What Ails American Media

Unless you’ve been living under a rock — or obsessed only with the fate of the NBA — you have heard something about the “Scott Thomas” affair.  If you want to read a bit about the Right side of the blogosphere, this is as good a place to begin as any.

But I ran across an interesting perspective on it (HT: Redstate.com) from someone who is not part of the Right.  Read the whole thing — it’s absolutely fascinating.  For example, who knew that there was even a job called ‘literary semiotician’?  In any event, semiotician John Barnes lays out reasons why he thinks the entire story was cooked up by a MFA writing student with a serious case of masculine inferiority complex.  But then he addresses how the fraud (if it is a fraud) could have come to pass:

Now, how did New Republic get so badly fooled?  One might point out they have rather a record of being badly fooled – they were after all the home of Stephen Glass, and one of their editors was Michael Straight who belonged to the same Soviet spy ring as Kim Philby.  But I think a more proximate explanation is simply to look at Franklin Foer’s [editor of The New Republic] biography.  He’s only 31, and before becoming editor, he was at The New Republic for eight years.  A bit of arithmetic tells you that he hasn’t done much else.

Or look at this interview from when he took the job; you’re not dealing with a guy with any broad experience of life here – he’s essentially had one job in his life and he thinks about policy, not news.  One of his major goals as the new editor seems to be to reverse Peter Beinart’s pro-Iraq War stance, and to build up readership, which even a wonk such as himself can recognize will mean talking about the world we live in rather than the policies he plays with.

So here’s our boy Foer.  New on the job.  Trying to move away from policy, which he understands (or at least does a credible job of manipulating the signs for) to reporting and attracting an audience, which he doesn’t. Hasn’t been outside the little world of big thoughts, but knows he’s got to go there if the magazine that has been his whole working life is to survive.

And here’s the “Scott Thomas” article, and it’s all about manly stuff, stuff people like to read about (at least more than they like to read about subtle adjustments at Treasury or State).  And here’s Foer’s chance for a little bit of performative speech (semiotics-talk for “speech that causes an immediate change in the world just by being spoken” – like “I now pronounce you man and wife,” “I ask Congress to declare that since yesterday at midnight the United States of America has been at war with the Empire of Japan,” or a shouted racial epithet on a busy city street.)  Anybody have any trouble seeing what happened? (emphasis mine)

Not me.  And that is truly what ails American media.  Too many of our journalists and editors think their function in our society is to do performative speech.  That through their writings, through their words, through their speech, they are going to Change the World.

I’ve met my fair share of these people at Yale.  Hell, I was one of them.  Earnest, brilliant young men and women who really and earnestly believed that our task was to Enlighten the Unenlightened, and through our Truth Spoken to Power, Change the World.  Sure, you have the likes of Mary Mapes who are nothing but political hacks who happen to work inside media organizations.  But for the most part, I think the journalists are just idealistic people who want to change the world, and see journalism as their tool for shaping the world we live in.  At least back in school, hanging out at dark coffee bars debating Kantian ethics or the latest developments in world politics, these people were a heck of a lot more interesting than the proto-bankers who could care less about the world except for how they could make millions in it.

Their heroes are people like Cronkite whose declaration of non-support for the Vietnam War affectd policy, and of course Woodward and Bernstein.  They are like attorneys who just know what happened, and only need to find the evidence to convince a jury of their version of events.  Did tobacco company executives knowingly market to children?  Of course they did — it’s just a matter of finding that incriminating memo, or the right witness.

Trouble is… that isn’t journalism.  At its very basic, journalism is simply telling the story as it actually happened.  All humans are fallible, and all humans are biased.  The craft of journalism ostensibly is to try and strip out as much of the bias and fallibility as possible.  Hence the layers of verification, editors who want corroboration, etc. etc.  The overriding GOAL of a journalist should be the same as a physicist — to discover the truth.  If evidence supports one’s hypothesis, great; if not, well, that’s too bad for my hypothesis.  What ails American media is that they act too much like lawyers and not enough like scientists.

Who knows if the whole Scott Thomas story is actually true or not?  Time and investigation will tell, although all of the evidence suggests that The New Republic got fooled and fooled badly.  Hopefully this isn’t another case of Rathergate of political partisans with an agenda.  Even if it is not, however, the fact remains that until American media has a Sister Souljah moment with itself and realizes that their job is simply to report the facts to the best of their ability, our civilization continues its slide toward darkness.

-TS