Top Five Traditional Journalism Failures of 2010

Lee Phillips

I’m not one of those who claim that traditional sources of news are obsolete. While they struggle to find a workable business model, institutions like the New York Times continue to undertake important investigations and produce excellent articles on both world affairs and local concerns. But 2010 seemed to mark a turning point, where several important stories were covered more deeply, objectively, and reliably by what are variously called blogs, citizen or online journalism, new media, or various other things, often by traditional journalists struggling to come to terms with their new competition. For many people, now, this is the news, for better or worse, and it doesn’t require a special nomenclature: it’s just the web.

In this article I list some important cases where the old media institutions lost out to “new media” because they could not match the access, expertise, or insight possessed by writers who happened to be in the right place at the right time and were willing to share their knowledge with the web, usually with no hope of compensation. In some cases institutional journalism was also hampered in its ability to report objectively, because of the need for continued access to sources or the fear of offending some group of readers — and in these cases they compare poorly with independent writers who operate under no such constraints. I am talking about big stories; we don’t even bother to bring up the vast areas of specialized information and news where traditional, mass-circulation outlets have never come close to competing with the web even in its earlier days (say 10 years ago), and don’t really even try.

Now let the list-making begin!

There was certainly a flurry of what looked like reporting on these issues all over the media. So what’s the problem? Here we shall find the first example of a false idea that has taken hold of journalists throughout (at least) the English-speaking world. It is that they must be “balanced” to be objective, and that consists in transcribing opinions on “both sides” of a controversial issue, regardless of whether these opinions are well-informed or even make sense. The journalist considers his job to be done if he’s identified the two camps whose opposition creates the controversy and allowed them roughly equal time to emit a soundbite; actually doing research to find out whether either side is making sense is not allowed.

That’s the procedure for “reporting.” When it’s time for an overt editorial, the process is to identify a position taken either by the government or a large plurality of the readership, and rant on as if it requires your courageous support. In this year’s TSA fiasco we find both kinds of big media behavior on display, while more useful coverage comes from the “blogs.”

The traditional news outlets covered this story as a conflict between the government, which is just doing what is necessary to catch all the terrorists trying to board planes with bombs in their underpants, and some whiney privacy nuts who have the audacity to challenge the TSA’s wisdom and question the usefulness of the naked scanning and genital groping. You can pretty reliably determine a someone’s media habits by talking to her about the TSA controversy. Someone who gets her information from TV, radio, and newspapers knows that the TSA is catching terrorists and generally behaving in a professional manner in their tireless efforts to keep us safe in the air. Someone who is actually informed, because she reads Schneier on Security and other serious sources of news about security matters, knows that the TSA doesn’t catch terrorists and routinely misses weapons in baggage, that their agents are superficially trained, poorly educated and paid, and frequently engage in criminal activity and outrageous, unprofessional behavior; that they borrow techniques from pedophiles; that the naked scanners may be dangerous. If she’s familiar with this story, and others, about women who have been groped and molested by male TSA agents, she knows that the testimony of TSA chief John Pistole before congress, where he agreed with one of Senator Leiberman’s unctuous leading remarks to the effect that “enhanced” pat downs (similar usage to “enhanced” interrogations) are performed only by same-sex agents, was deceptive. I have not found any criticism of Pistole’s misleading testimony in the major media.

The low point in major media editorials on this subject might be the cranky rant emitted by Fred Fiske on NPR (at least in the Washington, D.C market) shortly before Thanksgiving. He was set off by the “opt-out” movement. In short, he thought that the people objecting to abusive groping and naked scanning were just spoiled brats who failed to understand that these measures were necessary to fight terrorism. You really must listen to the man’s tone of voice to get the full flavor, as he scolds the radicals, telling them that of course the scanners are safe, because Janet Napolitano says they are.

This subject provides a perfect example of the institutional incapacity of big media to report objectively on a hot topic that they obviously deem worthy of extensive coverage, simply because there is no way to cover this subject straightforwardly without offending the millions of readers and viewers who remain tithe-paying members of the Roman Catholic Church. As it is, even the sanitized reporting offered by the traditional media leads to spurious complaints of “anti-catholic bigotry.” So we get everything from inappropriate touching of little boys to violent anal gang-rape packaged daintily as “abuse” in the headlines, while the traditional media dare not approach a disinterested view of the situation, which would require them to admit that, in the words of writing in the online journal Slate.

I am sorry to pick on Mr. Pogue, but he is a convenient representative of all that is wrong with conventional media’s coverage of consumer technology. David Pogue is the most prominent technology columnist at the NY Times, and can be entertaining, in a glib, superficial fashion. “Entertaining” is the key: old media views reporting about shiny gadgets as diverting fluff, not to be taken as seriously as coverage of politics or business. So they hold Pogue and his ilk to (even) lower standards, going so far as to excuse his receipt of gifts and cash from various corporate interests, something they wouldn’t dream of tolerating from one of their “real” reporters.

The problem with this is that technology is in fact important; people spend a lot of money on it and their use of it affects their lives and the way that society functions. They need reporting on consumer technology that is careful, objective, and based on at least a little research. Fortunately, they can find it all over the web, but not in newspapers such as the Times.

Allow me to continue to use Pogue as a whipping boy in the service of two specific examples from 2010:

In a report on a portable WIFI hotspot called the MiFi, Pogue was mystified about why Sprint would allow its manufacturer, Virgin Mobile, to offer customers the use of its data network at prices that are lower than what Sprint itself charges. Pogue just could not figure it out, even though he claimed to have “researched the heck” out of it. A simple Google search was beyond either his ability or his botheration threshold.

In September Pogue attempted to write a review about what he seemed to think was a new kind of online tool for searching and sorting through your options for getting somewhere by air. Again he neglected to do the most rudimentary research before recommending technology to his readers. The new travel site didn’t work very well, and there is something very similar, that does work, and that had been available for quite some time. But the site that Pogue was recommending was put together by a buddy of his, and the better site was not.

The media certainly enjoy breathless reporting about “computer” viruses, worms, and other nightmares. I usually experience a strange sense of unreality when exposed to these stories, as I use computers every day and yet seem to be unfamiliar with the world being described. Toward the end the lightbulb turns on and I realize that I’ve been taken in again: this is not a story about a “computer” virus, trojan, or worm (the reporters rarely know the difference) but about a Windows problem. I don’t use Windows or any Microsoft programs, so the security nightmares do not concern me (directly). Invariably the tail end of the story involves some kind of vague advice about how to avoid infection, but never, not once, have I heard the single admonition that would actually help people: stop using Microsoft products.

I do, however, use an iPhone, and am keenly aware of the deep compromises in the areas of privacy, security, and openness that this entails. I am also aware of Apple’s history of rushing shiny software out the door that has not been sufficiently tested and winds up biting the user with critical bugs. In the past this has involved some horrendous negligence: Apple has shipped versions of its Mail program that delete email without warning and versions

of the Finder or OS X that delete files.

So if you want to know something substantive about how iPhone advertising compromises your privacy, how iPhone email suddenly stopped working well with many email servers, how malware can be remotely installed, or how someone can plug your iPhone into a computer and access its data, you must lurk in the nooks and crannies of the web.

The traditional media has something in common with certain elements of the blogosphere: not content with simply missing stories, they also enjoy making stuff up.

Of course there’s nothing new about this. Combine the journalist’s customary gullibility with the instinct to pile on and copy what everyone else seems to be saying, and you have a recipe for stories appearing out of thin air, not supported by any actual facts. The element that may be new is the increasing tendency of reporters to look over their shoulders at the new media and jump on a story before taking a hard look at its provenance, in a desperate attempt to regain some lost relevance.

So we had, in 2010, a raft of stories about “racial tension” that didn’t really exist, Mexican gangs that didn’t actually take over a part of Texas, and a president Obama who actually did not try to ban sport fishing or back the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Obama’s 75,000-word e-mail to the the entire nation, however, was totally real.