Find Insurance Online

Are Americans indifferent to what is happening in Europe unless there is some direct effect on them? If so, the news media would simply be catering to their tastes in focusing on other matters. One could ask whether such journalists have a social responsibility to provide the news that is intrinsically newsworthy even if customers do not think they need it.  Physicians, for example, do not prescribe what their patients need based on what the latter think they need. Two events in Europe can be cited as being newsworthy yet they went virtually uncovered in the American news media.

The other major European story occurring at the time of the German president's resignation was the Eurovision show, which is the European equivalent of the American Idol. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSBNC made a brief mention of it on June 1, 2010. Lena Meyer-Landrut, the winner, had become the superstar across Europe with her song Satellite, yet virtually no mention of her was made in America. Particularly considering the difficulty with which many Germans have had in feeling pride in their state given the Nazi atrocities in the last century, Lena's unabashed patriotism was itself newsworthy (and healthy for the Europeans). It is odd, given the tremendous popularity of American Idol (and Lena in Europe), that neither the Eurovision contest nor Lena received arny attention from American broadcasters. Political indifference or ignorance cannot explain a cultural snub on a type of pop icon that Americans would have valued.



Evidently, European news must clearly affect Americans for it to be covered in the United States. For instance, there was plenty of coverage of the Greece debt crisis, undoubtedly because Wall Street was being affected. Yet in spite of the relevance to the EU's bailout of states overwhelmed by their public debt, there was virtually no broadcast coverage in early 2011 of Germany's objection to the EU having a pooled emergency rescue fund. Nor was there coverage of the Franco-German proposal to give the EU government a role in seeing that the states having the euro have fiscal policies in sync.  The E.U. itself is only rarely mentioned other on the news networks. That is probably due in part to the fact that most Americans have no idea what the EU is, let alone that it exists. One could thus point to the social responsibility of the newscasters to bring the public up to date.

I suspect that Europeans pay more attention to what is going on domestically in the U.S. than vice versa. ON visits to Europe, I have been stunned by the attention being paid by ordinary people there to American politics. During Bill Clinton's fiasco with Monaca Lowinski, the story was front news and much discussed by Europeans in their leisure. The typical American does not follow stories such as Villipan's juridical vindication against Sarkosy, for example, or Berlesconi's hiring of a young prostitute. To be sure, the concentration of power in the U.S. Government makes for a tall edifice that is visible even across an ocean. Were there one president of the E.U. with power roughly equivalent to the American president (i.e., the European states transfering most of their sovereignty to the EU), perhaps that would galvanize American attention (and journalistic newsworthiness).  Even so, there is more than enough scandal in the EU that would undoubtedly be of interest to Americans. For some reason, the broadcast news editors are efffectively gate-keeping as concerns news from Europe.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/europe/01germany.html

In a few days during July in 2010, the American media was obsessed with Shirley Sherrod, who in a tightly edited video clip had made apparently-racist statements about not helping a caucasion farmer because he was caucasion. She was quickly fired by Tom Vilsak, the US Secretary of Agriculture, who, like the journalists and the NAACP, had failed to look at the full video.  The day after Sherrod was fired, the NAACP looked at the full video and realized that she was actually a racial healer rather than racist.  In the fuller video, she said, “I have come to realize that we have to work together … we have to overcome the divisions we have.”  Even as she used questionable language, such as “his own kind,” it should not be forgotten that the clan killed her father.  In other words, she deserves some slack.  At any rate, it was not long after the NAACP’s about-face that the agriculture department and the media were doing also doing an about-face. According to the NYT, “the White House and Mr. Vilsack offered their profuse apologies to her for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.”

Bill O’Reilly of Fox apologized—though while suggesting that Sherrod “very well could have seen things through a racial prism” and had been “blatantly partisan” on the job possibly in violation of the Hatch Act so she should not work in government.  O’Reilly was apologizing for not having done due diligence in “reporting” the story by watching the entire video before making a judgement. Like so many other journalists, he lept at the story without adequately checking the source—the video or Sherrod herself.  Even as the journalists were apologizing for their bad work, they wanted to distinguish themselves as journalists from the “blogger” or “activist” who had posted the edited video clip in the first place. O’Reilly promised his viewers that they could still come to him for good journalism even as he had gotten the story wrong.

Beyond the momentary obsession that the media enjoyed at Sherrod’s expense—the obsession itself being a problem missed by the journalists themselves—this case allows us to glimpse how journalism changed so much in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The case put journalists in the position of distinguishing themselves from bloggers when both had engaged in bad judgment. Hence Bill O’Reilly’s statement that his viewers could come to him for good reporting (rather than have to rely on bloggers) in spite of the fact that he had just engaged in bad journalism and may have done Sherrod another injustice even in his apology. To be sure, the blogger had erred in posting such an edited video clip without providing the context.  However, given the opining of many mainstream journalists who work for media companies and the actual news provided on blogs, the line between “journalist” and blogger are blurred.  Hence the journalists working for media companies were sure to distance themselves from the blogger, who they said was not a real journalist, even though they had all made the same mistake. Were there a clear distinction to be made between the journalists and the bloggers, the former would have done better work—but they didn’t.

Back in 1984 when Daniel Schorr was working at CNN, he objected to the network’s plan to couple him with John Connally, who had been the Governor of Texas and a Secretary of the Treasury, to cover the Republican Convention. It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist. In 2010, journalists were saying that it was improper to mix a journalist with a blogger. By then, many television journalists were giving opinions, and were thus closer being politicians, while many bloggers were providing news even before the networks. Lest the journalists point to their educational credentials from schools of journalism, how many American journalists in the nineteenth or even the twentieth century majored in journalism?  Is learning on the job at a newspaper so much different than the entrepreneurs who free lance at their own blogs to provide news?  If these are so different, why didn’t the “journalists” in the Sherrod case catch rather than perpetuate the blogger’s mistake? The proof is in the pudding.

The fact is that many bloggers are able to provide news because a person does not have to study journalism to have access to some information that is new. As a blogger myself, I have not found myself in this position—hence I confine myself to providing analysis based on my years of formal education and on the news provided by others—bloggers or “journalists.”  I must admit that I am more apt to trust the news from a company simply because there are institutional requirements for verifying stories, though as the Sherrod case shows, a media company’s procedures are not always sufficient. The difference between a news company and a blogger is perhaps in the checking or verification function, rather than so much in the getting of news (though the companies have more resources).  Even so, news can come from a variety of sources—not just from people who have a BA in journalism.  As a consequence, there is more of a need for verification—precisely because there are so many blogger/entrepreneurs operating. To dismiss them by saying they are not really journalists is an over-reaction and ill-founded. However, to insist on due diligence and verification on any report is even more pressing. Perhaps rather than have their journalists invoke artificial diremptions, news organizations could hire or contract per piece with many of the bloggers who are providing news so the latter could have access to the organizational wherewithal to verify stories.  These bloggers would then have the advantages of being entrepreneurs and of having the wherewithal to do due diligence.

Daniel Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News and an aggressive reporter who got into conflict with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors would likely see the advantages that bloggers have in terms of freedom, while being worried (as I am as well) concerning the due diligence limitations faced by the entrepreneurs. He got his first scoop, which earned him $5, when he was 12. A woman fell or jumped from the roof of the apartment house where he lived, and he called the police, interviewed them about the victim and then called The Bronx Home News, which paid for news tips.  Had there been an internet, he likely would have been a blogger. Would that have made a difference?

While good to a point, a profession’s gate-keeping can be readily subverted into simply keeping people out who are otherwise doing good work. In spite of the Sherrod blogger, other bloggers have been providing news—otherwise, the media companies would not be citing them as sources. Rather than fighting the bloggers, the “journalists” who got the Sherrod story wrong might offer a hand; they might just find that they will be helped in return. News is like water in a stream—there are many feeder streams.  Moreover, the nature of news is freedom,which is inherently broad rather than circumscribed.  This is particularly so in a high-tech world where the internet has had a democratizing effect in expanding the sources of news and analysis.  In this context, we might be wise to remember Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson concerning the need for an educated electorate rather than try to monopolize information-getting to those in the club.

Source on Schoor: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/business/media/24schorr.html?_r=1&hp
Source on Sherrod: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/us/politics/22sherrod.html?scp=1&sq=sherrod&st=cse

During the summer of 2010, as commentators at Fox, CNN, and MSNBC were arguing, they referred to their own arguments as “trench warfare” and “hand-to-hand fighting.”  Real soldiers would doubtless dismiss such descriptors as attempts by children to count as adults—as something more.  The soldiers would be correct, of course. Insulting or criticizing another person does not constitute fighting in the sense of warfare. Someone at MSNBC calling someone at Fox a racist does not come close to shooting someone with a rifle or even slugging someone with one’s fist.  The protesters in Libya who were being shot at by their own government in February, 2011, would shake their heads in disbelief in hearing of the "war" among media personalities.

Lest it be objected that this makes little matter, the propensity of the media “personalities” to over-reach covers their depiction of news.  For example, they use “crisis” far too often.  For example, there really was a crisis in September 2008 on the Thursday evening in which Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson told congressional leaders that unless they showed some intent to act, there would not be a financial system by the following Monday. No financial system on Monday: this is what it means to be in a crisis mode. To call the BP oil in the gulf a crisis more than two months after the explosion (and weeks after the well had been capped) a "crisis" does not compare, and is thus a case of the media over-reaching. By its very nature, a crisis is short-term.  The protest in Egypt, for example, quickly reached a do or die point. Such is crisis mode.  So too, when the planes shot at the protesters in Libya: the resulting turmoil, which can only be sustained as such for a brief period before a decision has to be made one way or the other, instantiated a crisis mode.  For republicans or democrats in Congress to refer to budget talks as though they were at a crisis utterly pales by comparison. Yet journalists perpetuate the verbal inflation and get paid in increased attention.  In the process, "crisis" itself becomes like the story of the boy who called wolf too much and was practially ignored when the wolf finally showed.

Every presidential address is vaunted as critical. “The President needs to say X or the sky will fall.”  No mention is subsequently made of the sky still up there even though the President omitted X.  In other words, there is no mechanism of accountability on journalists and pundits when they over-reach. The media companies themselves seem inert to any need for self-regulation. So the media wars are allowed to intensify even beyond "war."  Fox News and MSNBC must somehow sustain and intensify their "battles" so people will continue to watch the spectacle. In the meantime, the real news is sidelined.  The medium becomes the message and the voters are not so informed.  So goes a republic in decline.  So goes a culture in decline.

Popular election presumes meaningful discourse on current issues and political philosophy so the voters can distinguish the candidates.  Too often, however, the media takes its eyes off the ball and orients its coverage to the process rather than the content.  For example, on the eve of the 2010 US Senate election in Massachusetts, the New York Time reported, “Volunteers and campaign workers staffed phone banks for each of the candidates in the Senate race here, as they concentrated on energizing voters to get to the polls on Tuesday.”  Besides being rather obvious, this topic carries with it an opportunity cost—namely, the article that could have been written on the candidates’ political philosophies that go beyond an obsession on the health-care before Congress at the time.   Although it is short-sighted to use a Senate election as a referendum on a current issue, even that would be better than a focus on the campaigns’ mechanics.
Too often in presidential campaigns, media reports are on the process rather than the issues (forget political philosophies).  Because such campaigns are mostly retail rather than grass-roots (after the first few primaries), most voters rely on the media for information on the candidates.   There is a saying that might be pertinent: garbage in, garbage out.  We could do better.

Source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/get-out-the-vote-pitches-in-massachusetts/