Off-Topic: Journalists

[Grant Barrett]

I've always claimed that the reason I quit being a small-time journalist
about seven years ago was that I didn't like the company I was keeping.
This largely refers to the questionable motives, practices and results of my
journalistic peers. Whatever my other ethical sinkholes and sins, I made
every effort to follow good journalistic practices, and to some success, I
would say.

Since then, I've kept an interested eye on the journalistic trade (it is
not a profession in the true sense: journalists are not licensed and do
not require certification) and found my perception of journalism as
"questionable" re-confirmed time and time again.

But this questionable behavior falls well within the scope of typical
human failings, typical human weakness and typical human bad wiring. In most
cases when a fact is wrong, or a story is slanted, it is not due to malice
or evil intent, but rather to a cascading chain of events that starts
with a single moment. Sometimes this moment is a writer's assumption, or a
source's lie, or a too-tight deadline, or a confirming phone call not
received, or a thousand other things. While a layer of editors is usually
beneficial in catching mistakes, it also adds more chance of human error. A
story, as they say of spacecraft, has one million moving parts and is crafted
by the lowest bidder.

I have a cousin who, like thousands of other people across the country,
thinks that The Media is a monolithic body of thought and direction, which,
with the assistance of NAFTA, WTO, NATO, UN and (sorry to say) the Jews,
is hell-bent on the destruction of the Constitution, America, and
God-fearing Christians. His sources of information about these evils deeds (black
helicopters, foreign troops on American soil, etc.) are newsletters
fashioned out of whole cloth by know-nothing freaks, and radio shows on
late-night AM, sources with no credibility whatsoever. No attributions, no
verifiable sources, no chain of editors. My cousin believes his sources because
they are the only few outlets printing those fantastic stories; because The
Media largely reports the same things, then The Media must be acting in
concert, and there therefore must be a continuous, organized cover-up. His
sources, because they are a unique group, must be true because of their
exceptional content.

He asked me once how I could even believe anything I read in The Media
(he almost wet himself when I said I read the New York Times every day). It
is, and always will  be, a matter of multiple sources, and filtering for
known biases. For example, I know the New York Times tends to be liberal,
take pro-Federal stances, and has often been suspicious of new technology.
Reporters are not (and should not try to be) objective, and unless you buy
the idea of journalism as a monolith of thought, the only way to get a
rounded point of view is to apply known biases as screens to multiple
sources.

In closing, I should say that I recently joined an email list covering
computer-aided reporting. Based upon what I see there, and elsewhere,
journalists' biggest failings are not their mistakes, which are usually
forgivable, but their arrogance and unapologetic behavior, which are not.

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at americandialect.org