The Old Gray Lady ain’t what she used to be

IN THE fall of 1997, at the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed age of 17, I started journalism school and learned the role of the news media in society (or so I thought). It went a bit like this, taken from the website of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting:

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.

This was hammered home in class after class, especially the ethics class required of all J-school students, in which we learned about reporters fabricating stories, the importance of fact-checking, and especially Watergate, Watergate, Watergate. We were told that we could be heroes, if we held ourselves to the standards of Woodward and Bernstein. We were important! We were a key part of American democracy!

MORE THAN 10 years have gone by, and time and experience have made me jaded about the role of the news media, but my jaw still dropped when I saw the January 12, 2012, column by the New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane, titled "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?" Brisbane was responding to a letter that went as follows:

My question is what role the paper's hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements--by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper's overarching goal is truth, oughtn't the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn't the Times' coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?"

Brisbane puffs out his chest in response: But wouldn't fact-checking the statements of politicians make us look biased?

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?

There's a very simple answer to this question, Mr. Brisbane, and I caught onto it back when I was a cute little 17-year-old coed in undergrad, getting condescending pats on the head from hoary old newspapermen like you: do your goddamned job.

The way to avoid looking biased is to fact-check everything that every politician says, right or left--to hold their feet to the fire, as we were told we would be required to do. Many of the commenters on the article said it much more eloquently than me, and I encourage readers to check them out. I'll summarize briefly: all except one commenter answered the title's question with some version of: "Yes, you should be a truth vigilante, stupid--that's what we're paying for."

Naturally, a wounded Mr. Brisbane and Executive Editor Jill Abramson responded later in the day with exactly what you might expect: a response that boiled down to: "You want us to ferret out the facts? But that's haaaaa-aaard!" Brisbane writes:

My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut "facts" that are offered by newsmakers when those "facts" are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

To illustrate the difficulty of it, the first example I used in my blog post concerned the Supreme Court's official statement that Clarence Thomas had misunderstood the financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife's earnings.

If you think that should be rebutted in the text of a story, it means you think a reporter can crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice and report back. Or perhaps you think the reporter should just write that the "misunderstanding" excuse is bull and let it go at that. I would respectfully suggest that's not a good approach.

I'm guessing that the commenters responding to this are not New York Times editors, but they certainly know the job of a newspaper better than Mr. Brisbane does. An example, from Jesse King of Boston:

In the case of Clarence Thomas, there is an ancient and venerable technique of mind-reading available to the astute journalist:

Try asking him.

When confronted with such an odd statement, the astute journalist could, for example, simply ask Clarence Thomas how it is possible that a legal professional of his ultimate caliber and position could forget such an important matter, particularly given that it directly reflects on critical aspects of his job, such as conflict of interest provisions?

Today, the mainstream media claims, on the one hand, to have the public's back--and particularly the Times, known as the "Old Gray Lady" and the national "paper of record," one of the most respected news sources in the world and purveyor of the capital-T Truth. At the same time, there's this objection to fact-checking everything and really challenging politicians, the way we were told to in school--because that's being a "vigilante"! (Read: it might make powerful people angry!)

There are real consequences to this attitude--the notion that fact-checking is just too hard, and that the only way to be "unbiased" is to report what politicians say, not examine it. The consequences aren't just a matter of citizens believing falsehoods. Those falsehoods cost lives. The astute Mr. King (and I swear, although I live in Boston, I don't know this guy!) pointed this out in the comments section:

Where to start? The Iraq War of course. The most overt and deadly series of falsehoods uttered in the last decade, and where was the Free Press, the NYT?

Flag-waving in terror, so far as I could see--despite a series of extremely dubious and unsubstantiated claims being made by the White House at that time. Claims that simple public knowledge and logical inference strongly suggested were false, much less the rigorous fact checking or investigation that you claim to espouse.

SO WE already know that we can't trust the New York Times, or other mainstream media, nor do they have any intention of changing their ways. Where do we go from here?

Unluckily for the Times, right around the time I started journalism school, a new force came onto the scene--and I don't need to tell you about it, dear reader, because you're looking at it. Print media began losing ground because it was simply more convenient for people to find their news online, but now, in the era of Occupy, there's even more to it.

The media may ignore, under-report, or mock protests, as they have throughout the last decade and more, but it's not hard to find the facts on YouTube, and it's free, too. The most important news stories are being broken on the Internet, and print media have to scurry to catch up. They cover incidents like the pepper-spraying at UC Davis last fall because the Internet scoops it first, and everyone already knows about it, not because of any commitment to truth, as evidenced by Brisbane's poignant question.

And then, of course, there are fine news sources like SocialistWorker.org, which never gives a politician the benefit of the doubt and makes no claim to be "unbiased" (after all, the truth has a known left-wing bias).

I don't have any particular hope that the New York Times will follow this example, but that's fine – because at the rate they're going, the Times and other mainstream media will go the way of the dinosaurs, because they refuse to do what the public needs them to. Citizen journalism is already proving itself to be a fine substitute.