Once upon a time in America, there was a profession called journalism. Aspiring members of the guild attended quality “J” schools like Columbia and Northwestern, usually after serving undergraduate apprenticeships in such impractical disciplines as history, political science, or literature, where they encountered the basics of the human experience and imbibed our Western cultural inheritance.
Journalists in this long-ago time were not only trained to use the language, an arcane skill no longer in much demand, they were also taught to value fact-based reporting, standards of reasonable objectivity, and the pursuit of truth. They learned as well to separate news from opinion and rumors from reality.
Where have these journalists gone? you might well ask. There are still a few around — at fortified redoubts like the New York Times, for example, and (I hasten to add) the journal you are reading. But judging from this winter’s media feeding frenzy, beginning with the January circus dubbed “Deflationgate,” respectable representatives of the news trade have become few and far between. They’ve been replaced, especially in television news and commentary, by practitioners of what can only be described as “gotcha” journalism, whose stock in trade is hearsay, innuendo, and half-truth, served up at the level of the lowest common denominator.
The grossly exaggerated, one-sided coverage of the new year’s initial non-story, the “scandal” involving the New England Patriots’ supposed illegitimate advancement to the Super Bowl via doctored footballs, is a case in point. The smartest coach and brightest quarterback around stood accused, essentially, of being dumb — dumb, because they chose to cheat against a team they could have beaten six times a week and twice on Sunday; dumb, because they committed their dastardly deed in the playoffs in front of an audience of millions and the focused attention of the NFL hierarchy; dumb, because their organization had experienced a brush with technical rule violations a decade earlier and needed to be squeaky clean. The entire episode strained credulity.
Such controversies are nothing new in professional sports, of course. Recall the famous “sneakers game” of 1934, when the New York Giants won the NFL championship wearing unorthodox footwear that gave them an added advantage. And did the immortal Green Bay Packers end Don Hutson set all those prewar receiving records because of the slimmer, passer-friendly ball introduced the same year?
Nevertheless, the Patriots’ Bill Belichick, the acknowledged best coach of his era, was vilified in the press and portrayed as an evil genius on the order of Osama bin Laden. In the end, it all came to nothing, as the self-described journalists who perpetrated what A.J. Liebling would have called a “no-news” story, probably suspected it would. But in the meantime, it filled the news hole for a time, stirred up the public, and allowed the chattering classes to chatter. Now, the collective media can move on to the next big thing.
Most of the upcoming big things, it turns out, are also scandals, but here the discussion turns serious because we’re talking mostly about political scandals, not sports scandals — life, in other words, not games. February’s juiciest scandal du jour was Oregon Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber’s forced resignation over his fiancée’s questionable lobbyist dealings, which involved suspected (though as yet unverified) influence peddling. By all accounts an excellent public servant, Kitzhaber, who was not personally implicated, was brought down by a reporter for the Willamette Week, one Nigel Jaquiss, who specializes in the interplay between sex and politics; his previous victims included Neil Goldschmidt, another Oregon governor, and Sam Adams, a former Portland mayor.
USA Today, which hailed Jaquiss not long ago as a great “investigative reporter” on the basis of his quasi-prurient exposés, sees no difference between this sort of journalism and the agreed-upon gold standard of investigative work, the 1972-73 Woodward-and-Bernstein reporting on President Richard Nixon’s attempt to hijack the Constitution. It’s all good, so why bother enlightening the public about real threats to democracy, when you can just titillate for fun and profit. Upending ethically or morally challenged pols is easier and more monetarily rewarding than taking on the entrenched economic forces that run the system and control our politics.
It’s tempting to credit this change in journalistic atmospherics to Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born, right-wing press magnate whose News Corp. brought Britain’s sensationalist tabloid style in print and broadcasting (Think the New York Post and Fox News) to America in the 1970s and ’80s. He’s unquestionably lowered the bar for what is acceptable journalism in this country.
But the truth is Murdoch is only the most high-profile exemplar of American corporate journalism’s contemporary shoddiness. It’s really the end product of a long downhill slide that culminated in the sloppy, biased coverage surrounding the lead-up to the Iraq war, with Saddam Hussein, Hitler’s stand-in, variously accused of imaginary terrorist connections and the possession of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction by a media horde hot for a shooting war. The Bush administration’s neocon propagandists needed to do little besides drop hints; an uncritical, group-thinking yellow press took it from there — with tragic results.
On the home front, a classic example of the negligence of contemporary herd journalism was the rise of the tea-party movement that has colored national politics for the better part of a decade. Originally, the tea partiers could have caucused in a phone booth, but sensing newsworthy possibilities, the mainstream press latched on to their inane cause and ran with it; the clown show that subsequently emerged to dominate our public discourse was, like the Iraq war, the pure creation of an irresponsible, incompetent mass media.
And so it goes. The template has now been set, and all the news that’s fit to frighten (or alarm or distract) — about Ebola epidemics, about ISIS coming to America, about nukes in Iran, about the bankruptcy of Social Security, about doomsday deficits, about killer storms, about no oil or too much oil — is now grist for a hype-addicted media. We may have to find a convenient country to invade to calm the hysteria and ease our fears and frustrations.
It makes you pine for more harmless stories about deflated footballs - - or for the days when Saturday Night Live “reporters” assured us that deceased General Francisco Franco was indeed “still dead.”
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2015
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