The election is well past us, but going cold turkey from a presidential election — especially this one — back to everyday life is no easy task. Fortunately, the mainstream media (MSM) has been dishing out as much political gossip as one could possibly consider healthy. The bad news is that the deliberations of a transition team just aren’t anywhere near as juicy as Joe the Plumber, so the media has had to manufacture stories to keep us hooked.
Political gossipers everywhere turned their eyes to Fox News last week when a reporter from “The O’Reilly Factor” ran down a list categorizing former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Bush-esque ignorance. Among other succulent details, Palin was apparently unaware that Africa was a continent and not a country.
As much as I would love for this story to have been true, not only was the report’s source not a top John McCain adviser, but in fact not a person at all. As The New York Times reported last Wednesday, Fox’s source was the fabrication of two aspiring writers who created the persona — complete with fake blog and think tank — with the hopes of pitching it for a TV show. If Fox’s report showed the broadcast media at its worst, The Times’ follow-up showed the print media at its best.
This inane story is a prime example of the broadcast media’s all-too-frequent shoddy journalism and failure to deliver on its last vestige of societal importance. Where the morning newspaper and evening news were once our only venues for the latest news, Web 2.0 has taken the middleman out of the equation. It has given the public at large the ability to see — and report on — what’s going on (e.g. cell phone pictures of the July 2007 London Tube bombings posted on Flickr).
Citizen journalism does have its problems; any John Q. Public can create a blog, claim to be a McCain adviser and talk about what a dunce Palin was. By the same token, though, any halfwit should think twice about the reliability of a guy claiming to be from the “Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy,” named for our arguably most (or second-most) torpid president, Warren G. Harding.
Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to fill up with interesting stories, especially when you’re competing with two other all-news networks to break the story first. (Not to mention thousands of online sources, which require no bureaucracy or deliberation to publish.) In this context, networks will pick up on a rumor if it sounds like there’s even a hint of truth to it, and go to air with the first “strategist,” “adviser” or “senior staff member” they can find. It’s understandably tempting for a producer to broadcast something as soon as it hits his or her desk, but professional media outlets — unlike citizen journalists — have a fundamental responsibility to the public to vet the reliability of their sources.
But what the MSM loses to citizen journalists in omnipresence it can make up for by being a reliable source of thoughtful analysis and investigative reporting. Citizen journalists may increasingly be the ones to break stories, but the mainstream media will remain the place for professional analysis. Print media, largely by necessity, has already caught on to this. Most can guess that the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy is fake — few have the time or the resources to research it. This means taking the time to get it right from the start and avoiding the temptation to be the first to the finish line. It is the professional journalist’s prerogative and responsibility to do what the citizen journalist cannot.