Not a howl but a keen

I hardly ever respond to comments in my comments section (am I bad if I admit that sometimes I don’t even do more than hastily skim the comments?) and it is even more unusual for me to respond to one of them with a blog post, but Joe Marshall at Straight Shot of Politics made a comment in this post wherein he stipulated that all of my complaints about the press were justified and then wrote:

You have told us, sometimes in exhaustive and comprehensive detail, where the news is done wrong.-But where is it done right?

I thought it was a fair question. Not a great one, but a fair one. And I’ll answer it with a question, too: Who says it’s being done “right” anywhere? I never said it.

I know that Joe – who was offline for a few months and therefore likely missed my thoughts on televised news which were guest-posted at CBS’s blog, The Public Eye – is probably waiting for me to sing the praises of of FOX news, or shout a hosanna to Rush Limbaugh, or whatever. I don’t watch Fox news. I don’t watch any televised news unless it is breaking, because it all mostly makes me want to vomit, as I have said before. I am beginning to hate ALL female newscasters who do that “speaking through closed lips from the back of my throat” voice as they over-enunciate, and – with the exception (this will surprise some) of Bob Schieffer, who amuses me – I just can’t abide the “anchors” at any desk, be they bubble-lipped cable hussies or blow-dried smirking men, or that latest invention, the dramatic gods and goddess-not-of-newsreading-but-of-newsfeeling.

And no, my disgust isn’t merely based on such superficials as over-fluffed hair, over-arched eyebrows or over-pursed lips (of either sex), either, I mostly find their content to be predictable. slanted and (lately) kinda snotty. If I try to watch Chris Matthews’ obsessive-compulsive spittle or Norah O’ Donnell’s constipated expression, I end up feeling like the Lord has sent me more than I can bear, and I go looking for Law and Order, SVU. I miss Jerry Orbach.

And I rarely listen to talk radio. In order to be coaxed into turning on talk-radio, I have to be in my car, without a good CD to listen to or an interesting kid to talk to, and with radio stations offering up one over-melisma’d tuneless warble after another. When I do tune in, though, I will listen to Marc Simone or Rush or Paul Harvey, and not to Hannity or Ingraham…sometimes I listen to Mark Levin, but, truthfully, that’s more of a morbid-fascination thing. It’s like I hear him screaming and I just keep listening to see whether he or one of his callers is going to bust a blood vessel on the air.

So, now that I have told you that I dislike “right wing” news as much as “left wing,” (ahem, excuse me – “real” news or “mainstream” news) I will answer your question.

The blogosphere-combined-with-internet is not “news done right” because it is a sort of transitionary-still-evolving plant that is on its way to becoming something entirely new – whether it will be a nourishing growth that feeds the world or a many-tentacled one that strangles it remains to be seen. For now, I like it – it’s helpful. I get the stories from all over the world, I read ’em and then I rely on my own gut, my own common sense, my own memory, what I know about history and what I can get from reliable references on the internet or my own 17 bookshelves.

By that I mean, I can read something like EJ Dionne’s absurd rant, and my own memory says, “waiiiit a second, I REMEMBER how that went down, and it wasn’t what he’s saying…” I can read the NY Times rabid editorial of November 15 and again, my memory kicks in – then I can go check things out, look at back-articles and find that yes…what I REMEMBERED to be true was actually true – and it’s all in the NY TIMES own archives – even if the current editorial board of the Times would rather not acknowledge it.

More than that, I can take the news I am reading from France, Egypt, Peru, England, etc, and then go to discussion forums on both the left and the right and see what they’re saying – what makes sense, what doesn’t, and the folks posting there will bring in new references and resources, or they’ll add their own personal knowledge of how a thing is done; then I can go to blogs, particularly blogs run by people with especial knowledge, be it in law, or medicine, or media or guns, or psychology, or cars, and I can read their stuff too, and learn and think and digest some more.

But that’s time-consuming. It’s fun and entertaining, but it’s a lot of work to feel like you’ve got a handle on what’s being presented to you. It would be so much easier if the news was just being “done right.”

There are some journalists, even in the NY Times, whom I enjoy reading and respect, because they seem capable of writing without grinding axes – Laurie Goodstein and John Burns come immediately to mind, and I like the folks at CBS’s Public Eye quite a little bit, particularly Vaughn Ververs, who seems to be completely committed to being balanced, and is bold enough to raise the cynical eye at pretty much everyone. Dick Meyer is pretty good at that, too (how funny, most of my praise is for CBS!)

I will go so far as to say, right now, that Public Eye may come the closest to what I think of as the news “done right.” But it is at this point an anomaly in the news industry. It may be a little gem, but it is an abberant one, valuable but rare and unlikely to be repeated. It does what a news outlet is supposed to do: puts a story out there – without spinning it or framing it or feeding it to your subconscious – allowing you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions.

I have a memory – maybe it was just an illusion, after all, but it seems real – that once upon a time, that’s what the news was – a reporting of the story, without manipulation or undue interest, without passion or prejudice. I could be wrong. I know the press was pretty unfair to Abe Lincoln, and old Walter Cronkite was a bit manipulative…but in all my years of newsreading and watching, I have never seen what I am seeing these days and I am unapologetic for wanting the press to be something that approximates the ideal of neutral professionalism that I believed in – a professionalism that they once seemed to be able to project, even if they had to bite back their bile to do it. My very high regard for the craft of journalism, which I think of as a NOBLE thing, for it is the craft that tempted such giants as Winston Churchill and G.K. Chesterton and and E.B. White, is one of the reasons I am so admittedly obsessed with the current state of it. It is also why I am so very GRIEVED by what I am seeing.

You mistake me, friend…the sound you hear from me is not the howl of a frustrated alley cat…it is the keen of a mourner who cannot, cannot, cannot believe what has become of her beloved.