Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.
Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.
My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts.
Sounds entirely reasonable, but in practice there are experts and then there are experts. Those experts whose message dovetails nicely with the underlying media narrative of liberal heroes and conservative villains are given prominent placement in stories and an authoritative voice. Those experts whose messages are perceived to lend aid and comfort to corporate concerns usually tossed in near the back end of a story and they are generally made to sound defensive, rather than in command of their subject matter. For the MSM, environmental groups “say,” while industry guys like me “claim.”
It’s maddening, because there is absolutely no reason why any reporter, no matter how badly he or she failed every chemistry and physics class in college, could not find a scientist or other technical expert who could break the skeptical side of a technical issue like the global warming debate down into digestible, understandable bits. There are plenty of us around. Just off the top my head, there’s Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, Richard Lindzen, Steve Milloy and Steve McIntyre. The left wing narrative dismisses experts like these as either: a) propagandists in the employ of Exxon-Mobil, or b) irrelevant because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Neither argument stands up, but skeptics are, according to the liberal playbook, “denialists” unworthy of attention, which is a convenient way to avoid having to think about the other side of an issue that, in reality, does indeed have two sides.
For those of us who have been involved in the environmental business, this sort of MSM behavior is sadly predictable when it comes to dear old Ma Earth. Whenever I represent an industrial client attempting to develop a new, high-profile (i.e., controversial) project, I do so knowing that the MSM reporters covering the issue are going to misquote me, take my statements out of context and ignore greats hunks of any argument I might care to make on behalf of the evil corporation daring to bring jobs and prosperity to the community in question. The best ink will be devoted to the experts on the other side who have a much more interesting tale to tell, basically because their account is so terrifying. Given the choice between somebody from the Sierra Club telling a group of nervous citizens that a new power plant is going to kill their babies and me – a paid shill for industry – telling them that’s just plain stupid, who do you think the MSM journalist/generalist is going to feature most prominently in a story?
That sounds like a complaint, but it’s really not. My job exists largely, if not entirely, because the MSM has been so good at frightening large swaths of the populace by grossly distorting environmental and health risks. (I’ll have to remember to send Andy Revkin a Christmas card this year). But, having cried wolf for so long and so shrilly, more and more people are ignoring the legacy media and turning to the new media to get the whole story. They should. When it comes to science and the environment, and many, many other subject areas, there’s a very good reason why people are turning away from the MSM in droves: the MSM hasn’t done its job for decades.
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