of the consumers of news know much more than they used to. To some extent, the journalist is superfluous and even gets in the way — confusing the issues with their ignorance rather than illuminating.
Nonetheless, they were good enough for the traditional media, since until recently, there were few other ways to disseminate knowledge quickly and widely. Their shortcomings had to be endured by the public as the price of getting any information, in any timely way, at all.
But, and of course I am not the first to say it, say I want to know about Congress. I can read the text of proposed legislation online, plus staff analyses of its impact and cost, free; read Congressional testimony and watch many of the hearings on live webcasts by the Congress or regulatory agencies themselves or on C-Span (both of which are often archived for some time if I’m busy at the moment); see the Federal Register and the Congressional Record online every day. I can get all of the facts and comments, not just those a reporter chooses to give me.
So why do I need the LA Times to have 47 staff (!) in its DC bureau. Of course, I don’t.
