Sunday, April 08, 2007
Mainstream media often disappoint
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Spending spree isn't root cause of deficit rise
- The party of no vs. the party of 'd'oh!'
- No-new-tax pledges butt against reality
- Bowers is busy pandering to market vendors
From the RoundTable blog
Sometimes I think I despise the mainstream media just as much as my friends in the blogger community, although for completely different reasons.
"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" does a far better job than I ever could of highlighting the shortcomings of the 24/7 madness of cable news.
My only real exposure to CNN and Fox is Stewart's hilarious show or the very rare occasions that this newspaper ends up as a topic of conversation on one of their segments.
Neither of the most recent such incidents -- Bill O'Reilly ironically calling me a liberal loon on television moments after accusing me of engaging in personal attacks, and last week's CNN segment on the gun database incident, hosted by a reporter best known for allowing himself to be Tazered and waterboarded -- filled me with much regard for the medium.
But even the mainstream print media too often fall down on the job. Some reporters -- especially those covering the nation's capital -- are egotistical, lazy, complacent and addicted to their access to those in power, however little they use that access to actually benefit the public.
Many reporters also believe they've done their job if they simply quote both sides of an issue -- as if most issues only have two sides -- with no further effort to get at the truth of the matter.
A good friend of mine, one of the best reporters I've ever known, calls that "bracketing the truth." It's depressingly common.
For instance, President Bush recently came out with some harsh criticisms of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi because of her trip to Syria to speak with President Bashir Assad.
"Photo opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they're part of the mainstream of the international community when, in fact, they're a state sponsor of terror," Bush said, and the press dutifully reported.
Most then dutifully reported Pelosi's responses. Her press secretary said, "The Iraq Study Group recommended a diplomatic effort that should include 'every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq.' This effort should certainly include Syria."
Very few reports mentioned that at the same time Bush was complaining about Pelosi's trip, a delegation of Republican members of Congress, including Virginia's Rep. Frank Wolf, were in Damascus meeting with Assad. Bush not only didn't criticize Republicans for their trip, an aide to one of the congressmen suggested the White House helped arrange the visit.
If not for bloggers like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, that blatant hypocrisy would never have been exposed. It still went unmentioned far too often in newspaper and radio reports.
Another recent lapse also involves a whopper by President Bush. He went off on the Democratic Congress for not sending him a "clean" emergency funding bill for Iraq, free of unrelated spending and pesky guidelines for troop withdrawals. Repeatedly, he has said that if a bill is not passed and signed by mid-April, troops will run out of funds for necessities -- or the Pentagon will have to shift money from training and other at-home necessities to free up money for the war effort.
Fine, except it's not true. According to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon has enough money from the last emergency appropriations to fund the war through July.
Most readers wouldn't know that, though, because too few national reporters are willing to call official sources on even blatant lies.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not alleging a vast right-wing conspiracy in the media, even though both examples are of President Bush getting away with hypocrisy or falsehood.
The coverage of the new Democratic Congress is just as rife with lazy reporting that accepts far too many political proclamations at face value.
Local reporters covering city hall generally do a better job of getting at the truth than the big shots in Washington.
There are some bright stars in the Washington press corps who dig hard, know the value of good sources and who aren't afraid to tick off lousy sources who might retaliate by curtailing largely worthless access.
But they are, sadly, the exceptions. That's a shame, because what happens in Washington affects us all.
The mainstream media owe us better.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
