inqk.net

So I’m reading this article in Edge magazine and I just have to stop. The interviewer is doing their best but the corporate blow-hard on the other end just won’t stop using words like ‘amazing’ and ‘blown away’ while he dodges questions and repeats corporate spin.

The snookering of the media by corporate and political interests feels like something that really only happened in the last 15 or so years. Maybe it’s that media consultants didn’t exist back before then and so most people weren’t wise to all the tricks of the trade. Maybe it’s that with so many media opportunities these days everyone’s just had a lot more practice. Maybe it’s because I was born in 1982 and what I remember of the 80s is mostly informed by Die Hard movies.

Whatever the case, what do you, as the media consumer, do when confronted with this sort of thing? I stopped reading the article, free as it seemed it was from any real content, but afterwards I couldn’t help feel as if perhaps I’d missed out on something important. After all, I’d started reading the article because I was interested in how the iPhone was developing as a video game platform. There might have been nuggets of information buried in there, only waiting for someone (me!) to dig them out. Avoiding the media hardly seems like the answer.

I wanted to blame someone for this development and the ‘fair and balanced’ approach to journalism seems as good a scapegoat as any. What does ‘fair and balanced’ even mean? Are the two compatible? What if being fair means being unbalanced? What if being balanced means being unfair? Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor¹, has referred to the approach as a ‘false equivalency’. In an interview with Jon Stewart she explained:

[My] view is that when Candidate A says it’s raining outside, and Candidate B says it’s sunny, a journalist should be able to look outside and say, ‘Well it’s sunny, so one of these guys is wrong.’

But if you’re in an interview with Candidate A when do you say this? During the interview? Aftewards when you’re backannouncing it? In a follow-up segment the next week? I feel like in polite society it’s rude to point out to someone that what they’re describing is diametrically opposed to reality. Or is calling someone on their shit what separates a journalist from a dinner party guest? Politeness be damned?

Of course there’s an immediate problem with calling people on their shit. You need to know yours. And really well. What this requires is an incredible amount of preparation by journalists to have researched the interview subject, the previous answers they’ve given during interviews, their likely answers to your questions, the obvious holes in these answers, oh, and the general topic area. In a 24-hour news world where budgets are being cut and newsrooms are being downsized does anyone have the time or the resources to do this?

Are we at a point where the capacity for impoliteness no longer exists? And what do we do if we are? Sometimes I wonder if news institutions like the New York Times have become too old and what’s needed is deep, deep reform. That the rhythms of old media are too well known and too well understood by those that they are tasked with shining a light on. Are the trailblazers of the Internet the solution? Can they even begin to fill this void? Who has time to do research when you’ve got to post something new every 30 minutes?

I’m not sure where this leaves us. I guess still not reading the Edge interview but no closer it seems to a solution. If we ignore the panderers in the media does this send the signal that newsrooms ought to get serious about their jobs or that they ought to get rid of those jobs? If we frequent the blogs do we simply enter a deafening echo chamber where the spin that assaults us is our own? Is there a third way, something that’s rougher than old media but better funded than new media?

And where does that funding come from?