The FCC Versus the Internet

Newspapers: The Credibility Question

By Alan Caruba

Of all the jobs I ever held, the ones I enjoyed the most were as a reporter for weekly and daily newspapers. Every day was different. You got to interview interesting people. You attended events. And then you got to write about all manner of things about which, as often as not, you had no clue.

As a rookie reporter in my early twenties, I learned “on the job” how a community was administered by a city council. I knew nothing about how businesses were run. On the subject of politics, I apparently was born a Democrat and liberal, so I didn’t question these biases. Mostly, reporting never seemed like “work.” You talked to people. You took notes. And you could even win awards on the state level because, if there is one thing the journalism community loves to do, it is to give out awards.

For example, have you ever wondered why The New York Times, Washington Post, and a handful of other dailies always seem to win Pulitzers? Occasionally some unknown reporter from some Midwest newspaper may pick up a Pulitzer, but it is almost always the same dailies. In 2008, the Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes out of fourteen categories, one of which didn’t give any award. The New York Times won two and the local reporting prize went to a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The trade magazine of newspapers is Editor & Publisher. In better times, it was fat with advertising. These days it is as thin as your local daily. Its writers are uniformly liberal in their outlook, but occasionally they rise from their stupor and wonder out loud why people no longer trust newspapers like they once did.

Greg Mitchell, E&P’s editor, recently noted that, “When the watchdogs are asleep, we all get robbed.” It bothered him greatly (me, too) that one in four Americans think that the “faux” news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert has replaced “real” news as viable outlets. From my occasional observations, both Comedy Channel shows offer the same liberal bias as the mainstream media.

C-Span recently aired a Writers Guild panel with several of the writers for the fake news shows and they unanimously said they regarded the shows as “entertainment” and seemed wary of the notion that anyone would consider their content as real news. This was disingenuous. They are well aware of the way they influence viewer’s perceptions of real events and personalities.

The stupidity level of too many Americans is demonstrated by the way they apparently are having difficulty differentiating between the idiocy offered by Stewart and Colbert, and what passes for news on the front and other pages of their daily newspaper. Stewart gained attention when he attacked the alleged financial pundit, Jim Cramer of CNBC, for having no idea why the nation lurched into a financial crisis.

The problem with Mitchell’s citation of Stewart is that, with few exceptions, just about the entire cadre of those assigned to cover business topics and all of those covering Congress rarely, if ever, identified the government as the chief culprit in the meltdown.

None cited the government’s interference in the housing market with laws intended to make owning a home a right that even low-income citizens could enjoy. They did not notice the rise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, owning fifty percent of all the mortgages made initially by banks and mortgage loan firms. Why was that? Because the government required them to lend billions in sub-prime loans. Then these two “government entities” took those bad loans, bundled them together, and sold them as “securitized” loans to hedge funds and others. They were essentially worthless. The banks got stuck with a lot of “toxic paper.”

Mitchell wrote that journalists essentially failed to adequately report about the Iraq War and the financial meltdown. As regards the former, I think the criticism is unfair. They reported what the government told them. They had few opportunities to determine if the intelligence being cited was accurate and we are all pretty much conditioned to believe the CIA and other government agencies. Even Colin Powell believed them enough to make the case for war in the United Nations.

As regards the financial meltdown, Mitchell is right. There were ample warnings, particularly in the financial press such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, as well as whole books written on the subject of the imbalances and risks inherent in the government’s role the housing market.

As Mitchell pointed out, “The media miss stories all the time, always have, always will, and there’s nothing to be ashamed about in that—you can only do so much, especially in a time of slashed newsroom staff. But to miss a story of this enormity, with consequences that will echo for decades, only adds weight to the warnings of doom for the ‘old’ media.”

Ironically, it is warnings of doom that have always dominated the “news.” To this day they still write about “global warming” despite ample evidence that the Earth has been cooling for a decade! Even the environmental groups that have foisted this hoax on us are quietly advising one another to change their terminology as the public grows wary of their lies.

The issue is credibility and the “old” media has been losing it now for years. The advent of the Internet, lively news and opinion websites, and bloggers, has released countless experts in various fields to write and be read regarding issues involving climate, immigration, national security, education, foreign affairs, politics, and countless other topics that touch our lives.

I no longer get my local daily delivered in the morning. And long before I stopped delivery, I had become painfully aware of how biased and often astonishingly uninformed or misinformed its reporting had become.

That’s particularly sad for me as I genuinely love newspapers. I will tell you this, however, after spending most of my working life as a public relations counselor, I have long since concluded that there would be no “news” if those of us providing it weren’t on the job.

In the end, the reporter’s job is not to trust us or any other source without personally verifying what we provide. As corny as it may seem, I always told clients that anything other than the truth would come back to bite them.

There’s an old newsroom piece of advice to which I still adhere. "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

The Shortest Honeymoon on Record

By Alan Caruba

This is likely to be the shortest “honeymoon” on record for a new administration.

The news that former Senator Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name from consideration to be the Secretary of Health is another bombshell to hit. The news that the new Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner, had problems doing his own tax return just barely skated by the confirmation process. Grownups knew that he had cheated on his taxes until he was caught.

Whoever is nominated for Health and Human Services, they are going to have to convince Americans that a government that couldn’t respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina is perfectly competent to take over the nation’s health care system. Good luck with that!

Meanwhile, just below the radar screen, Nancy Killefer, who failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes on household help, withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government.

The only comparable meltdown I can recall was Bill Clinton’s first weeks in office when he set off the “gays in the military” bomb that went so terribly wrong for him so terribly fast that he scrambled to come up with “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to get away from it.

President Obama’s decision to give his first formal interview to Al-Arabia, a major Middle Eastern television channel, did not go well. He came off as so weak that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fell all over himself to get to the nearest microphone to demand that the new administration apologize for past “crimes” against Iran. Not a good start for a man who had already been described as “a house Negro” by Osama bin Laden’s right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Overriding everything else, however, is the astonishing $819 billion “stimulus” bill that doesn’t promise to stimulate anything except the Democrat’s penchant for “earmarks” galore. Economists have denounced it along with anyone else who could find a media outlet.

Even the European Union let it be known that its “buy American” mandate was a very bad idea in the era of globalization where every nation’s economy depends on its ability to export goods, especially to the United States of America.

Nancy Pelosi has been running around defending millions for a program about sexually transmitted diseases and, by extension, insuring that fewer new Americans are born because in her view it would put a strain on the economy. Grandma Pelosi’s pronouncements have not been well received.

Cutting the Defense Department’s budget at a time the U.S. is still engaged in two wars has struck some people as a very bad idea, too. All we need now is another announcement by Sen. Harry Reid that “The war is lost.”

Just how tone-deaf are Obama and the Democrat leadership in Congress? And just how smart are those Republicans who have finally discovered their backbones by unanimously opposing the so-called stimulus bill? We may know soon enough when the 2010 elections are held.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these events has been the sudden collapse of Obamamania that extends even to the mainstream media who saw it as their duty to get him elected. Buyer’s remorse has set in very swiftly except among the totally brain-dead.

If the feeling spreads that Obama is simply unqualified for the job or overwhelmed by it, it is going to be one of the most difficult presidencies since that of Abraham Lincoln who wasn’t even sworn into office by the time several southern States had already met to declare they were seceding from the union.

The ultimate irony of all this is that Obama’s mastery of the Internet to raise gobs of money for his campaign is that he is only now discovering that the Internet community is equally capable of examining every aspect of every proposal he makes to “change” America into something most Americans don’t want.

Cheerful Remarks at the Funeral

By Alan Caruba

I have been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists for more than twenty-five years. Not long ago they sent me a lapel pin to commemorate my devotion to the organization which has, I must admit, mostly consisted of paying my annual dues. I have long since lost my youthful enthusiasm for the profession, but not for writing.

Like Mark Twain, I drifted into journalism because I was seriously opposed to having to actually work for a living. One of Twain’s classic quotes was “Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please.” A pretty fair definition of journalism in his times and ours.

I began to have early doubts about the rigors of being a journalist when, three months after I joined the staff of a weekly newspaper, the first I had ever worked for, the editor moved on to a daily and I was anointed the editor. That’s right. I went from rookie to head honcho in about 90 days. I virtually wrote that entire newspaper for well over a year or so and probably learned as much as any four-year curriculum at the Newhouse or Columbia School of Journalism. Then I moved on to a daily newspaper.

In the December issue of “Quill”, the SPJ magazine for its members, the new president, Dave Aeikens, used his page for a commentary titled, “Our profession is not dying, it’s just changing.” My thought was that he was making some cheerful remarks at a funeral. The name of the magazine tells you how outdated newspapers have become in a time when the digital version of your favorite source of news can be accessed in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia

Indeed, Aeikens mentioned highly trafficked news websites such as CNN and The New York Times, but managed to neglect mentioning that Fox News was in the top ten. And therein lies the problem. The new media is so wedded to its liberal agenda that it can’t even manage to mention that the newly indicted Governor of Illinois is a Democrat, but on the same day they did not fail to include that Larry Craig, the Senator who got into trouble for unseemly behavior in a men’s room, is a Republican.

The game is up for the mainstream press. The Internet constantly reveals how they distort the news and how they print news that is too often unsubstantiated boldfaced lies such as telling us that global warming is real or that the U.S. can be “energy independent”, or that “biofuels” made from food sources can replace gasoline, or that Barack Obama is a “centrist.”

The problem is that too many people for whom CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and similar liberal news outlets represent an accurate presentation of the world remain blissfully ignorant despite ample evidence that Congress has absolutely no idea what it can or should do as the latest burst economic “bubble” creates fear and panic. Thus, we are now hearing all the failed programs of the previous recessions and depressions being trotted out. Only the Republicans are opposing the most blatant raid on the public treasury in the history of the nation.

While news of failing daily newspapers is now a daily occurrence, permit me to suggest that the problem goes beyond the loss of classified advertising or slashed display advertising budgets. Certainly they play a major role, but the print newspapers have run slap-dash into a generation that has been rendered so ignorant of history, civics, science and other essential knowledge, and is so self-absorbed as to have entire web pages and blogs devoted to themselves and networks of other nitwits, that reading the daily newspaper is just so ”yesterday.”

That is why newspaper circulation and network news viewers are sliding into a black hole where real reporters and real editors are becoming obsolescent.

The question is who do you trust? And why should anyone but a nitwit trust a news media that almost universally bought into and anointed Barack Hussein Obama as the “Messiah”? How can anyone trust news magazines that picture him on their covers as the new Lincoln or the new FDR before he has even served a day in the Oval Office?

“The role journalists play in democracy is far too important to give up on it,” wrote Aeikens. He’s right, of course. Real journalists retain their skepticism. Real journalists do not write news releases. They write the news—what they see and record—and that includes those aspects of the news with which they may personally disagree, but which must be reported anyway.

This is why commentators like myself are finding an audience searching, searching, searching for some facts on which we hang our particular take of what is occurring. We’re the ones who, if we take ourselves seriously, actually document what we write.
Unlike myself who has a pedigree in journalism, most come to what they write based on expertise in many other areas of a very complex world.

I will predict that weekly newspapers will weather the storm breaking over the daily newspapers. The best news is always local news. Some smart fellow will set up a syndicate for news out of the state capital and feed the state’s weeklies.

The dailies will struggle for a while. Not all will die, but those that survive will not look like the present dailies with their endless cautionary tales of everything toxic that will kill you and every member of your family. Events in far-off places will be reduced to a few paragraphs in a single section. There will be some gossip, the movie and television listings. And, always, the obituaries.

The Internet will provide just about everything you need to know. It will do it faster. It will do it better. It will offer what today’s daily newspapers do not, a choice of whom to believe, not a predictable flow of recycled news releases and opinions.

In an era when the Nobel Prize is given to charlatans like Al Gore, people will still thirst for the truth and they are not finding much of it in today’s daily newspapers and news magazines.