Reporters Errant: The Origins of Bushwah

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Thu Apr 19 23:00:04 PDT 2007


<http://www.fredoneverything.net/Press1.shtml>

Fred On Everything 

Reporters Errant
The Origins of Bushwah

 

Everyone and his pet goat has noticed that the media do a poor job of
covering the news. The facts frequently aren't facts, the reporters
conspicuously don't understand their subjects, and the spin is annoying.
Why?

For lots of reasons. To begin with, newspapers necessarily attract certain
types of people. To get the news, reporters have to be aggressive, willing
to push their way over others and to ask questions people don't want to
answer. They have to work well under the pressure. Because deadlines rule
newsrooms, they often have no choice but to write superficial,
half-understood stories. A reporter can't tell the editor, "Yeah, somebody
did just nuke Capitol Hill, but I think we should wait to write about it
until next week, when we have the facts."

Further, reporters have to submerge themselves daily in tedious details of
unimportant stories about trivial people: Who wrote the check used to buy
the fur coat that was obviously if not provably part of the bribe from the
lobbyist of the trash-collectors' union to the mayor's wife? (Who really
gives a damn?) Most reporting is neither interesting nor exciting.

It requires the soul of a CPA in a hurry, and reporters indeed amount to
high-speed fact-accountants. The job quickly weeds out those who don't want
to be, who aren't comfortable with the compromises and pressure.

The nature of people is that some qualities do not often coexist with
others. For example, the aggressive and detail-minded are seldom studious
or contemplative. Fact-accountants are not theorists. The cast of mind of
reporters is concrete, not abstract, their mental horizons short. Reporters
aren't stupid--most are quick and some are very bright indeed--but they do
not naturally look at the big picture. They do not, for example, approach a
new beat by reading books about it. Intellectual they ain't.

To put it a bit too succinctly, the qualities needed to get the news
preclude an understanding of it.

Since most of the people in any newsroom fit this pattern, a culture has
evolved which supports the reporters in their natural inclinations. It is a
staple of reportorial philosophy that one does not particularly have to
know a field to cover it. Any reporter, goes the thinking, should, given a
week or two to fill the Rolodex, be able to cover anything. Which in fact
he can, barely: Within a few days an experienced reporter can knock out
copy that usually is not ridiculously wrong. Neither is it very good. But
that is good enough.

A concrete example: A reporter assigned to the military beat and told to
cover, say, submarines, will pull everything he can find on submarines from
Nexis and the morgue. He will learn who in the Pentagon deals in
submarines, who builds them, what the armed-services committees on the Hill
think about submarines, whose districts profit from the contracts.

He will not read books on the design of submarines, their history and modes
of employment. He will probably never quite learn what they are for:
plugging the GIUK Gap, for instance. Further, reporters seem to be obligate
technological illiterates: Our example will not learn about phased arrays,
convergence zones, the relation of the aperture of a towed array to its
angular resolution. He won't have the background to understand such things
even should he try. So he will go for politics, which he understands.

In short, he will learn everything about the politics and bureaucracy of
submarines, and nothing about submarines.

The fundamental ignorance leaves him at the mercy of his sources. Since he
will have no independent idea which of competing claims about a new
submarine make sense, he will have to decide instead which sources seem to
him more trustworthy. Seeming trustworthy is an art much studied in
Washington.

Now consider the circumstances under which reporters work. Newspapers with
few exceptions are understaffed. A computer magazine can have a writer
specializing in CPUs and microcircuitry, another in software, a third in
disk drives. By contrast a newspaper will have a reporter who covers
Science-and-Technology. The job is a bit like specializing in practically
everything. It ain't doable. The field is too grand. It can be approximated
by the very rare reporter with a strong technical bent and a lifetime of
reading texts in biochemistry, vector analysis, neurology, and so on. These
usually go to technical publications.

Back to our example, him of the submarines. His beat will be The Military.
He can't cover it. The military is a vast, sprawling canvas of different
services, weapons, missions, bases, much of it relying on exotic and highly
disparate technologies. Further it is all over the world. The reporter
can't go all over the world.

So he will cover the Pentagon, which is convenient, and military politics,
which he can believe he understands. They aren't the military. But they're
coverable.

And here we come to a governing principle of newspaper journalism: Do what
you have time to do. This is why you see stories reporting that some policy
shop, say the National Coalition of Concerned Physicists (I think I made
that up) says that we are all in danger from radioactive emissions from
rutabagas. Maybe we are; maybe we aren't. The reporter doesn't have time
or, perhaps, knowledge to find out.

To save labor, journalism has decided that the issuing of a report is in
itself a story, not the beginning of one. The reporter therefore doesn't
have to know enough to determine whether the report is correct. He merely
has to announce its existence. The published account is inherently biased,
even if the reporter covers himself by adding a one-sentence rejoinder from
the rutabaga farmers. The important thing is that he gets a story easily,
which is all he has time to do.

The policy shop understands all of this, and takes advantage of it.

Them's some realities of the news racket. We'll look at other from time to
time.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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