Journalism

Mark Bowden has an article in the Atlantic (not online) that provides a lot of insight into modern journalism.

On Stephen Glass and his fictional non-fiction:

"Glass's run of faked features happened not just because he was clever and determined but because he was giving The New Republic and other magazines exactly what they wanted. His story is about the pitfalls of advocacy journalism and its close relative, journalistic celebrity, two of the profession's most dangerous modern trends."

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"Glass diagnosed an appetite at The New Republic for stories that illustrated, preferably outrageously, the naivete of traditional liberals and the moral corruption of conservatives. His stories fit perfectly the pugnacious neoconservatism The New Republic of that era was attempting to define."

On the impact of cable news on journalism:

"We are approaching the time, if we haven't already reached it, when a reporter with a hot story can spend more time on TV talking about it than was spent reporting and writing it."

Bowden praises the portrayal of journalists in the movie Absence of Malice. For example it:

"it showed that what passes for a great investigative story is often nothing more than information leaked by public officials who have motives of their own. It was a rare instance in which the silver screen actually had something useful to say to the Fourth Estate."

This gets at a very dangerous confluence of trends in the media. One stream is cable's obsession with certain criminal cases. Another is journalists's near-total dependence on prosecutors/police for information on such cases. A third is the black box nature of news programming: it almost never tells us how or where the reporters get the information presented.

The result is that certain defendants get hosed down with fact, innuendo, speculation, and fiction before they enter a courtroom. A fair trial becomes next to impossible.

Interestingly enough, neither left nor right seem particularly interested in the subject. It is much easier to rail about right-wing talk radio or the left-wing bias of NPR.

Related: I posted about the problem of "investigative journalism" here:

Leaks, Journalism, and the Right to Know