Remember when you could trust the national media to report news completely, objectively and even-handedly?
Neither do I.
Sure, when I was a kid, I trusted Uncle Walter.
CBS anchor Walter Cronkite ended his broadcasts with “and that’s the way it is.” After growing up, I realized that, well, often it wasn’t.
Sometimes Walt’s idea of “the way it is” was just wrong, most famously when he misreported the North Vietnamese Army’s and Viet Cong’s 1968 Tet Off ensive military debacle as a victory. It became a PR victory for the Communists.
Dan Rather extended that journalistic tradition with his “fake but true” National Guard documents about President Bush. Dan can claim to be the anchor who put the BS in CBS News.
Sometimes called “fi rst draft of history,” journalism reveals, as first drafts often do, the writer’s agendas, blinding biases and laziness.
Ensuring Barack Obama’s success has been a national media agenda since 2007.
When it came to Obama’s political infl uences, quirkypolitical rise or friends Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, the media were remarkably incurious - a character fl aw they regularly attributed to George W. Bush. Their lack of curiosity continues with Obama’s unnecessarily destructive management of the sequester and the facts and coverup of Benghazi.
Forty years ago, curious and energetic reporters dug into a “third-rate burglary,” the Watergate break-in, despite its irrelevance to the Nixon landslide. They did their job well. We were informed. Justice was served.
But awkward Richard Nixon never sent a “tingle” up anyone’s leg as Obama did Chris Matthew’s. Leg tingles apparently don’t supply journalists suft cient energy to dig into what happened at Benghazi or to penetrate the coverup.
The administration’s lack of cooperation with the House committees investigating suggests the facts would be embarrassing to the U.S.
Normally, that’s media gold.
But not if Obama might be embarrassed, too.
Ignoring Benghazi requires averting media eyes; avoiding the Dr. Kermit Gosnell story requires willful blindness. The Philadelphia abortionist went to trial April 18 for the murders of a woman and of seven babies (the charge now reduced to three).
The case was a hot topic on conservative and, oddly enough, pro-choice blogs, but only after liberal, pro-life feminist Kirsten Powers’ mentioned it on Fox News did the story surface. Except for a brief April 19 New YorkTimes story on page 16, the media was silent.
Yet this story has everything the media could want except the Westboro Baptist Church-multiple murders, grisly details, greed, a member of a prestigious profession gone wrong. Still, despite many AP wire reports, no one in the media saw much significance to it.
Had the infants’ spinal cords been snipped a few seconds earlier, Gosnell could have been charged only with abortions on post-24-week fetuses, illegal in Pennsylvania. Because Gosnell’s “precipitated fetuses” were so obviously really dead babies, abortion’s euphemistic respectability was easy to see through.
Perhaps the journalists read linguist George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” a liberal’s guide for not thinking in “conservative terms.” If you can’t think in another’s terms, you are blind to their issues. Exactly the point. These journalists had trained themselves not to think, a useful skill for any ideologue when faced with inconvenient facts.
Reporter: “He allegedly killed babies?”
Editor: “Fetuses, man, fetuses.”
Reporter: “But the dictionary says a fetus is an ‘unborn human being.’”
Editor: “Sorta, but not fully developed. Don’t think of Joe Biden.”
Reporter: “That’s hard.
They don’t have selfawareness, right? Sorry, thinking Biden again.”
Editor: “Just stop thinking.”
The laziness of not thinking also allows local media to be infected with national agendas and biases. Without thoughtful editing and rigorous verifi cation, local media can report unverified, even unverifi able stories from national media as fact.
In a recent example, alocal TV anchor said, “The president is monitoring the situation closely.” This statement is mere supposition of presidential attention, an unacknowledged quotation passed from White House flack to wire service to station.
Repeating such pablum, like publishing a news release instead of researching and writing a story, promotes to fact a cheap self-serving sound bite. Low information voters form opinions from uncritically absorbing such soft, warm nonsense: advantage incumbent.
Editors and reporters should just say what they really know: “The White House reports that the president is monitoring the situation closely.”
Agendas, biases and laziness can get the better of anyone. When they form journalistic practice, the rest of us should be as energetic, alert and skeptical as, well, the journalist should have been.
BUDDY ROGERS HAS BEEN A U.S.
ARMY PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER AND HAS TAUGHT WRITING FOR MANY YEARS, CURRENTLY AT NORTHWEST ARKANSAS COMMUNITY COLLEGE.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 04/28/2013