1115.org

(1) Next Time Lucky?
The press struck out big-time with the John Mark Karr story, but important questions remain. Are the cruel media gods done playing with them now? Will their next big story not suddenly turn into a damp squib embarrassingly late in the game? Stay tuned, but don’t get your hopes up. After all, it’s still the same old bunch of clowns deciding which stories should receive the major-hype treatment. It’s the same old pool of talking heads, misleading us (and those who hire them) every step of the way with their so-called expert insight, but secure at the end of the day in the knowledge that future media appearances are as guaranteed as any government job. (All you have to do is show up. And go through the motions. If you do good, you get to stick around. If you screw up, you get to stick around. If you screw up big-time, you get a medal. It’s actually like the true Olympic spirit, isn’t it? The important thing is to play the game. Doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.)

As you will have gathered from the occasional caustic reference, I didn’t exactly follow the John Mark Karr story closely. But the few times I heard talking heads holding forth on the DNA testing, they were very clear that the DNA test could well be negative because it was quite likely that the third party DNA sample on the underwear wasn’t the killer’s at all; it could simply have resulted from handling during the manufacturing process. Not one of these brainiacs, though, ever said they thought it would be a big deal if the test came back negative. Not one of them came close to suggesting that the case against Karr would probably have to be dismissed if the test came back negative. How screwed up is the whole expert commentator concept in our media today if even for this saturation-coverage story, not one media expert came close to grasping the central issue in the prosecution’s case?

All they seem to ask of their experts is that they are good-looking (especially the women), or they speak well, or they make provocative statements. Real insight seems to have zilch to do with it.

Matt once wrote in a post:

if mainstream reporting on the areas in which I claim expert status … is representative of reporting as a whole, there are far too many journalists covering subjects completely outside their understanding.

I feel exactly the same way about my areas of expertise. And I have heard that same statement from every single person I know. And no one I know thinks the media does justice to the topics they really know and understand.

And that, in a nutshell, is the main problem with our mainstream media today. They don’t report the news any more. They don’t strive to help us understand it. They produce it. They package it to sell. “Just the facts” is now a horribly archaic notion. It’s not about getting it right. It’s about making it sexy. Or scary. Or dripping with human interest. It’s about appealing to the largest possible audience. And in the end, we get the news we deserve. We get the news we are willing to buy. That’s how the marketing gurus say the world is supposed to work. Not to mention the free market gurus.

(2) Crossing The Line
From the general to the particular. Here’s the NYT’s Anne Kornblut describing the speech staged by President Bush in Biloxi on Monday:

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass.

When the TV networks carried this speech, how many of them showed in pictures what Kornblut describes here in words?

At what point did our news media — the vaunted guardians of our democracy and freedoms — cross the line between reporting the news and serving as willing instruments of the government’s propaganda machine?

Funny how Rumsfeld’s characterization is that the media “have been manipulated by Iraqi insurgents or al-Qaida terrorists”. In the Bush administration, many different luminaries wear the hat of Minister for Misinformation and Doublespeak, but none more proudly and more often than Donald “Goebbels” Rumsfeld.

And these are the guys who, with a perfectly straight face, talk of appeasement! They’ll have us all goosestepping and singing “Heil to the Chief” before they’re done, all the while going “Nazis bad, Bush good”.

As Keith Olbermann said last night, “This country faces a new type of fascism — indeed.”