Making Themselves Irrelevant
Saturday 21 July 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized
One of the many ways that the media is quickly making itself irrelevant. Matt Welch at USA Today:
Even before most Americans had found out that a dozen moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., had been pitilessly gunned down, allegedly by a young man named Jim Holmes, ABC News reporter Brian Ross was already linking the massacre to an odd if familiar suspect: the Tea Party.
“There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year,” Ross reported on Good Morning America. “Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”
There were at least 24 other James Holmeses in the greater Denver area, it turned out; the Tea Partier in question was more than twice the shooter’s age, and Ross and his bosses were impelled to issue an embarrassing correction and apology within a few hours. They were not alone.
The conservative muckraking site Breitbart.com, after criticizing Ross and interviewing the man he recklessly accused on live television of being the possible trigger man on a grisly mass murder, ran with a story that Holmes “could be a registered Democrat.” Or not; the site later concluded that “the suspect may, in fact, not have been registered to vote.”
Politicizing tragedy with thinly sourced and even baseless speculation appears to be a permanent feature of our media age.
And as long as journos have incentives, financial or otherwise, to create the news by always being first to “report” something, however speculative, they’ll continue to make themselves irrelevant to people who seek truth and journalistic integrity in reporting. Most people don’t particularly care what a panel of “experts” have to say, especially about a story in which NO facts have yet been reported, but as long as 24 hour cable news stations have the need to fill 24 hours worth of television programming to justify their generous advertising, and websites have incentives to drive traffic to their sites by being the first to “report” something, we’re going to have speculative journalism that is incapable of telling us what it doesn’t know, rather than trying to shape our opinions based on what they want to have happened in order to fit in with their narrative about the nature of the American socio-political polity. As long as journalists and professional muckrakers feel that the need to convince the American people that the Tea Party is a bunch of violent rednecks ready to revolt on O’LimBeckBart gives their marching orders, or that OWS really is dangerous, is a more important goal than simply reporting the things that have happened and are verifiable, we’re going to have douchebaggery in journalism.
In that light, I have a news flash for journalists: your agenda is NOT more important than the news you are trying to report. Either get it right, or shut the fuck up. Anything else is just noise to be filtered out. Yes, mistakes happen; but ABC reporting that the shooter was likely a Tea Party member, or Breitbart reporting that he was likely a registered Democrat and part of OWS are not mistakes. They’re your hopes of who is responsible so that your narrative can be “proven”, yet presented as fact. And, frankly, no one gives a fuck about your agenda.
2012-07-21 » madlibertarianguy