Low-profile acts of actual journalism
My esteem for Glenn Greenwald knows no bounds. Salon.com's expert on all matters related to American civil liberties is the most indispensable journalist America has produced possibly in my lifetime. If I didn't have so much self-love, this blog would be turned over to just a day-after-day-after-day link to what he's writing.This afternoon Greenwald published an indictment of recent actions of The New York Times that, to me, is so eviscerating of the newspaper's credibility-- so entirely damning and shaming of the paper's failed mission of journalistic duty-- that he's almost got me petitioning the publisher to close the shop. These are dark days indeed for "the gray lady"-- caught suppressing information about a secret war on Pakistan at the Obama Administration's request, and recasting on its pages murdering C.I.A. operatives and private military war profiteers as "diplomats."
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I watched the February installment of HBO's "Real Sports" program this weekend, and the television news magazine did an interesting feature story about the popular website-- and one of my favorites-- Deadspin. The justified refrain of Deadspin's writers and editors in regards to journalistic ethics and our modern media, combined with Greenwald's insights today, helped make it clear to me for the first time how our system now works-- whether we're talking about sports reporting or reporting in the political news media. Journalists like those at Gawker Media/Deadspin or WikiLeaks are the ones that actually confront the newsmakers with unpopular information and go about doing the duty of the Fourth Estate without regard to their personal "access to power." The traditional news services-- your city's news daily, for example, or each and every broadcast and cable television channel except for Democracy Now!-- revere and protect the political and corporate elite, fully complicit in the cover-up or in the spinning of the news.
When a blog, or an anti-secrecy group like WikiLeaks (none of whom are considered by the establishment media groups to be their "equals"), uncovers a cover-up, these traditional news organizations then have de facto permission to report the secret-- but you can be sure that they'll suppress it right up until the point that one of the "less ethical" sites does the dirty work of speaking truth to power. This is the playbook for the divulging of important government secrets, like the ones Greenwald or WikiLeaks concern themselves with, all the way down to Deadspin's sports stories, such as a certain Hall of Fame quarterback's habitual sexual harassment of female team employees.
A New York Times or a TV network news division will often possess knowledge beforehand of these more "sordid" stories-- and with strong evidence to boot, but the release of the particular details would be so inconvenient or embarrassing to the power elites they cover that it might jeopardize a reporter's insular access to that person, and the prestige (and dollars) that that access affords.
Once somebody else has displayed the journalistic fortitude to deliver the story, it's full speed ahead to follow-up for everybody else. Maybe this is the way it's always destined to be in the industry when there are such sharp divisions of economic scale and financial compensation, but which of these two groups are actually engaging in journalism, and which group is more indispensable to an engaged citizenry. Theirs was not meant to be a profession of secrets or compliance.
posted by CM @ 8:29 PM
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