former journalists discuss a profession in crisis

Archive for December, 2014|Monthly archive page

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Information deficit disorder jeopardizes our democracy

In Blog on December 20, 2014 at 7:38 pm

Before I took up a career as a public interest lobbyist, I was a journalist.  And in my heart of hearts, I continue to think like a journalist.  Indeed, I have been so emotionally wedded to the profession that I wrote a book, Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis to deal with my own feelings about leaving.  But journalists continue to break my heart, and not because I long to be a reporter again.  It is because my second career reminds me how important – and increasingly how rare – good journalism is.

Daily, I walk the halls of Congress and hope to persuade Members to oppose proposals that will harm the public good, and to advance proposals that will benefit it.

I don’t expect reporters to agree with me.  But what is so discouraging is that mainstream media reporters increasingly are not interested in covering what Congress does, or fails to do, until the eleventh hour before a crucial vote or perhaps after the final days of a congressional session when something important is left undone.

Columbia Journalism Review recently wrote a story about the media’s lack of interest in a strongly bipartisan bill that came within inches of getting approved by Congress before Members left for good at the end of December.

The bill would have strengthened the federal Freedom of Information law, making it easier for all citizens, including journalists, to gain access to information shedding light on the workings of their government.

The point of the CJR story, and a blog by New York Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan, was that the media should have energetically reported on the stalemate for legislation that stood to benefit journalism directly.  After all, a free press thrives when government operates transparently.

That’s true.  But the problem is much bigger.  The dirty little secret in Washington is that by and large the press corps does a terrible job covering 90 percent of what happens in Congress and how it affects average Americans.

I can’t tell you how many meetings public interest lobbyists convene to figure out just what angle of a complicated policy matter might draw the interest, no matter how fleeting, of a distracted press corps.

We know we can’t present anything too complicated, that the details must be written in text that is easily accessible, and brief.

We understand that many reporters want “stories” not memos.

We know they want “sexy” not “wonky” and have to convince editors who have even less patience.

But it gets old, this constant struggle to entertain.  And it wears you down, when big fights over things you care about fail to capture the media’s attention, and thus never really become a part of the public debate.

There are definitely some exceptions.  Reuters reporter Sharon Begley has bravely gone where few journalists have — delving into the wonky world of cost-benefit analysis.  She has written about “the lost pleasure principle”— and how it could weaken pending federal efforts to address the potential health hazards of e-cigarettes and to inform the public about the nutritional value of their restaurant meals.

Washington Post reporters Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold have done a splendid job tracking the new methods deep-pocketed special interests are using to influence public policy.

But consistent careful coverage of federal policymaking is by far the exception, rather than the rule. Media outlets can rise to the occasion, especially when a government failure creates dramatic story lines – patients crippled by defective hip implants, mounting deaths because of tainted products from compounding pharmacies, or environmental disasters.

But they too often lose interest, and don’t follow up to see if our elected officials do enough to address the problem that caused the crisis in the first place.

Reporters change beats.  Newspapers change owners.  There is little sustained attention to federal agencies, or Congressional committees.  Sometimes, as when Sen. Elizabeth Warren takes to the floor to attack a spending bill because it will jeopardize our financial system, the media takes notice.  But Warren had been warning for months about efforts to weaken government regulation of banks. It was only in the final hours of the final days of the 113th Congress that most reporters noticed.  And then, of course, it was too late for the public to weigh in.

Let me be clear.  It is not the media’s job to arouse either outrage or approval.  But if Americans are in the dark about what Congress does or fails to do, they can’t assess the performance of their elected representatives or knowledgably express their views.

Journalism is in transition now, and mainstream media newsrooms have lost thousands of jobs.  Newspapers throughout the country shut down their Washington bureaus, depriving us of seasoned reporters who were covering their local members of Congress.  One can only hope that publishers, editors, and owners of broadcast media outlets will come to realize that journalists cannot shirk the duty they have to the American public – to inform citizens so they can govern themselves.

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Christmas wishes and rape

In Blog on December 14, 2014 at 6:12 pm

In the wake of the controversy over Rolling Stone’s story about campus rape, and the response from The Washington Post, I have a few wishes:

I wish solid reporting on sexual abuse on campus received the attention it deserved.

I wish that rape victims always were treated with the respect, seriousness and care for the truth that Kristen Lombardi so well exemplifies.  Her nine-month investigation in 2009 won her several national journalism awards.  But it didn’t prompt to the media attention that Rolling Stone’s story did last month. (And praise to Post blogger Alyssa Rosenberg for reminding us that telling the stories of rape victims demands special skills from journalists.)

I wish Rolling Stone’s sensational rape story had held up and that the reporter had done a better job checking her facts before questions about the veracity of her explosive central anecdote undermined in some people’s minds the fundamental premise of her story: that rape victims find it difficult to come forward on campus, scared of their attackers and unsure that the university will believe them or protect them.

The story of the woman reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely called Jackie was the vivid narrative that held our attention, but the article also contained the stories of other women who spoke on the record and allowed their full names to be used.  It also contained a penetrating critique of a campus culture that seems to prefer less accountability and more genteel silence, even if that means hurting sexual assault victims and even, potentially, those who are wrongfully accused.

I wish that the collapse of this one vivid anecdote had not skewed coverage of the larger issue in the Post.  Indeed in its initial follow-up to the Rolling Stone article – before the questions about Jackie’s story arose – the Post was writing solid pieces about the way U-VA responds or fails to respond to victims of sexual assault.

For example, I wish the Post had diverted some of the resources it devoted to reacting to the Rolling Stone story to covering the Senate hearing on campus sexual assaults, instead of relying on an Associated Press story.

Instead, not only have the Post’s two media critics – Paul Farhi and blogger Erik Wemple –  weighed in several times about the flawed reporting, we’ve had several very long pieces on its factual errors.  The Post did a public service in initially raising doubts about the veracity of certain aspects of Jackie’s account, but the the paper now risks losing sight of the larger institutional problem that the story attempted to illustrate.

I wish more stories like this one  by Nick Anderson were part of the Post’s ongoing coverage.

I wish the Post had not given the sleazy blogger who recklessly chose to reveal what he claims is the name of the rape victim the attention he so desperately craves.

I wish that Post editors don’t lose sight of the balanced views the Post editorial staff has wisely conveyed.

I wish the Post had devoted as much energy, outrage, and general chest thumping to debunking the shoddy journalism that helped send us to war in Iraq, leading to more than 100,000 violent deaths, as it has to this one failure in a key part of one story by Rolling Stone.

Finally, I wish, desperately, that a newspaper that once nominated a story for the Pulitzer Prize whose central character turned out to have been fabricated out of whole cloth, would, just for a moment, stop being so self-righteous about this incident.  And move on.