Changing the Game

I wrote earlier today about the secret society of lefty journalists called Gamechanger Salon (somewhat pretentious name, no? … see: Fletcher's Castoria Blog.) This has got me ruminating on what is occurring in news reporting in general. As I understand it, reporters are meant to provide their audience the essence … the who, what, when, where and how of a news story … preferably early on … but not necessarily the why. Now, often the lede of a news story is the imagined why and one has to sift through many filler paragraphs to find these other facts … if they are there at all. Too often reporters tend to squash other essential and needed facts for the sake of political correctness.

I recall reading a while back a survey done on the entering students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism … and the primary motivation of these tyros was to change society for the better (obviously “better” being a relative term.) In other words, rather than reliably and truthfully reporting the facts of what was occurring in the world, they wanted to change the game. And it appears that Columbia University ... and many other such schools ... do little to change this misguided ambition. I believe that this is a noxious notion of what reporting is supposed to be … and has grown mainly from Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate news reporting which brought down President Nixon.

Every cub reporter now wants to emulate this dynamic duo … and lead our society out of the sewer and into his/her own version of utopia. Such scooping of the world will result in a Pulitzer Prize and then fame and riches beyond imagination. This is a little like a grandstanding playground basketball player imagining himself as the next LeBron James. Instead of pursuing a respectable career within ethical and professional boundaries, many reporters are now trying to become another Walter Cronkite and “making a difference” like this CBS News anchorman did by humiliating LBJ. And so they join the Gamechangers Salon.

Opinion journalists may do this ... but not reporters. There should be an enormous gulf between the two ... which has now been conveniently blurred. And, journalists of any stripe should not be forming cabals.

(I think that H.L. Mencken also said that any newsman who has more than just a handful of mourners at his funeral was not a good journalist.)

Flipper

Flipper

When I was growing up the main-stream media clearly had a right-leaning bias.  Some time around the early 1970's things there flipped dramatically to the left.  I suspect it was a result of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's resignation.  However, the events in Viet Nam and the resulting protests ... along with Walter Cronkite's declaration of our eventual defeat by the Viet Cong ... and the publishing of the Pentagon papers by the New York Times ... all clearly presaged Woodward and Bernstein's triumph.  After that, the media fully realized its transformative powers and believed that its primary mission was bringing about even more social change ... as opposed to just reporting,  This coupled with the Supreme Court's decisions emasculating libel laws gave the U.S. media an extraordinary headwind to port.

The question then poses itself -- when will our media's bias flip back to the right?  (And I can confidently predict that this will happen someday ... the question is, of course, when?)  Clearly the Fox News network and the successes of the right-leaning talk radio (and some blogs) suggests that there is some movement in this direction.  However, the media tally (mostly network news, newspapers, Hollywood, and news magazines) is still overwhelmingly liberal.  My wife posed this very question to me this morning while watching Morning Joe on MS/NBC (which was sans Joe Scarborough, and, thus, a little hard to digest without some antacid tablets ... Mika Brzezinski's continued smirks exacerbated my dyspepsia.)

Over the course of today, I've attempted to answer this question many ways ... perhaps a Democrat scandal of the magnitude of Nixon's ... perhaps when Fox News's ratings match those of the combined network news programs ... perhaps even when a right-slanted movie takes the country by storm (Act of Valor?).  All these things are possible indications, but, upon much reflection, I have come up with what I believe to be the acid test ... that would be when that political chameleon, Arianna Huffington, flips back and, once again, becomes a conservative.