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September 29, 2005
Getting it Wrong
Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and journalist, completely misunderstands the utility of press freedom to a free society. (hat tip: Francis Porretto) A local New Orleans official gave a tear-filled interview on Meet the Press, which cannot be conveyed with a summary. When Broussard, the local official, blamed the Federal government for the problems in response to Hurricane Katrina, Meet the Press host Tim Russert asked whether local government should not bear some responsibility. Broussard answered:
Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.[snip]
The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.
The problem with this story is that it is factually incorrect. The woman in question died the night of the hurricane, before the city even flooded, rather than a week later. Tim Russert did the right thing: he had Mr. Broussard back on the show to correct the record. When Broussard tried to dodge, Russert called him on it, and it is this that Jarvis objects to. In the process of that objection, though, Jeff Jarvis lets out the most astonishing statement on media responsibility and method since Rather's infamous "fake but accurate" remark:
Too much of journalism is turning this way today: If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we'll be safe; we're doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we're after.
Exactly, totally wrong.
- "No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts."
Nope. Reporters' jobs should be to collect and convey facts, so that everyone else can make up their mind on what story that conveys. Telling people the story, and selecting and arranging the facts that support your story, is called spin, and it's something that journalists tend to decry from politicians and other non-journalists. Taken to it's logical "fake but accurate" extreme, in fact, it's not spin so much as lying.
- "Anybody can get facts."
Anybody can get some of the facts local to them, and can report them on a blog or what have you, certainly. But I cannot get facts about things that are not local to me, or that I do not have the time to gather. Nor can I afford to sit at, say, every city council meeting in order to catch that one important moment that comes along after a decade of nothing interesting. Nor can I get, say, the world's foremost expert on levees to answer my call in the middle of a hurricane so that I can get my questions answered. Only an organization dedicated to the purpose of collecting those facts, willing and able to spend money to have hundreds or thousands of people actively collecting those facts, can get the facts in the non-local sense, or can get a significant amount of the facts on any given issue that is not geographically confined.
- "Facts are the commodity."
A commodity in great demand and short supply, in fact. Jarvis is right in that facts are a commodity that is used to form opinions. Where he is wrong is in the implication that we cannot form our own opinions, but must be handed them by a journalist.
- "The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we're after."
But the people will find the truth if given the facts. The people will fight for justice if they have the facts of justice denied. The people will learn lessons if they see everything about the events. And these will be more complete and generally more correct than if a particular person, organization, or trade decides that it should have complete control over matters of truth, justice and lessons. Indeed, the reason journalism is dying away in readership and viewership is that there are now alternatives, and we the people are beginning to realize how much information, how many facts, what kinds of justice, and what lessons we've been denied by the all-pervading monopoly media institutions.
Journalists decry political spin (particularly conservative political spin) all the time, but what they frequently do — what Jarvis is pretty much demanding they do — is to spin the information themselves to convey the story they desire to be perceived. I don't think journalism is worse in this respect today than 15 years ago, but I've become aware enough of it that I usually tune out journalists. The New Orleans story was different: so much detail was conveyed as if by people actually observing, that I gave the press the benefit of the doubt; in fact I did not doubt at all. My mistake. If reporters cannot confine themselves to the gathering and conveyance of facts, then reporters become not reporters but opinion shapers. And that's fine, but don't expect the rest of us to passively accept being shaped.
And if our refusal to accept the news at face value causes us to search for alternatives, and if finding those alternatives continues to deny resources (readers, viewers, advertisers, etc) to the current media empires, and if they find that cuts their budget for gathering facts and using them to form opinions for the rest of us, well, too bad so sad. At least they should be able to dig up where their decline came from. After all, they're journalists.
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