A quote often attributed to Otto Von Bismarck in the 1930s — but really belonging to poet John Godfrey Saxe over 60 years earlier — tells us that “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
“Original Old Media reporting” belongs on Saxe’s list.
In all three cases, the temptation to look away is great. In all three, we must resist. All require strong surveillance to ensure a quality product.
For all of their considerable accomplishments, New Media watchdogs have not done a particularly good job of proactively monitoring wire service and other original-source stories as they move through the assembly line from breaking news to supposedly settled narrative. As a result, as often occurs when legislators and sausage plants aren’t closely watched, product quality is often pathetic, and is sometimes downright dangerous.
Take the coverage of Detroit Flight 253. In the hours immediately following the thwarted terrorist attack, both the Associated Press and USA Today told the nation that there was an “Al-Qaida link” involved. The AP’s money paragraphs were these:
One law enforcement source said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil.
“We believe this was an attempted act of terrorism,” a White House official said.
As shown here, by 11:04 p.m., the wire service was already downplaying the AQ link. But in the process, it invoked the dreaded M-word:
From there, the devolution accelerated. As I observed the next morning:
(The Muslim and Nigerian) verbiage remained but went to the second-last paragraph of the 3:07 a.m. version of the report, and disappeared without replacement from the 3:54 a.m. dispatch. The 8:56 a.m. report also has no text discussing circumstances in Nigeria, and has been purged of the M-word.
The wires’ faith in their reporters’ original work continued to dissipate in the days that followed. The supposedly solid AQ connection somehow became tenuous and unproven. It got so absurd that we even began seeing references to how Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab “allegedly boarded a plane.”
All of this culminated on the Tuesday after the attack, when Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post and the rest of the establishment press allowed the President of the United States to inform us, without challenge and as if it was a recent discovery, that — shazam! — the attack might have had something to do with AQ (bold is mine):
President Obama and his top advisers received new information Monday night about the attempted airliner attack in Detroit that has led them to believe there is “some linkage” with al-Qaeda, a senior administration official said Tuesday.
This is a self-evident load of rubbish to anyone who followed the story from its inception. The president and his poseurs played “let’s pretend,” and Old Media’s lapdogs let them skate. “Obama learns the truth, and will act to do something about it” became the dominant takeaway, and the public ate it up. Alleged journalists’ coverage of this critical story broke faith with those they claim to serve, and arguably allowed an administration whose commitment to fighting the War on Terror is more than a little questionable to appear duly vigilant.
Sadly, this kind of story decay occurs all too frequently, comes in many varieties, and has been occurring for years. In October of last year, the New York Times‘s Jeff Zeleny heavily watered it down another reporter’s story originally critical of Barack Obama’s failed attempt to get the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago. The original reporter’s dispatch is gone. Zeleny did it again in covering the president’s late October visit to Dover Air Force Base to review the coffins of returning dead soldiers. In 2006, Reuters began blaming Britain’s support of Israel for the thwarted London multiple plane bomb plot within hours of its discovery. In 2005, a routine report about the economy’s job gains at the Washington Post was transformed into a treatise on why it didn’t matter because George W. Bush’s Iraq War unpopularity was the paramount issue.
Sausage makers have had to learn to live with having outside inspectors in their plants. Similarly, legislators have generally come to accept the fact that groups like Citizens Against Government Waste and the Club for Growth will be on the lookout any time they’re in session — which partially explains why the current Congress’s attempt to prevent that oversight during its assembly of the health care sausage has drawn so much outrage.
It should not surprise anyone that Old Media’s sausage makers aren’t particularly interested in allowing a similar degree of oversight, and that they are in some cases quite hostile to attempts at real-time inspection. The AP, for example, periodically threatens to go after anyone who might dare to cite a few words from or link to its content, as CEO Tom Curley did in a New York Times interview last year:
The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.”
While there is clearly a financial motive involved in such a stance, the AP and other wires seem to be at least as interested in making it difficult for others to oversee and record what they do as they’re doing it.
That cannot stand. If bad sausage gets into the market, it can be recalled. If bad legislation becomes law, we can vote out the lawmakers. But once a story’s narrative becomes established, all that remains for those who object is a far less effective reactive response that will reach relatively few.
Especially given Old Media’s obvious, growing, and more aggressive biases, New Media watchdogs must work harder and smarter to ensure that these sultans of slant lose their nearly exclusive control over what will become the first draft of history.
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