5:45 in the afternoon.
CineWorld in
Haymarket; a nearly empty theater, watching
State of Play as it attempts to be the
All the President's Men of the Bush era. It fails in that attempt mainly because it over plays the "conspiracy theory come true" angle and spends the last 40 minutes trying to pull all the pieces together into a final, muddled, twist.
This isn't to say the movie isn't enjoyable, it is and there is some fine acting all around. Russell
Crowe is particularly believable as an overweight, ex-hippie investigative reporter attempting to balance protecting a friend (even after screwing his wife) and Getting The Story.
When I came out of the movie I couldn't help but wonder how many people believe that die-hard muck-
rakers still toil away in grubby newsrooms, knocking back Jack Daniels and committing small-scale felonies in pursuit of a scoop.
Back in the
pre-CNN age when I was a cub reporter with delusions of grandeur, a well-founded cynicism and mistrust of all politicians, I actually worked with guys not dissimilar to the Russell
Crowe character. They kept whiskey in their desks and knew the phone numbers of cops, bookies, gang informants and the mayor's barber. Information was their commodity; they acquired it and traded it with the deft precision of cold-war spies. They knew that discretion was the key to staying in the game and sources were never, ever, burned.
I don't know how things work now- I haven't set foot inside a newsroom in 15 years. I do know that with the advent of 24/7 network news the stature of journalists and the profession of journalism began a steep and steady decline. CNN lowered the bar and Fox News dug a hole and buried it.
To someone like me who grew up idolizing photojournalist, humbled by the steel-will of Edward R. Murrow and believing that Woodward and Bernstein were tobacco stained superheros, the sight of overpaid, vile-spewing pundits shrieking at each other during the news-hour is nothing short of criminally repulsive.
Gone is the dignity and depth that Walter Cronkite would bring to every story he presented. Replaced by an endless stream of government issued sound-bites and talking points. US news programs have descended to the level of Jerry Springer-like farce. Likewise the slanderous rags which pass as "news" papers here in the UK can do nothing to instill confidence in the profession.
One would think that this sorry state of affairs would be the root of the mistrust the general public feels towards journalists. To some extent and within some quarters this is true, however it doesn't explain why a significant number of people will trust Fox News over the BBC and
bloggers rather than the
New York Times.
I think that part of the reason stems from a frightening trend to blame problems not on the perpetrators but on the messengers. A conversation I had recently illustrates this point nicely:
Random woman at a party (
RWAAP): "We need to get the reporters out of Iraq and Afghanistan so that our troops can do their jobs!"
Me: "Don't you think we need to know what's going on in war-zones?"
RWAAP: "No. The military sometimes has to do things...certain things...to win the war and they can't do them if there are reporters around."
Me: "OK. So we should pull reporters out of ALL war-zones, like Rwanda, Georgia and Palestine so those soldiers can get on with the job?"
RWAAP: "Yes. I mean, NO! We need to protect our troops."
Me: "Right. Because our guys never commit atrocities?"
I didn't get an answer to that because my partner pulled me into the garden and chastised me for "not being friendly."
For further evidence of this overwhelming desire to blame the press for reporting on government malfeasance rather than the government for committing it, take a look a the comments from this article from yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle about a
New York Times reporter who escaped from the
Taliban:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/comments/view?f=/n/a/2009/06/20/international/i085949D20.DTLThe reporter, David S.
Rohde, clearly has balls of steel to go along with his Pulitzer, yet he and his newspaper are slammed both for his being in Afghanistan and reporting on the war. Do yourself a favour and search the
New York Times website for
Rohde's articles: they are insightful, well researched and yes, address uncomfortable subjects like prisoner abuse. The irony is that
Rohde wasn't even working for
The Times when he was taken captive- he was doing research for a book on the conflict.
Without news organizations like
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and the BBC the public at large would be nearly blind to the workings of both world and local governments. If it weren't for men and women with cameras, notebooks and tape recorders the atrocities of Tienanmen Square would have gone unreported.
From the Khmer Rouge to My
Lai, Watergate to
Blackwater; Katrina, Chernobyl, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami,
WMDs, Parliamentary expenses and Iranian elections- if you have heard about it, read about it or watched it on TV, reporters delivered the content.
The shift in readership from traditional news outlets to blogs is one I find particularly disquieting. I will never argue against the right of any idiot with an opinion, myself included, to post whatever mindless drivel he or she wants on the web. What I find alarming is that so many people are substituting raw,
unsubstantiated, gossip for hard news gathering. There seems to be a feeling that
bloggers, unencumbered by the need to verify their stories, somehow are privy to information and sources unavailable to people with press credentials.
Don't get me wrong. Blogs have their place and the immediacy of the Internet is a useful tool for providing a first look at breaking news. The ongoing election crisis in Iran is the most recent example of this. However, as the BBC was quick to point out, running video clips without first being able to ascertain their legitimacy jeopardizes the authenticity and accuracy of the coverage.
In my mind it is that question of accuracy which divides the world of on-line and real-world reporting.
The New York Times doesn't always get things right but unlike the
blogsphere, they can suffer serious repercussions for getting it wrong. The Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 is a prime example.
Jayson Blair wrote for the
New York Times for four years and filed hundreds of stories, a large number of which contained fabrications. He was hauled before his editors, confronted with his unacceptable behavior and took a "personal leave of absence" from the paper. After he came back he seemed to have turned his life around but it wasn't too long before inaccuracies started creeping back into his pieces. He was sacked in May of 2003 for what the paper called "a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."
A career destroyed, public humiliation and embarrassment. The price paid when legitimate news organizations fail in their duty to convey accurate and truthful information. What then are the penalties for a web site like
The Drudge Report when they convey blatant falsehoods? According to the BBC they would be, millions of dollars in advertising revenue and a place in
Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World list.
(Take a look at an excellent article by Andrew Shapiro on this subject:
http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/shapiro-drudge.shtml)
Who then are we going to trust? A newspaper who's very existence depends on its reputation for accuracy and in-depth investigative reporting or an anonymous blogger sitting alone in his apartment churning out whatever pops into his caffeine soaked brain? For many, the answer is the latter. It's easier to believe a comfortable lie which agrees with your own point of view than inconvenient facts which oppose it.
I fully expect
The New York Times to publish articles that run counter to my world view and to reveal that institutions or individuals I hold in high regard are flawed- sometimes fatally so. That is the nature of a free press and I wouldn't want to live in a society where such journalistic freedoms, along with inherent checks and balances, were absent.
The rapid decline of the standard bearers of professional journalism and the rise of
unmoderated, unaccountable, opinion blogs, on both sides of the political spectrum, bodes well for any politician who wants to cut a shady deal or any multi-national who decides that cleaning up toxic sludge from a little place called Love Canal is just too much of a
financial burden.
Knowing that we are being watched is supposed to keep us honest. That's why here in the UK we now live in a nation-wide Big Brother House of interlaced listening posts and CCTV cameras. While the effectiveness of this surveillance for deterring crime is debatable, what is unquestionable is the impact a camera and a pen in professional hands has on governments and large corporations. If no one is watching, they can, and will, get away with murder.
