What passes for journalism at the moment?
This blog brims with commentary on my disdain for what passes for journalism these days. So, imagine my dismay when 60 Minutes, the reputed standard bearer of broadcast journalism, only reinforced my disdain on Sunday.
On October 27, 60 Minutes aired a highly touted report on the 9/11/12 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. However, this report was laden with fabrications, seemingly aimed at undermining the credibility of the Obama Administration.
Public outrage forced 60 Minutes to issue a pathetic apology for reporting one man’s delusions of grandeur as damning facts. It’s as though 60 Minutes reported on events from a parallel universe, where only the minds of rabid Tea Partiers meld.
A simple Google search is all it takes to debunk the bulk of Tea Party allegations against Obama. And that’s all it took to debunk the material allegations in this report.
Most notably, 60 Minutes showcased a self-styled Rambo, boasting of his “heroic” efforts to repel the Benghazi terrorists. I won’t compound their error by naming him. However, this fraudster claimed he had no choice but to act because the Obama Administration “refused” repeated SOS calls for the Marines to intervene.
Except that, to quote America’s leading media critic, Jon Stewart, his account “was total bullshit.”
We realized we had been misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry.
(60 Minutes, November 10, 2013)
Ratings trump truth
Let’s face it: Investigative reporters apologizing for being “misled” is like police officers apologizing for being mugged. The only reason 60 Minutes was so misled is that it followed other news programs down the primrose path, chasing ratings for corporate profits at the expense of journalistic truth.
Apropos of which, its corporate parent, CBS, just published this con artist’s book on Benghazi through another of its subsidiaries, Simon and Schuster. That maneuver turned its report into little more than an infomercial — a classic example of weaving a tangled web.
But this scandal vindicates the contempt I heaped on journalists recently for trolling social media for news and reporting every tragedy as if it were the friggin’ Super Bowl.
I preempted Brown’s lament, noting what a pathetic enterprise journalism has become. I argued, among other things, that journalists report what they think the public wants to consume as news instead of informing the public about actual news.
Journalistic malpractice becomes criminal
Journalism’s unfolding phone-hacking scandals represent an even more egregious breach of public trust than banking’s subprime scandals.
After all, expecting bankers not to cheat is like expecting bees not to sting. Conversely, nobody expects journalists to break the law to find easy fodder for new stories. Indeed, that shocks the conscience almost as much as priests sexually molesting boys as part of their pastoral rites.
My current pet peeve is the inherent malpractice of TV journalists wasting hours on idle speculation about the 2016 presidential election. That’s three years away, so such speculation clearly has no news value.
Meanwhile, their malpractice reeks of hypocrisy. After all, these are the same journalists who, just months ago, were presenting snarky, indignant reports about retailers promoting Christmas wares in August. That’s at least three months before any such promotion would seem appropriate.
Tina Brown’s lament
The above is why I was so heartened on Friday when I read that no less a person than the doyenne of journalism has acquired a similar disdain:
Tina Brown, outgoing editor of the Daily Beast and former editor of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Newsweek, doesn’t even read magazines anymore — nor does she think too highly of journalism at all.
Brown told the audience of a THiNK conference in Goa, India on Friday that she is basically done with journalism, which she said is currently having a ‘very, very pathetic moment’ and has turned into advertising in order to try to make a profit. ‘Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies,’ she said.
(Huffington Post, November 8, 2013)
Welcome to the real world, Tina. After all, far from having a very, very pathetic moment, journalism has been in this pathetic state for years. I need only cite news programs interrupting reports on the crisis in Syria to bring viewers “BREAKING NEWS” on Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest. What’s more, I see no end in sight. iPINIONS can only warn that chasing clicks will gut journalism, trading truth for clicks.
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