Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

On Wednesday Yves Smith fretted that bloggers may be doing more harm than good, and wrote “the hollowing out of news organizations can only go so far before information delivery becomes impaired.” In Smith’s formulation, news organizations are the cornerstone of our understanding of the wider world; their diminution necessarily means the quality of our available information is diminished. What kind of original reporting we would be missing out on, though?

The most damning indictment of traditional outlets is that they missed the two biggest issues of the last decade. On Iraq and the financial crisis you would have been better off not consuming any media at all, with the highly important exception of McClatchy. Between the twisted model of access reporting, where the goal is to cozy up to senior officials by promiscuously granting anonymity and uncritically passing along spin, to the claustrophobic embed model of reporting from combat zones, Americans were consistently fed administration propaganda and shielded from the horrific effects of its policies.

Investigative journalism has atrophied, too. As Rupert Wright wrote last year, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years.” (And before you say “Walter Reed” see this.) Instead of being adversarial the posture has become increasingly accommodating.

Even beat reporting has been spotty; the tendency is for conformity and a settled, conventional outlook to dictate priorities. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the financial world. One of Joe Nocera’s friends in the business gets into hot water, and instead of refraining from comment or (God forbid) looking into the matter, Nocera attacks the one alleging fraud. He then crows when one of the resulting lawsuits comes to an indeterminate conclusion and completely ignores when another vindicates the whistleblower.

Nocera, along with a handful of reporters at the Times, the Wall Street Journal, a few magazines like Forbes and Barron’s, and some of the personalities at CNBC, are capable of shaping day-to-day business narratives. If they downplay significant stories or trumpet marginal ones who does that serve? Wouldn’t we be better off if more people got their news from Shahien Nasiripour, who has been going through years of meeting minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee to check the credibility of recent claims?

How about if we were deprived of saturation coverage of Harold Ford’s political masturbation, or feature reporting that treats the lives of the lower class like anthropological curiosities? Or international coverage fueled by fits of pique among privileged reporters? James Fallows exhaustively detailed just such a recent failure, and one of his posts highlights this from Tish Durkin: “Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese people managed a clearer view of Obama’s visit than the US media did.”

Lambert at Corrente frequently compares our two Newspapers of Record to state media, and via email wrote “I tend to cite to WaPo or the Times when they’re doing real journalism, and otherwise, that is, most of the time, to Pravda or Izvestia.” At first blush it is hyperbole, since neither is even partially owned by the state. But in practice how would a state run outlet have covered the stories above any differently? If they serve the powerful instead of challenging them does it matter who the owner is, and is it such a grave insult to suggest Soviet counterparts?

Two enormous stories broke this week. The first was the Wikileaks video, the second was the the president acting like a mafia don and ordering hits on citizens. One was from a new, independent source and the other from traditional ones. Good on the Post and the Times for breaking the second. I know it’s easy to pick instances of bad behavior, and it is not fair to use those examples to indict all journalism. Still, there is a lot of garbage in the more “respectable” outlets and some invaluable stuff in the alternative ones. If traditional organizations continue to slim down then some important stories will undoubtedly not get reported, and that will be a loss - but not a net loss. A proliferation of smaller, independent sources are already giving oxygen to otherwise neglected coverage.

Causal readers may bristle at this new, fragmented world, and long for the days when a single source could provide all the relevant news. Even in that golden age, though, there were advertisers to keep happy, sides of the tracks that were more lucrative (and therefore more deserving of coverage), and the inevitable bias that comes with trying to please the widest possible audience. The old canard about objectivity was nothing more than a well maintained illusion. This era is better, and I’m glad we’re living in it.