The Audit

12:12 PM - April 19, 2012

Audit TV: Dean Starkman at the Narrative Arc Conference

By Ryan Chittum

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Here was an interesting insight from a Barney Frank interview about the journalism industry and how it has failed the public:

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/barney-frank-2012-4/

"I dislike the negativism of the media. I think the media has gotten cynical and negative to a point where it’s unproductive.

Is that a recent development?

It’s been a progressive development, or a regressive development. And I include even Jon Stewart and Colbert in this. The negativism—it hurts liberals, it hurts Democrats. The more government is discredited, the harder it is to get things done. And the media, by constantly harping on the negative and ignoring anything positive, plays a very conservative role substantively.

But isn’t part of that just because the media is expected to be adversarial?

Who expects it to be adversarial? Where did you read that? Did you read that in the First Amendment? Where did you read that the media is expected to be adversarial? It should be skeptical, why adversarial? Adversarial means you’re the enemy. Seriously, where does that come from?

Okay, maybe “skeptical” is the better word.

But that’s a very different word. You reflect the attitude: adversarial. And there is nothing in any theory that I have ever seen that says when you report events that you’re supposed to think, I’m the adversary, so that means I want to defeat them, I want to undermine them, I want to discredit them. Why is that the media’s role? But you’ve accurately stated it, and I think it’s a great mistake.

Do you think I just showed my hand there?

No, I don’t think you showed your hand personally. I think you reflected the Weltschmerz.

But you know the old aphorism, “Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.” I think that’s more what I was trying to get at.

When have you comforted the afflicted? I don’t see that in the media. I don’t see reporting that comforts low-income people or the environment. I think it’s negative about everybody."

What I see a lot in the washington media is adversarial approach, towards safe targets, masked as the press's public obligation. There's a lot of "Obama's a dick" or "Gore is an out of touch robot" kind of commentary because judgements and personalities are easier to talk about than the realities of political policies. cont..

#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 01:52 PM

You see this in the business press as well, which was why Bethany McLean was able to eat the press's lunch in the 2000's on the subject of Enron:

http://www.journalismjobs.com/bethany_mclean.cfm

"It's hard for me to judge what I thought of business journalism. I was so young and naïve. I went to a liberal arts school and never read The Wall Street Journal. I didn't have the knowledge to make an opinion about the world of business journalism. I definitely was surprised when I got to Fortune, about the emphasis of writing over understanding finance. Most journalists have a background in writing, and not a background in personal finance. The attitude has always been that you can teach someone business but you can't teach someone to write. I don't agree with that. I think you can understand numbers. I'm not a forensic accountant by any means, but it's not that complicated to get an understanding of how an income statement and balance sheet work. I think writing can come with practice as well. … When I first started working at Fortune, people would almost be proud of the fact they did not have the ability to do numbers. They'd just say they can call an analyst and get everything they need. I think there's much more of an understanding that you have to have a basic awareness of finance to do this job.

I think Enron probably helped people a lot. There's always been a real bias toward personalities and characters being the story, rather than numbers being the story. In some cases, numbers can be the story. Business is about people in the end, and it does come down to characters. But you can zero in on different aspects of the numbers and still tell a good story. You still have to look at the numbers, too. So I think in that way, the business has changed. "

When I look at the press, I see a situation where the journalist is not often grounded in reality and therefore relies on consensus over understanding. When I look at the press, I see a situation where hyper partisanship by conservatives has made the journalist scared to be skeptical of conservative claims, in fear of being accused of being adversarial, and down right nasty in challenging liberal claims, under the pretense of doing a public duty.

What I don't see is a lot of "Afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted". I see a lot of support for Paul Ryanish ideas put forth by both democrats and republicans which hurt the afflicted and support tax cuts for the comfortable. That might make someone look biased according to the rules of modern journalism.

If journalists have little to no grounding in basic history, economics, and math, then they have no business telling a story because their stories will be of the genre we've come to expect from the lazy press, convenient fairy tales which mislead the public because they are fundamentally wrong. This kind of press is not valuable, and it should come as little surprise when the public begins to let it go into the trash in search of alternatives.

#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 02:17 PM

"That might make someone look biased according to the rules of modern journalism."

Doh! What I meant was "Afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted? That might make someone look biased according to the rules of modern journalism."

Fail is me.

#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 02:22 PM

Barney Frank bitching about the press?

First of all, who cares?

Secondly, how can one be "skeptical" without being "adversarial"? How can you say "I start with the premise that you're full of crap, Barney Frank, and everything you say is damned lie or a misjudgment, but I'm not trying to be "adversarial" about it - let's go do lunch in a non-adversarial way so that I can ask you about your lies and misjudgments?"

Anyone heard of Peter Zenger?

Damn right, the press should be adversarial to the Gubmint.

Government is inherently corruptible and exists only to oppress citizens or to suppress them. Government is somebody holding a gun at you and shooting you with it if you don't do what is demanded of you. Government - ANY government - is an infringement upon liberty and freedom. Power corrupts, as anyone with half a brain knows, and government, again inherently, is fundamentally rooted in the use of physical force in the administration of power.

This reliance upon pain of death or imprisonment is fundamentally different than other types of power. A boss doesn't have the right to pull a gun to force an employee to do something, like the Gubmint does. Anyone who can't (or won't) acknowledge this distinction isn't worth considering.

Say you get a speeding ticket and don't pay it and you don't show up in court. What happens? A man shows up with a gun and hauls your ass at gunpoint in handcuffs to the magistrate's office, that's what.

Say you don't pay your Obamacare fine when it's due. What happens. The IRS will send agents at gunpoint and seize your stuff. If you try to impede them, they will shoot you.

As any smart person knows (and as history has amply demonstrated) government should be minimized to provide the least possible intrusion upon the rights and liberties of the governed. It should exist ONLY to maintain an orderly society where personal safety, liberty and property rights are protected. PERIOD.

The press damn well ought to oppose any expansion of government and should assume that any act of power warrants investigation.

#4 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 03:29 PM

"Secondly, how can one be "skeptical" without being "adversarial"?"

Well, just for instance, say someone makes the claim "You can't be skeptical without being adversarial."

I could be skeptical of that claim and seek to verify it. When I have verified it as false, then I could go back to the person who made that claim and discuss the basis they used to make that claim. If the error was based on an honest misunderstanding of facts and/or terms in the dictionary, then by addressing the error, the person who made the error becomes better informed and less prone to repeating the error.

I could also be adversarial towards the person. Then the error becomes evidence of the person's idiocy and/or dishonesty. I don't really have to care about whether the error is based on honest misunderstandings or not nor even whether 'the error' is actually true or not. The error is useful in its capacity as evidence, not in its potential for correction.

So yeah, the difference between skeptical and adversarial is a choice of focus. The skeptic is focused on the truth. The adversary is focused on the enemy.

Is that simple enough for you?

#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Apr 2012 at 08:37 PM

Thimbles is just blithering semantics.

There is no practical distinction to be made, from the perspective of journalism, between a "skeptical" and an "adversarial" role.

Questioning and distrust of authority is required of good journalism and good citizenship. I don't care what label you slap on it, distrust between parties results in an inherently adverse relationship. PERIOD.

Whiny liberal crybabies like Barney Frank take it personally on the rare occasions when journalists bother to question them about their liberal nonsense.

Questions like "Geez, Barney, how did the projected cost of Obamacare manage to double in just two years?" are "adversarial" because the Gubmint gets "discredited" making it harder for poor Barney to "get things done".

What a crock of crap!

#6 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Fri 20 Apr 2012 at 07:25 AM

"Questioning and distrust of authority is required of good journalism and good citizenship. I don't care what label you slap on it, distrust between parties results in an inherently adverse relationship. PERIOD."

Yeah it would be nice if journalists questioned authorities like the idiots continually pushing for deregulation in the banking system and energy sector.

It would be nice if journalists told the stories necessary for public protection instead of saying "Whoops! There goes the Gulf of Mexico" "Whoops! There goes the banking system!" "Whoops! There goes your pension!" "Whoops! There goes your lungs!" "No one could have predicted!"

Journalists have no problem seeing government as the enemy (which may be another reason why they go easy on conservatives because "Hey! They distrust power too!", (unfortunately, this means that the national security state conservatives support largely goes unchallenged)) but they have a hard time being even skeptical of private power. They depend on them for commercials, their negative reporting could result in large economic costs, they could lose access, they could get sued...

So many of the CNBC folks say nothing. CNN has Wolf Blitzer holding Hilary Rosen to account on the mommy flap. Nope, in the commercial journalism world, there's nothing more important going on in the world today involving you, your mortgage, your government, your employment etc...

Do you know why internet shows like democracy now regularly eat commercial journalism's lunch? I'd sure like to know. I think it may have to do with Democracy Now's approach to news - in that it doesn't just report the news, it goes out to witnesses and experts on the subject reported to present to their audience what the news means. It might have to do with Democracy Now's approach to reporting, in that it doesn't follow the news herd, it goes to the people and explores the subjects that are relevant to their lives and the life of the democracy they live in.

Many journalists, especially the tv brand, cannot be bothered.

#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 20 Apr 2012 at 12:40 PM

And this behavior has consequences for the journalism brand.

http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/

#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 20 Apr 2012 at 12:44 PM