Dis Coarse Discourse 0

Will Bunch, who is definitely one of the good guys (I have one of his books), muses on what’s wrong with reportage. His conclusions may not be what you expect. A snippet (emphasis added):

Look, this member of the media doesn’t think there’s a lot — outside of some amazing investigative reporting by the likes of the Times’ Suzanne Craig, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, and others — that the media should “re-commit” to after 2016. The wall-to-wall cable TV coverage of Trump’s rallies — because he was an “entertaining” reality show star who might say anything, unlike the other candidates who gave old-fashioned speeches on “boring” policy matters — was a disgrace. The obsession on so many polls — many of which proved in the end to be highly inaccurate — was ridiculous. So was the media’s quickness to be distracted by the shiny object — FBI director Jim Comey’s letters on Hillary Clinton’s emails spring to mind — and not cover substance. There was certainly a failure to see the passion for Trump in the Rust Belt and the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton in America’s cities or college campuses, or to understand why.

Many of the journalists and outside critics who’ve talked about the failures of journalism since Trump’s election have touched on some or all of these factors. But most of the media criticism has come up bone dry when it comes to solving these problems — because almost all of this conversation takes place in the tiny, suffocating box of stale journalism ideas that have slowly been choking the profession for decades.

My take is this:

Somewhere along the line, the concepts of truth and objectivity became separated so that, today, “objectivity” applies only to opinion; all opinions are equal and truth is irrelevant.

Besides, uncovering truth is hard work. It might take actual reporting, legwork, and digging, perhaps even a visit to a library. That’s too much like work and besides I’m on air in 20 minutes. . . .

In the real world, though, all opinions are not equal, some persons tell the truth and some lie, some are wise and some are fools; some are good and some are venal. Nevertheless, differentiating between truth and lies, between good and evil, is not the work of today’s inside-the-village journalists, and it is especially not the work of cable news and entertainment journalism.

In entertainment journalism, the work is ratings.

Truth doesn’t get ratings; truth is ipso facto irrelevant.

That’s one reason I gave up on broadcast news long ago (that and that you can learn more in five minutes of reading than in 30 minutes of zoning out in front of some broadcast something-or-other). I get my news the old-fashioned way.

I read stuff.

Pah!