Fraters Libertas

We Don't Need No Stinking Journalism

According to cliché, journalism is the first draft of history. To me, that seems to be an accurate characterization. Meaning it probably wasn't the product of a journalist. Remember, they create first drafts, which implies clunky prose, typos, superficial reasoning, false starts, dead ends, and first and foremost, mistakes (and in my case, gravy stains on the cover page).

In other words, it's a product not really worth considering for longer than it takes to read it. Maybe they get some of it right, maybe they don't. And whatever valuable insights they've identified might get brought out after a careful review by a competent advisor, then some intellectual rigor, introspection and actual scholarship by the author. But who's going to provide that - the Star Tribune!? (rim shot - oceans of cascading laugher)

Bret Stephens of the WSJ has further thoughts on the matter:

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight: They can and usually do. Nor is it that the facts are obscure: Often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts--facts with consequences--from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.

Maybe they have such a difficult time deciding what's significant because no one can be expected to accurately document the significance of something as complex as human relations and politics and WAR! when the deadline is a few hours after the events take place. This would be near impossible for someone who approached their duties to report the facts in good faith. But throw in the ego-driven need to make a difference, to afflict the so-called comfortable and speak truth to the power that isn't wielded in concert with your ideology and you've got no shot at accurately identifying what needs to be reported and what doesn't. But that, my friends, is your daily newspaper, especially when they get in the business of providing commentary and analysis.

For examples of first drafts of history destined for the paper shredder of time and perspective, see the hyperventilating about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay or any piece written by noted first draft scribbler, Jim Boyd.

In contrast with that snake oil, I direct you to Victor Davis Hanson. This week in NRO, as he does every Friday, he addresses the most vital current events of the day and it reads like a doctoral thesis from some decades in the future, explaining what happened and why during the critical, confusing, tragic year of 2005. Excerpt:

If President Bush were a liberal Democrat; if he were bombing a white Christian, politically clumsy fascist in the heart of Europe; if al Qaeda and its Islamist adherents were properly seen as eighth-century tormenters of humanists, women, homosexuals, non-Arabs, and non-Wahhabi believers; and if Iraq had become completely somnolent with the toppling of Saddam's statue, then the American people would have remained behind the effort to dismantle Islamic fundamentalism and create the foundations to ensure its permanent demise.

But once the suicide murdering and bombing from Iraq began to dominate the news, then this administration, for historical reasons largely beyond its own control, had a very small reservoir of good will. The Islamists proved to be more adept in the public relations of winning liberal exemption from criticism than did the administration itself, as one nude Iraqi on film or a crumpled Koran was always deemed far worse than daily beheadings and executions. Indeed, the terrorists were able to morph into downtrodden victims of a bullying, imperialistic America faster than George W. Bush was able to appear a reluctant progressive at war with the Dark Age values of our enemies.

And once that transformation was established, we were into a dangerous cycle of a conservative, tough-talking president intervening abroad to thwart the poorer of the third world - something that has never been an easy thing in recent American history, but now in our own age has become a propagandist's dream come true.

This isn't a first draft of history, it is history, with current events merely serving as one example in a convincing litany. And VDH has no problems in identifying the significant facts from the insignificant. For these reasons I give him the highest compliment a writer can receive. He is no journalist.