They say that timing is everything in life. I certainly hope there's more to it than just that for our colleague Saint Paul because once again it's turned out that he has no timing whatsoever. No sooner does he depart for the safety and seclusion of an extended vacation in a Rocky Mountain redoubt, then his old buddy Brian Lambert, late of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, does emerge from underneath the rotting carcass of the recently extinct Nick Coleman Radio Show to pen an article for local monthly The Rake titled Newspapers in Turmoil!.
As one would expect, it's a rich vein of golden material ripe for the mocking. Lambert became a special favorite of Saint Paul's due in no small part to his continuing claim that there is no liberal media bias, which usually was made in columns that pilloried conservatives and were themselves prima facia evidence of the very bias that Lambert sought to deny. We get plenty more of the same here with bonus mentions of "my friend Nick Coleman," "The bard of Anoka, Garrison Keillor," and another of Saint Paul's bete noires, Dan Barreiro. Somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, Saint Paul is experiencing the phenomenon of "remote salivating."
I'm not going to give Lambert's piece the thorough attention it so richly deserves here. I'll save that for Saint Paul's return. It's not right to jump another man's claim like that. Instead I'll just share a few of the nuggets that I culled from it:
Simultaneously, political ideologues of all persuasions, but primarily of the right wing, have badly intimidated MSM editors and news directors into playing a disingenuous "balance" game to counter bogus charges of being politically biased.
Sniff. We're sorry for bullying those poor ninety-pound weakling MSM editors.
Maverick journalists and "original thinkers" need not apply for management positions in the new system; they are considered remnants, holdouts, and cranks of a bygone era.
Which is why I, Brian Lambert--maverick and original thinker, was fired.
The new manager lives in an insulated echo chamber, constantly exchanging boilerplate corporate prattle among his or her management peers and superiors, and issuing too-frequent-to-be-credible "red alerts" rushed out for employee consumption--and despair. It's a fair question whether this new crowd are journalists at all.
Unlike me, Brian Lambert.
By the time the mainstream has fully squandered the essence of its influence (probably over the next decade, accelerating after the complete conversion to digital media), there will be at least three or four dozen marquee bloggers well enough established to declare parity with run-of-the-mill Op-Ed pages in both analytical acuity and readership. At that point NBC/GE might as well let Brian Williams read daily transcripts from Power Line and Daily Kos.
Good luck getting more than three or four word in from Kos without running into problems with the network censor.
So yes, traditional news--news gathered by professionals operating under well-understood rules of engagement, where fairness and accountability matter more than speed and sensation--is very much under siege.
Exactly when was this heralded era of "traditional news" with fairness and accountability anyways? I seem to have missed out on it.
Some of the reasons for the great decline are external, contrived, and cynical, particularly the crackpot chorus that perpetually squawks about political "bias."
You're preaching to choir here Brian. Make that the "crackpot chorus."
A now-classic example of the kind of "balance" trap the MSM has got itself into was the so-called Swift Boat Veterans issue during the 2004 presidential campaign. The point was not that a Democrat, John Kerry, was the victim of a contrived, baseless smear.
You see, none of those guys were really "Swift Boat Veterans." In fact, there really is no such thing as a "Swift Boat" either. The whole thing was all just a dirty trick made up by Karl Rove to get John Kerry.
The point was that, rather than persistently assessing the accuracy of the charges of the Swifties, standard newsroom protocol required persistent "balance." Six inches of quotes from the Swifties balanced by six inches of response from Kerry. Day after day. Eventually, readers were left with the "balanced" view that there was no truth and both sides were idiots. In terms of campaign tactics, Kerry has been justly criticized for failing to take the Swifties head on. But in too many news reports, that failure became a bigger, far more frequently reported story than whether what the Swifties said was even true.
Fully reporting and regularly declaring the Swifties' tale to be the transparent lie it was would, of course, have left journalists open to blistering attacks from talk-radio hosts and bloggers, and probably also an uncomfortable chat with upper management. But the Swift Boat episode falls into a familiar pattern whereby the media's quaint notion of "balance" has it reporting more on the fracas than the facts.
Interesting to note that Lambert never does get around to explaining exactly what these "facts" were. Instead he just continues to beat the drum that the Swift Vets' stories were lies without ever bothering to produce one shred of evidence to back up his claims.
In my experience, ninety-five percent of reporters and editors are well within the mainstream of political attitudes, appropriately skeptical about every politician and every overreaching ideology.
You know, the Brian Lambert/Nick Coleman "mainstream."
In fairness to Lambert, he does make a couple of good observations about newspapers needing to allow their writers to write and become more like blogs:
The attitude and writerly personal style of blogs is most similar to that of the best columnists--metro, politics, sports, whatever--and mainstream newspapers are constantly struggling with how much freedom they dare parcel out to even those characters.
And:
Papers still have the wherewithal to fight back against the appeal of the best bloggers. But in order to compete, they're going to have to let at least some of their writers be actual writers, loosen their foundation garments, assert their opinions, employ more literary devices, and in general have some fun with the topics and people they cover.
Amen to that notion. Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about seeing such changes any time soon.
Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that Saint Paul is enjoying his well deserved vacation in the Rockies. He doesn't even know what he's missing out on back here at home.
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