At “The Most Stupid Lede I’ve Ever Read,” a commenter responds, “I don’t see the problem with the whole thing. The purpose of media is to consume and destroy facts, and excrete toxic civilization-smashing poison gas.”
Oh dear. The sad reality is that journalism is one of the world’s more dangerous professions. See, for example, “61 Journalists Killed in 2014/Motive Confirmed.” They may have been mistaken or misguided, but they were evidently not liars, fantasists, or poseurs, like Williams. If they were, they would still have lives—and makeup artists.
Sometimes, when I try to explain the decline of North American network journalism in the age of the Internet, I offer the “air traffic controller principle.” Think of the air traffic controller on one end of a news reporting spectrum and the Talk TV human hairpiece on the other.
Now, Bob Kernel, weather reporter for Radio KORN – The Farmer’s Friend, is in the middle of the spectrum.
If we need the ATC to land planes safely, he must restrict his on-the-job communications to that end. He is not ranting at incoming pilots about global warming or religion-is-a-scam. Okay, maybe he is. For three seconds. After that, he should be looking at a different career. Or, if he is in the military, courts martial maybe.
About Bob Kernel, well, he can get away with a bit of news-shaping. But only a bit. If he chooses to rant about some a-crockalypse instead, farmers will just find out the weather on the Internet, without Radio KORN. So a bean counter observes that Bob’s act is bringing in lots of complaints and no ad dollars. Then Kernel is pounding the pavement with all the other media types, newly let go.
The human hairpiece, at the far end of the spectrum, can just plain make stuff up, about himself or a bunch of other things. His audience consists mainly of people who choose to be deceived. (Maybe they write their own fantasy autobiographies too?) The key thing to see is why it doesn’t even matter any more: Because, using the Internet, we can find out the truth about important stuff without him or any of his type.
(That is not true about the air traffic controller unless we could land the plane safely ourselves, with no information from the airport.)
The issue is NOT that these legacy network media are “biased.” All media are always biased. Our bias is where we stand when covering a story. It is not possible to cover a story from no position.
No, the reason for legacy big media’s current tolerance of simple fantasy (and, believe me, the Williams affair is far from the only scandal; a book could be written about this stuff in the last decade) is their increasing irrelevance.
In the days when media were vital, they were partisan, no question. They concealed JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe, for example. But they couldn’t spin wholesale fabrications to the public about things that truly mattered when they were the only sources of information. They could not pretend there was no Cuban Missile Crisis, but there was a Bolivian Missile Crisis. They could do that today. But who cares? So I say give it time.
Note 1 on how things have changed: My parish priest advised that whenever we hear nonsense from “Jenny Smart Ass, Religion News Columnist” about what is going on at the Vatican, we go to the Vatican’s Web site and find out for ourselves before we react or draw any conclusions. It could be good news or bad, but for the first time, we can hear what the Vatican says about itself for ourselves. Well, that sure crashes the value of being Jenny Smart Ass, doesn’t it?
Note 2 on how things have changed: The guy who quoted on a job at my house last year told me that almost no one n his journalism class at a local U was actually working in journalism today. Legacy media is a sunset industry.
Note 3 on how things have changed: Governments will certainly try to get control of the Internet, all in the name of the public good. (Always is, right? Has anyone ever instituted a tyranny for the express purpose of the public bad?) Resist that attempt by all means. People who would have been journalists will become spies, snoops, sneaks, snitches, and censors—and feel good about it, and be better paid than you. – O’Leary for News