A tip of the hat to CBS

I have several times tipped the hat to Dick Meyer over at CBS, as being a journalist who – while quick to defend his profession, which is a healthy thing – is also in possession of a singular gift of balance and intellectual honesty.

Meyer is the Editorial Director of The Public Eye, CBS’s new experimentation in blogging, and he has put together a feisty, likeable (and blogroll-worthy) product, heavy on media-issues, but thus far free of the lapses into gum-chewing and insulated naivete which plague ABC’s The Note. (“No one who voted for Al Gore will be voting for Bush in 2004!”)

Yesterday Meyer posted a thoughtful and slightly combative piece on the Mars-and-Venus differences between journalists and bloggers, taking umbrage in particular at Jeff Jarvis who wrote (in a piece dissecting Tim Russert’s second interview with Aaron Broussard), “Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity.”

Wrote Myer:

Facts are not a commodity.

Anybody cannot get the facts.

True facts are very hard to come by.

And anyone who doubts that truly has no respect for journalism and reporting.

However legitimate all the calls for greater honesty, transparency, openness, bias-self-revelation and humility are, they are essentially insincere unless they acknowledge and empathize with some basic realities about journalism — its limits, challenges and basic standards.

Why can’t anybody get the facts? Because lots of times people — sources, officials, real people — lie to you. Sometimes they shoot at you. Getting the facts about what’s going on in, say, a 200-square-mile part of southern Louisiana that’s flooded is very difficult. Getting the facts in a murder case is difficult. You get the idea.

Good reporting of true facts is not something to denigrate. Some of the best service the blogosphere has performed is simple fact-checking or fixing — and bloggers are rightly not shy in pointing that out. But they are — can be — miserly in according respect to the old-fashioned geezers who “just don’t get it” and continue produce the commodity of facts. Without those facts there wouldn’t be much to blog about.

The MSM may be equally guilty for showcasing debate, sound-bite food fights and on-demand editorializing. But really, that happens mostly on a slice of cable television, talk radio and op-ed sections. Most of the press is spending most of its time trying to get facts.

Since Meyer invited blogging Martians to respond to his Venusian smackdown, and since I am brave-and-stupid…

I can testify to the difficulty of being a nobody blogger trying to nail down facts, and the serious advantage a newsgatherer has when they can call Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center, declare they are calling from CBS news, and get someone credible on the phone to confirm or deny a rumor that is flying through the internet. In my case, I tried to confirm that Mayfield did in fact warn New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to evacuate his town literally days before Katrina hit Louisiana. Predictably, I got nowhere in my efforts, and eventually the mainstream press did verify that “internet rumor.” When trying to collect facts from a source beyond Google and Nexis-Lexis, bloggers (unless they are so-called “Higher Beings” in the blogosphere) quite logically do not have the access of the mainstream press.

But it is precisely because the MSM does have premier access to sources and the patina of professionalim on their side that any evidence of journalistic laziness, of expedition-over-firm-exposition is really inexcusable. While many in the media spent last week patting themselves on the back for their Katrina coverage, what is slowly being revealed is that too often the press (in particular the cable news shows) offered sensationalistic rumors and gobs of soft-centered, chewy emotionalism, in the place of hard facts. And many stories, such as the revelations by both the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army that they were “loaded with provisions and ready to help” those trapped in the Superdome, but were prevented from doing so by the Louisiana State HSD, simply never got coverage beyond the blogs, leaving some to wonder if such a story could not be covered because it would not fit the “unmitigated disaster” framework, being very quickly constructed by the press, meant to hold the “and every bit of it can be blamed on Bush” tapestry.

To be fair, it is obviously exceedingly difficult to collect and verify facts when you are a reporter trying to make sense of what seems to be a scene from a Michael Bay disaster. But it is important, when reporting on a story of such magnitude, to be absolutely certain that your reports of “rapes and murders at the Superdome and snipers at the Stop-n-Shop” have some basis in reality. Trying to produce stories without access to hard facts, and trying to feed an insatiable monster of news consumption, the media presented rumor as fact, hammered it home with the high drama of on-air anchor meltdowns, and in the process created an atmosphere wherein the most egregious race cards were allowed to be played, and blame seemed to be allotted more by ideology than genuine incompetence. (And then the Oprah’s of the world simply lock in the stain, like dirt ground into a carpet.)

Still, given the dramatic nature of the story, the missed steps by the mainstream press would be much more understandable and forgivable were they not, even in these much more restive days, still occuring.

Yesterday, the Drudge report highlighted an article from 1998 wherein then-First Lady Hillary Clinton fretted about the impact of internet bloggers on the dissemination and veracity of news: “…Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?” she said.

“There used to be this old saying that the lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on,” Mrs. Clinton added. “Well, today, the lie can be twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed to find its boots.”

Having just seen the “editing” and “gate-keeping” functions of the mainstream media at their most ineffective during Katrina, which saw Andrea Mitchell immediately expounding on how the New Orleans levees broke “because President Bush has cut funding,” (it took a week for some in the press to sheepishly – and quietly – admit that Bush had allocated more money toward the levees than his predecessor) and having noted poor Byron Calame’s difficulties in getting Paul Krugman or the New York Times to ever acknowledge or correct their mistakes, (a fault the press really hates in George W. Bush) one wonders if President Bush does not share Mrs. Clinton’s concerns about the internet, and about the MSM, too.

The Mainstream Media is certainly Venus – beauteous and long-beloved. And the bloggers are undoubtedly scrappy, aggressive Mars. I think a big-media blog such as CBS’s Public Eye – particularly with a man of seemingly sterling integrity, like Dick Meyer at its helm – can go a long way toward keeping those two planets aligned and off the collision-course.

And I do think that Public Eye can even help teachable bloggers to learn about – and come to respect – the newsgathering process. It will remain to be seen whether the Venusian Mainstream Media will recognise the challenge fact-checking blogs present to them, which will mean holstering some of their overt biases in favor of balance, or if the Martians will continued to feel compelled to pull out their Acme Planet Vaporizors, point them toward Black Rock and its co-horts and shout “ka-boom!”

UPDATE: Both Ace and Maxed-Out Mama vote for ka-boom! And they make some very valid points. So do Sigmund, Carl and Alfred and Right Wing Nut House