Wherein I Agree With Matthew Yglesias About The MSM’S “Status Anxiety”–UPDATED
January 15, 2009 / 9:55 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierThe Mainstream Media, it be troubled. As in, there are photographers like this Twitter guy who did on-the-spot citizen journalism (Was his picture less newsworthy because he wasn’t a reporter by trade? At this writing over 56,000 people have viewed it.) and there are commentators like me, who report and interpret real-time events like the debates or President Bush’s last speech to the nation. I can read the transcript and watch the President speak tonight and then comment on it (the President has aged and looks weary despite his optimistic talk). How is that different than the paid commentators?
Here’s the thing. I’ve never actually heard a crack investigative reporter tell me that the essence of good journalism consists of your work appearing in a non-blog venue. Similarly, I’ve never heard that from an intrepid war reporter. I think those people understand that if you uncover a major secret and write about it in a blog, or in a magazine, or on a newspaper that it’s all the same. Similarly, if you risk your life to get a first-hand account of events in a confusing war zone nobody will care if it’s a blog from the battlefield or a TV report. That’s because those people are doing journalism at its best and they know that their work stands or falls with the information contained therein.
But what Mike Barnicle and Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan do isn’t like that. I say this as someone who likes their show and watches it almost every day, just like I hope people like my blog and read it every day. The three of them, and Joe Scarborough, are all in the same boat with me—we’re providing what we hope is an informative, entertaining product that’s fundamentally derivative of work being done by other people. But a passel of TV chatters and newspaper columnists and guys are accustomed to basking in the glow offered by people doing real reporting. There’s a lot of status anxiety. And this gets to be its worst, in my view, among the kind of people who do the sort of pseudo-reporting associated with following the President of the United States around. Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, I’m a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then that’s journalism. Similarly, if I travel around with the president and then read the pool reports that my colleagues write and then write about that: Journalism. But if I read the newspaper account of where the president went and then write about that: Cheetos.
It’s a little silly.
It is silly. It’s silly when I hear Sarah Palin say it. It’s silly when I hear Sean Hannity say it. It’s silly when I hear reporters say it.
The truth is a little scary for those in the news field. The best and brightest bloggers don’t get their following by being unfair Looney-Tunes (Andrew Sullivan excepted). They get their readership by trying to present the facts from a point of view. The main difference between me and Matt is ideological, not, I suspect, a desire to present the issue fairly. That is, we come from different ideological standpoints, and we’re clear about our biases, but we want to present the issue fairly so that people can leave informed and form their own opinions.
How is that different from a journalist sitting in front of a camera or who happens to be in the White House press pool? With C-Span and other live feeds, I can see all that nonsense in real-time from the comfort of my high-back and laptop table. It’s not different.
One experience that stayed with me from the joint Blogger appearance on the BBC for election coverage with Jane Hamsher was that we worked essentially the same. And, we worked essentially the same as the news people themselves. We used the same data. We came to the same conclusions in points of fact. We came to some different conclusions about what the facts meant. And when the BBC reporters wanted to call a state that had not closed their polls yet, we bloggers nearly stroked out. There was no way we could report that, even though we both felt the outcome was certain based on the data. It’s called fairness and integrity. The best bloggers possess it, just like the best journalists possess it.
But bloggers go one further: they don’t pretend to be unbiased. They don’t feign objectivity. They present the facts from a point of view just like people in the news media do. Evidently, the Mainstream people tacitly admit that they’re biased. Sam Dealey in U.S. News says:
With the inauguration of America’s first black president less than a week away, it was inevitable that the self-obsessed media would insert their own diversity into the occasion. Sure enough, in his Monday Washington Post wrap-up, Howard Kurtz laments the lack of black reporters covering the White House as “a pale reflection of America.” Summing up the piece’s prevailing sentiment is the Post’s Michael Fletcher, who is black. “It feels like you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility,” he says.
Whoa, hold on a minute: Hasn’t the mantra from media types all along been that journalists are objective?
If we accept that black reporters will have a different take from their white colleagues on Barack Obama, does it follow that one of those views is more “accurate” or legitimate than the other? And now substitute “conservative” for “black.” Doesn’t this underrepresentation argument concede the point that conservatives have made all along about press bias? After all, it’s hardly a secret that most reporters and editors are liberal or left-leaning.
Oh yes, the liberal reporters and editors are biased, too. That they don’t admit it just means that they’re also delusional. The willful ignorance won’t save their profession. NYU professor Jay Rosen (whom I’ve sparred with on Twitter) has been prescient about the demise of Newspapers (and I would add, Talking Head) journalism. You can read what he wrote in 2005 about “laying the newspaper down to die“.
What can the MSM do to survive in this atmosphere? Do better. Be more informative. Be fair. Be more interesting. Be less sensational. Don’t take the audience for rubes and pretend at objectivity. State biases, connections and ways that your reporting might be slanted. That is, practice full disclosure.
The media still has the advantage. They come into people’s rooms every night. A long tail of people have to come find me or Matt Yglesias or Jane Hamsher or Twitter celeb photographer Mr. Krums online. We have to be sought out.
The irony of the Press’s blogger obsession is that they believe objectivity is their competitive advantage yet they so clearly lack it about their own profession.
UPDATED:
Well, I spent a wee paragraph explaining how the MSM could save itself. Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media says it’s too late:
It’s not stopping, either. Newspapers are the first to go, because they depend primarily on classified advertising, or what might be called “nearly classified advertising” – such as the display ads for jewelry and perfume in the Style section of a newspaper. Magazines are already feeling it as well. Look at a copy of Newsweek or Time next time you’re out. They are still hampered by the fact that it’s expensive to print on physical paper. Meanwhile, their virtual competitors can deliver “impressions”: people who see the advertisements, for far less, and provide content that’s literally up-to-the minute. In response, many magazines – especially trade magazines that don’t require glossy images – are already moving to web-only very.
What then? This won’t stop. Advertising-paid television is on the same track. I don’t have any use for broadcast TV any longer, I depend on cable. And I’m one of millions. And I know people who get all their television from YouTube or Hulu, by Netflix and by download.
To some extent, the television networks are protected by the relatively high cost of production. But that won’t last. Last night I was watching Ed Driscoll’s piece “The Red Queen’s Race“. Ed appears to presents it in the sepia-toned set of a Victorian mansion, but in fact he shot it entirely in his home studio. The whole “set” is digital. Steve Green shoots his PJTV segments in his basement. Mine are shot in my office. And blip.tv gives you access to an amazing variety of original content, made by semi-professional creators who will only get better with experience.
We’re only a few years – two to five is my guess – before the networks are in the same position as newspapers and magazines are today: their expensive, capital-intensive business model on the brink of destruction.
19 Responses to “Wherein I Agree With Matthew Yglesias About The MSM’S “Status Anxiety”–UPDATED”
January 15 2009 / 11:18 pm
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“We’re only a few years – two to five is my guess – before the networks are in the same position as newspapers and magazines are today: their expensive, capital-intensive business model on the brink of destruction.”
Great. As I’m getting along in years, I am all in favor of them dying more quickly than not. It will be an amusement for my declining years.
I wonder what the current economic disintegration adds to the pot? If as the CW now seems to indicate, the era of ‘easy’(aka criminally incompetent) credit is now over, I would think that there will be substantially fewer advertising dollars thrown around in the future no matter what the other trends are. This alone will probably mean the death of many of these business models.
Guess that silver lining / cloud thingy has some merit after all.
January 16 2009 / 12:39 am
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I agree that newspapers are dead men walking, and it seems the vast majority of reporters, editors and columnists are willfully blind to the irreversible descent into oblivion. It is primarily because of this denial, and the failure to admit the reasons for the death of the newspaper, that the demise is now unavoidable. Because now the public wants them to die.
Until the last 18 months or so I think newspapers could have turned it around. If they could have summoned the intellectual honesty and moral courage to have recognized and admitted their many years of bias and partisanship, and taken credible steps to correct those gross errors, I suspect there are enough core newspaper readers who would have forgiven them so that the industry could have survived.
It would not have been easy, because a majority of reporters and editors, particularly at major metropolitan papers, would have had to have completely changed the way they did their jobs. They would have been required, for the first time in the careers of many but the longest tenured, to have reported fact as opposed to opinion. They would have been forced to learn how to write objectively and without any motive or goal other than to write clearly, concisely, informatively and accurately. I think if they could have shown that moral courage and a genuine desire to change, most of the reading public would have stuck with them.
But that’s moot now. The newspapers can’t even admit what is happening to them, much less why. In a way, much like papers did for public figures for generations, they are preparing their own obituary before hand. The difference is, the newspapers can’t bring themselves to tell the story straight. Anyone who is paying attention can see the narrative they’re already trying out and polishing up: it was that damned internet, and “Bush’s Depression”, which killed the newspaper industry. Even with death staring them in the face they can’t admit what happened,
And that was that they drove away their readers. They didn’t lose them; they actively drove them away, offended them, insulted them, kicked them down the stairs. They ignored, hell they scoffed at, decades of complaints from their readers, their customers, about reporting that was editorializing, and editorials which were partisan handouts. The newspapers treated the dissenters from orthodox modern American leftism as non-persons. The funny thing is, those non-persons happened to make up a huge chunk of that newspaper readership which might be described as “heavy-duty news consumers”. So when those non-persons saw that the internet and podcasting and citizen journalism provided much more of what they wanted (transparency of bias, objective reporting of facts) they left the newspapers in droves. And they’re still leaving. Very soon now the advertisers will catch on that the newspapers’ subscriber numbers have been grossly inflated for years, and that will be the fall of the pillar which is holding up the portico. The collapse of the industry will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and it’s possible that within a two-year span we could see a loss of perhaps 2/3 of newspapers currently published. The magazines will be neck-and-neck with them to destruction, and the television news industry will fail shortly after.
The sad thing is, it didn’t have to happen. Readers begged the papers for years to hear their cries. Readers weren’t even necessarily asking for a change in perspective or particular editorial polices as much as they were asking for an end to the practice of advocacy journalism, and editorials passed off as straight news stories.
All we wanted was transparency and a modicum of fairness. But what we got instead was even more spin. We had inflicted upon us the outrage of Election 2008. When the news media as an institution, as an industry, completely abandoned any pretense of disinterest, and actively and openly campaigned for a presidential candidate. Even as newsrooms are on the verge of being packed up, we former newspaper readers are treated to stories of entire newsrooms breaking into applause as “their candidate” gets encouraging results. In 2008 the news media as a whole showed that it was a party to national politics, not its chronicler.
And that is why today, former readers will not only sit on their hands when the industry begs for help; will not only turn away or turn a channel when another story about forlorn freshly unemployed newstaffers pops up – no, instead we former readers will take a kind of sad pleasure in seeing the industry die. Because that’s how destroyed the relationship between the papers and their readers is. Former readers will have a sense of reckoning, of a settling of accounts, in witnessing the death of the newspaper, because the newspaper industry as a whole finally declared what had been seen for years but had never been admitted: that the papers had picked a side. And the majority of the news industry picked a side other than the one their former readers were on.
So we’re not on the threshold of watching the demise of the news industry; we’re just seeing a political adversary fold its tent and disappear into the night. There’s not a lot of regret when that happens. And that’s a shame, because it didn’t have to be. But arrogance and contempt for a huge chunk of your customers is a guaranteed formula for failure.
January 16 2009 / 1:37 am
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I saw the beginnings of this over thirty-five years ago, when I was taking journalism in high school. That era marked the end of objective journalism and the beginning of advocacy journalism. It’s one of the reasons I decided against journalism as a career.
January 16 2009 / 2:28 am
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jum1801,
couldn’t agree more! 10 or 20 years ago I used to subscribe to at least 2 papers a day and I was excited to pick up a new paper whenever we traveled because papers in different cities had different perspectives on things. Since then, of course, it’s all AP, Reuters etc, so the local perspective is gone.
Nowadays the only newspaper I still subscribe to is the WSJ online edition and even that mainly for the financial market info and the editorials. Their non-business “news” coverage has been going downhill for years as well. The other papers don’t offer anything I would pay for. Craigslist takes care of classified ads, Monster and others take care of job ads and shoplocal handles the Sunday flyers. The “news” are stale by the time the paper finally gets here. So why should I spend $30 or so on a monthly subscription again, especially with the nasty attitude displayed by our paper towards people like me? The only thing the papers still have going for them are the coupon sections but I’d rather pay a few dollars more per week at the grocery store to support real people than to support those paragons of journalism.
Bottom line, the sooner those papers die the better. I won’t miss them.
January 16 2009 / 7:07 am
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I certainly agree with Charlie Martin’s opinion that it is too late to save the physical newspaper. They never understood the threats against them;
1. Classified Ads – There is no reason to buy these anymore. I can go to Craigs List, Ebay, Amazon, Monster Jobs, MIBOR (Indianapolis Real Estate Listings), etc. for what I need to buy or list to sale or whatever.
2. Redundancy – Any AP story in the newspapers I can read online. Its now wasted space. It only takes me a few minutes to read it now.
3. Relevancy – Todays paper is yesterday’s news.
4. Declining Ad Penetration – Looking at the ads is not important or even necessary anymore. I can look online for deals.
5. Opinion Competition – Everyone has one, but now anyone can have their voice heard.
Journalists have been too full of themselves, way up on their pedestals to realize that the base was wearing out. They may have started to realize their problems, but to late. Now they are like Wiley Coyote who suddenly realizes that the support is no longer there and will be falling fast to a crash and burn.
January 16 2009 / 7:40 am
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Thank you for the great commentary. The fact that these self-important “journalist” are simple-minded fools is shown in their inability to understand that they have devalued their product by promoting “advocacy journalism,” i.e., propaganda, and that the natural result of the diminised value of their product is that nobody wants it.
The demise of network news can’t happen fast enough for me; and, I hope that CNN disappears along with network news. Can you imagine how enjoyable an airport will be when CNN is gone?
January 16 2009 / 7:59 am
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The thing is we can carry a thousand newspapers in our hand all at once now. Every media outlet there is is available with a few keystrokes. And like you said, what’s the difference between them and us, especially since now they inject opinion into their reporting. I can get just as much “news” from you, good doctor, or Glenn Renolds, or Atlas Shruggs, or Wendy Sullivan, or Matt Drudge, any number of sources. I can Twitter it in real time. Just yesterday I was getting better updates on the Hudson River crash via twitter than I was on FOX News or CNN. Often up to an hour ahead. And on top of that, if I find myself in the right place at the right time, I can break just as big a story as any top reporter.
Blogs are opinion pieces for sure, but facts are so easily cross checked. Right then, right now if I want. Depend on a newspaper or television for your information and what you get is what you get.
January 16 2009 / 8:44 am
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“But bloggers go one further: they don’t pretend to be unbiased.”
This is the essence of the primary problem with journalism in America. Journalism schools (silly concept, that) and the people in the trade teach and believe that they are capable of unbiased reporting– that there is such a thing. They ignore the gatekeeper problem of what news gets reported, and they tend not to notice the echo chamber they’re in, and they don’t believe in the sampling error created by the type of politics that leads students to pursue journalism.
This silly notion of lack of bias is a modern, particularly American one. We must kill it.
January 16 2009 / 9:06 am
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People suffering from status anxiety have a strong tendency to be attracted to radical totalitarian ideologies…especially ideologies of the fascist flavor.
January 16 2009 / 9:19 am
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This is a very well written and thought out post. Like to acknowledge those things when I see them.
January 16 2009 / 9:22 am
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You’ve nailed it! I can’t wait to watch the NYT and the Washington Post turn into “fish-wrap” and I should be ashamed to feel that way but I don’t. All we wanted was fair reporting of the facts not their opinions.
January 16 2009 / 9:51 am
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Aside from status anxiety, never, ever misunderestimate the power of the Gov William J LePetomane Syndrome: “Gentlemen!! We’ve got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs!!”
January 16 2009 / 10:42 am
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I’m not so sure. I agree with most of you: I would like this to be true. I have no respect for journalism in the West today.
And yet…
My first inkling that this argument may be wishful thinking on my part was the mid-term elections 2 years ago. My second was the presidential election 2 months ago. What happened?
The MSM still defined the story. I had thought that people were smart enough to not get their information from those fools: that other information sources ended the monopoly on information that the MSM has enjoyed for, say, the last 60 years. But I think I was kidding myself. The number of people that get their information off the internet (that form their worldview off of that information) is, unfortunately, still very very small. The vast majority form their worldviews from the MSM-maybe not from CBS news, but from the whole media-which includes the big three, and CNN, and Jon Stewart, and E! entertainment, and the Golden Globes ceremony, etc etc.
I had thought polls weren’t capturing the real views of alot of people-the ones that don’t answer unsolicited calls, the ones that don’t trust polling, yada yada. I was wrong. The polls were basically dead on in the last two elections. The populace, widely defined, is still shaped by the mainstream (even if not specifically by Catie Couric). The polls can still capture the views of the country as a whole.
And that means the stranglehold on information hasn’t been broken. Just because a few of us surf the internet for our worldview, and choose to surf the out of the mainstream sites (instead of E! online, or CNN on line, and so on) doesn’t mean the country as a whole does.
I wish I was wrong.
Sk
January 16 2009 / 11:19 am
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I did a post on this for my blog and updated it with this;
Just read the link from Glen about the Star Tribune Bankruptcy. How bad was the business?
“Like most newspapers, the Star Tribune has experienced a sharp decline in print advertising. Its earnings before interest, taxes and debt payments were about $26 million in 2008, down from about $59 million in 2007 and $115 million in 2004.”
Do they get it? What do you think after reading their statement?
“Chris Harte, the paper’s publisher, said the filing would have no impact on home delivery, advertising, newsgathering or any other aspects of the paper’s operations.”
Nope they still don’t.
January 16 2009 / 10:57 pm
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The MsM are still very powerful, it’s true. But the last two elections are only partly about that power, the Republicans ran away from their core voters, deliberately playing down precisely the issues that motivate the people who would tend to vote GOP, in the hope (and this was admitted aloud at different times by both McCain and Giuilani) of winning over Democrats to vote for them.
This was futile, because elections are far less about the so-called ’swing’ voters than they are about turnout. The Democrats were motivated in both the last two elections, their voters came out, while many in the GOP voting ranks were angry and disgusted at their own party over a variety of issues.
In 2008, Barak Obama elevated black turnout, while John McCain insisted on replaying Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign, same themes, same fundamental assumptions, and he got essentially the same results.
McCain was so ineffective a candidate that he actually managed to lose States in what should have been the GOP heartland, while gaining nothing in the northeast, where he and his fellows had wild hopes of gains.
The GOP is not nearly as ‘damaged’ as the MsM is portraying, they could easily make a major comeback in 2010…but only if they take a hard look at their own voters, and listen carefully to what THEY are saying, and respond.
For example, no matter the merits of the matter as a policy issue, the GOP base is implacably opposed to the idea of a ‘comprehensive amnesty’. Their reasons are cogent and straightforward, it’s no use trying to dismiss them as closet racism, and the effort to do so is poisonous. The Bush/McCain/Kennedy immigration efforts in 2006 and 2007 did the GOP more political damage than the Iraq War and Hurrican Katrina combined. Yet the GOP leadership seems utterly blind to this.
January 27 2009 / 4:25 pm
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You wrote: “President Bush’s last speech to the nation. I can read the transcript and watch the President speak tonight and then comment on it”
That’s true, as long as the media outlet does not cut up the speech and seamlesly splice phrase together his words into a new order! The BBC just got caught doing just this with Obama’s inaugural address.
BBC admitted to us, a media ethics site, StinkyJournalism dot org, that they made a “montage” of Obama’s words on the environment. The problem was not all the words were even about the green policy (one was, in fact on health). Moreover, splicing words together Obama’s words without disclosure as if it were “magnetic poetry” is just plain wrong.
BBC thus far refuses to acknowledge their error. Read more at http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-143.php#comment