Thoughts about...Journalism and Media

by Terry Michael
July 14, 2008


New Journalism

at The Washington Post

Pandering to the masses with the
12 (twelve!) part Chandra Levy series.

"The Chandra Levy case captivated the world."

You can see those breathless words for yourself if you navigate to a washingtonpost.com web page posted Friday, July 11 touting a 12-part series about a dead intern (yes, you read that correctly: twelve!), the first installment of which was plastered across the front page of the Post's Sunday print edition two days later.

Stop whatever youre doing and think about that.  Reporting staffs are being decimated all over the American daily newspaper landscape.  Seasoned journalists are being forced into early retirement buy-outs.  Hundred-year-old news values--objectivity, fairness, dispassion, fact-based arguments, proportionality--are being trashed in an infotainment media culture that dumbs down public discourse to verbal food fights, featuring talking-pointed-heads on cable "news" channels.

And the paper of record in the capital of the free world, a few miles up the road from where Jefferson and Madison understood the importance of the printed word to our experiment in liberty, has used its investigative and metro staff resources to publish a 12 part (twelve!!!) tabloid-style series pandering to the prurient interests of readers captivated by the unsolved murder of an intern.

Jesus probably needed 12 disciples to help him get the Word out.  God made do with ten commandments.  But why do the editors of The Washington Post require a dozen units of precious news hole space to investigate the sad demise of a young woman in Washington?

Could I suggest some other uses of that reporting talent?

Might those metro correspondents have made better use of their time looking into the deep culture of corruption that so obviously is festering in the District of Columbia government, where property taxpayers were bilked of tens of millions of dollars in a scam that had to involve scores of employees winking and nodding?  Or how about the $650,000 appropriation for needle exchanges, advocated earlier this year by our peripatetic young mayor.  Who's getting those contracts, financed by taxes paid by about 65 people like me, who each involuntarily donated roughly $10,000 in income, sales and property taxes to the District of Columbia in the past year?

Or, how about using those investigative correspondents to look into the hideous failure of our war on drugs, the 35th anniversary of which was celebrated a few weeks ago at the Drug Enforcement Administration.  The Post might have used the leg work and document explorations devoted to the death of an intern to question what we've gotten for those tens of billions thrown at neo-Prohibition.  (HBO's The Wire stepped in to explore that question, which bviously was too demanding for a news organization with murder mystery priorities.)

Here's another thought.  Next April, we come upon the 25th anniversary of a press conference held in Bethesda, heralding the discovery of the virus that was the "probable cause" of AIDS--a scientific feat performed at the National Institutes of Health without publication of a single peer-reviewed paper preceding the press release.  Could the Post's investigative team have set aside a little time to explore the anomalies that have piled so high from that hypothesis they might not actually be anomalous, but rather contradictions of a seriously flawed theory?

Make your own list.  Those are the favorites of this particular skeptic, with his 1969 bachelor's degree in journalism from the Univ. of Illinois.

I run a program to teach college journalists about politics.  My next class of 13 students arrives in Washington September 2 for four months of interning in news bureaus while they receive twice-weekly seminars about politics.

I just hope the Post's 12-part series is over before they get here, because I dont want them to see this "journalism" from the newspaper at which two young metro reporters helped bring down a corrupt administration several decades ago.
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Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael wrties at his "libertarian Demcorat" blog, www.terrymichael.net

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Washington Post to Readers:
Stop Us Before We Kill Again
Post (war) Partum Depression?

by Terry Michael, March 20, 2007

People! Listen up. If there’s a journalism shrink in the crowd, please proceed immediately to the media tent. The editorial page editors of The Washington Post seem to have dropped some really bad shit on this otherwise fun and fabulous fourth anniversary of their first Iraq war trip. They’re having these, like, uh...reality-based flashbacks about no actual WMD’s, and non-threatening paper tiger thugs, and tribal, theocratic cultures that don’t seem to be into flower power. If you’ve got any anti-anxiety stuff to help ‘em out, man--pills, or whatever--they could really use it. Please help, man. Peace and love. Rock on.

I live in Washington, DC. I know surreal when I see it. And I saw it in vivid blotter acid color this past Sunday on the editorial page of a paper that once helped bring down a president who also undercut America’s moral authority several decades ago.....

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Nieman Reports / Spring 2004
Why Political Journalism Fails
at Handicapping the Race
By Terry Michael
Money, ads, staff and calendar. Those themes dominate much of political journalism in the months before a presidential election cycle really kicks in. And they are pushed by reporters acting as horserace handicappers, trying to determine the main contenders and which candidates have what it takes to win the nomination and even the fall election.

It’s a kind of “supply-side” approach to political reporting. Figure out who has the most money, the cleverest commercials,the most seasoned operatives, the advantages of early caucus and primary dates—and reporters have the data they think they need to predict likely winners....
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The non-debate on the war
Published August 25, 2005
By Terry Michael
"Teach your interns the role of journalists is to question power, not propagate it." That advice arrived recently from retired New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. While Mr. Wicker's words are important for my journalism students, they're a timely reminder for the Baby Boom leaders of America's newsrooms — who should have learned more than they did in the '60s, when the best and the brightest gave us Vietnam. The most influential interpreters of our public affairs are accepting, rather than expanding, a noose-tight frame the Washington political culture is enforcing to limit permissible discourse on the war in Iraq....
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