I am so happy it is 2006. I hate the odd years. 2005 was pretty much a disaster, or at least marked by one disaster after another. This year, I hope we can all learn from our mistakes and make some much-needed improvements. A great place to start is in the media, so here are my suggestions for the new even year.
Now that K Street is officially a bad neighborhood, it is a wonderful time for a shakeup in the lobbying industry. Not all lobbyists are disgusting, lying, cheating, overweight megalomaniacs in fedoras. Now is a wonderful time for new lobbying shops to emerge as a tool of the people rather than as a tool of the powerful. Why not use the built-in influence machine to advance the fourth branch of government?
Someone has got to push legislation for news standards. Missing white girls like Natalie Holloway and the Runaway Bride do not deserve obsessive media attention, especially when there are so many missing people who get no attention, such as the more than 6,000 people unaccounted for since Hurricane Katrina. It would make more sense to have a 24-hour missing person’s channel. That way we could really help people and prevent the media circus that these stories often turn into.
We could bring back the fairness doctrine too, which said both sides of an issue deserve equal time in broadcast. Another broadcast requirement of times past is that TV and radio stations provide a public service. This public service used to be the news. If the news is not a public service anymore, who is it serving? In the past few decades media deregulation has had an enormous effect on what we see and take as truth. We should regulate content to assure that we get the truth instead of distractions.
Speaking of distractions, it is time for the media to start reporting more than one story at a time. Note to Jon Klein: We can handle it. The 24-hour news cycle is there so people can get more news, not less. When the media put all their resources into one story, and one angle, the coverage suffers. Often the reporter on location just stands in front of the camera and says the same things over and over again, desperate for new information. One of my favorite, but totally overexposed, journalists fell victim to this with disastrous results. CNN’s Anderson Cooper falsely reported the rumor that 12 miners were alive when they were actually dead. Granted, it is what everyone believed at the time. But why didn’t they have a reporter embedded with the company officials who knew the truth the whole time? And why didn’t Cooper spend time talking about the larger issues, such as the hundreds of safety violations the mine had or the fact that the union was kept out of the Sago mine? Breaking news is one thing. This was a broken newscast. The mistake of the media became the headline, obscuring the important meaning of the story.
Another thing that I can’t stand is journalists interviewing journalists. If they have a book coming out, a plug’s a plug. But as a news story the practice is unacceptable. When I took Info Hell we had to interview several experts and they made it clear to us that a journalist is not an expert. The biggest culprit is Larry King. He has journalists on all the time as guests and throws them softballs the entire interview. He had both Judith Miller and Bob Woodward on the show on separate occasions, and neither of them had to take calls from viewers. These are two people who should absolutely have to answer to the public. It is their job to inform them. Now they are just part of the story, like Geraldo Rivera.
Rivera has a long history of making himself the center of his news stories. Who could forget the military plan in the sand scandal? He freaked out on FOX News and held up a starving baby at the New Orleans convention center. He used to have his own tabloid show. Unfortunately, the Geraldo-style fame is not isolated in journalism today. TV journalists should be trusted, recognizable personalities, not celebrities. Rumor has it that CBS wants to give Katie Couric $20 million to do the nightly news. Andy Rooney, interestingly in an interview on Larry King Live, suggested CBS take that $20 million and open up all the foreign bureaus they have closed. What a great idea! Spend money on resources to gather quality news rather than on a pretty face to read headlines.
I have been thinking lately that journalism is a profession where the worse you do your job, the further you go. If you ask tough questions at White House press conferences, you don’t get called on. If you devote yourself to tabloid stories that distract attention, you get your own show like Nancy Grace or Rita Cosby. Stories get cut because they are too complicated. But editing a press release and reporting it as news is a perfectly acceptable practice.
A change must occur. Journalism should be an honorable, not detestable, profession. I read somewhere that journalist comes in second only to politician on the list of things parents hope their children never become. This is the year that changes. This is the year of responsible journalism.
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