CSotD: That which can be explained by ignorance
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I'll admit I haven't been following TV coverage of the Oregon standoff, but between Jen Sorensen's take and Ann Telnaes's animation and a few lesser commentaries, I gather the media confusion I cited yesterday has not cleared up appreciably.
I have noticed that disjointed reporting continues in on-line sources and, meanwhile, the false equivalencies continue to flourish on social media.
There most certainly are agenda-driven people in both formal and de facto media and on each end of the spectrum, and I don't disagree with Jen's suggestion that, if the occupiers were, say, environmental extremists attempting to shut down a logging operation, some elements of the media would have their epithets at the ready.
But, overall, it's probably fair to chalk up most of this off-target speculation as an example of the old saying, "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
Okay, "ignorance." But it's stupid to remain ignorant unless you also remain silent, and when's the last time that happened?
If there is a conspiracy at work, it's a conspiracy to place profits above productivity. Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelman may be actively working to distort the news, but there are far more media owners who simply don't give a rat's ass about quality, and the result is failure to communicate based, not on stupidity or on pre-set agendas, but, rather, on the stripping from newsrooms of intellectual resources and sheer manpower.
In other words, they've offered buyouts to everyone with any depth of experience and are overworking the remaining rookie skeleton crews beyond any hope of acquiring knowledge or of even doing competent reporting.
Which is why most of what you see in the news is, basically, a matter of gathering quotes to flesh out a press release.
This is not "reporting." It is "stenography."
Specific example: I had a reporter — a journalism major — who turned in a story about a tax proposal. I asked her what a particularly opaque quote from the public meeting meant.
"That's what he said," she replied.
"Yes, but what does it mean?" I persisted.
She offered to show me her notes to confirm the accuracy of the quote.
I was thinking of this the other day at the grocery store, because I saw some piece of marketing that surprised me, and, as I was fitting it into what I know about grocery stores and marketing, I thought, "How do you even know that?"
The answer was that, back when I was a local reporter, a new grocery chain came to town. Today, that would mean re-phrasing the press release and getting a quote from the flack at their HQ about how excited they were blah blah blah and then off to do the story on the new dog licensing rules.
But in 1988, it meant in-depth interviews with the new store people, reactions from the existing store people including some discussion of planned renovations and expansion, interviews with industry analysts, a 50-mile drive to another town where the new people had built a fairly recent store using most of the marketing approaches that would be used in the new store and then a hard-hat tour once the frame of the new store was up.
So, yeah, I walked away knowing about end caps and j-curves and why you put the bakery near the entrance (which later became why you put the produce near the entrance and is probably something else now).
It wasn't that our newsroom needed a grocery store expert on an ongoing basis, but, over the years, I also learned about retail leasing, international currency exchange, the Americans With Disabilities Act and how apples are harvested and marketed, together with how the health effects of agricultural sprays are assessed and why the fact that babies love apple juice changes that.
What mattered on a wider scale was that I became not just more knowledgable specifically, but less bullshitable in general.
Every business reporter had a similar supply of background information and experience after a few years on the beat.
That's gone.
Thanks to buy-outs, you don't even have the crabby old reporter in the corner anymore, the one who knows that the reason the mayor opposes street lights on Elm Street is because the alderman proposing it slept with the mayor's wife before they were married.
And thank god for Google Earth because the new kid also has four stories to turn in and has to shoot video for the web and is expected to blog as well, so the idea of getting in the car and driving over to Elm Street for a look is out of the question.
Moreover, even if you kept anyone around for more than a cup of coffee, the idea of assigning "beats" is old-fashioned. "Jack of All Trades and Master of None" is part of the modern job description.
I wish I were making this up.
Specific to armed standoffs, here's how that reservoir of staff knowledge worked:
I didn't cover the armed standoff at Ganienkeh to which I referred yesterday, but I was around long enough that, when the local US Census Bureau came out with numbers for the regional Indian population, their claim that they had passed the books over the barriers and that the armed militants had filled them out and passed them back set off my bullshit detector.
It also produced laughter not only in my corner of the newsroom, but among Mohawk leaders who, when speaking to reporters, normally contain themselves to occasional chuckles.
And it resulted in a story that probably wasn't what the Census had been hoping for and that consisted of more than re-typing their self-serving, ridiculous press release.
So it doesn't surprise me that the national media don't know what to make of this thing in Oregon, but it saddens me that — with the exception of a good report I heard on NPR last night — they don't even know who to ask.
And the fact the NPR was, in fact, able to find people who knew what was going on simply makes me sadder, because shouldn't all the news services be able to do at least that much?
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