Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Editorial: CBS reflects challenges facing U.S. news media
Corporate mergers, staff cuts, politically biased outlets and an emphasis on entertainment have drained away substance and credibility.
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Scandal over the phony documents on which CBS recklessly relied in reporting on President Bush's National Guard service may draw attention to a much broader problem: the consequences of a failure to adhere to the rigorous standards of journalism and abdication of responsibility throughout the rapidly changing news industry. The nation's foremost private watchdog has been off chasing squirrels and licking strange hands for years.
Most especially in broadcasting, scandal, celebrity, flash and entertainment have supplanted much hard news - war, the economy, the federal budget. Shifting markets and corporate ownership have reduced some newsrooms' resources and lessened their journalistic independence.
Passive or careless reporting on major issues such as Iraq taints even once notoriously hard-nosed operations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS. Partisan Web logs - accountable to no one and often mixing disinformation with fact - and naked bias at Fox News and other outlets further diminish overall credibility.
Public opinion of the mainstream media is low, and in some instances with good reason. Yet those news operations remain vital to government accountability and informed exercise of democracy. Independent print and broadcast news in their various forms are an absolutely necessary alternative to government, partisan and corporate information sources, which frequently have a vested interest in skewing public opinion.
Thomas Jefferson could as easily have been writing in 2004 as in 1785 when he penned: "A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers [of government]."
The founding fathers expected and wanted a press that would hold the government accountable. The First Amendment protects that role broadly and bluntly.
Now the American people should hold the mainstream media accountable for neglect of that duty. And they have at hand a weapon - the market force of their viewership and readership - powerful enough to counter the pressures that have tempered so much of the honest, vigorous scrutiny that marks journalism at its best.
Those readers and viewers must demand news that is clearly distinguished from mere entertainment or partisan propaganda.
CBS and Dan Rather should pay a price for relying on bogus evidence. So should Fox, for its shamelessly reactionary news slant. So should The New York Times, for fraudulent reporters such as Jayson Blair and credulous reporters such as Judith Miller, whose parroting of the Bush administration line on Iraq The Times later properly repudiated.
And so should those owners and managers who deprive their staffs of the resources needed to chase down the complex stories that matter, and apply rigorous standards of journalism to those stories. So should those who clamp down on editorial independence and silence dissenting voices to advance business and political interests. So, too, the purveyors of nonsense, and worse, on the Internet.
America needs to shake the watchdogs awake.
