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The Ultimate Prize for Journalists: Get Trump
But the ultimate prize [emphasis mine] has proved elusive for the scoop-hungry journalists competing to join the reporters’ pantheon alongside Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose methodical news-gathering for The Washington Post helped bring down a president alleged to have broken the law.
This is from a column on Monday by Jim Rutenberg of the NYT (talking about the Buzzfeed story). Stephen Cohen pointed this out yesterday on the John Batchelor Show.
For the past two years, the MSM has launched an unprecedented attack on the president. About 92% of the stories about him are negative; this with the economy roaring ahead. It’s reasonable to credit at least some of the growth to his policies. As Prof. Cohen, a leftist, pointed out, reporters should be reporting, not engaging in advocacy journalism. And they wonder why conservatives mistrust them.
Published in Politics
It’s unfortunately very true that ever since Watergate, everybody wants to be Woodward and Bernstein. That was the start of kids saying they wanted to study journalism so they could “make a difference.” No mention of reporting the facts.
Yes, probably the worst consequence of the Watergate matter has been how it has poisoned journalism.
I would say it is a tie between the Watergate phenomena and the fact that to attend a decent journalism school, like Medill at Northwestern in Illinois, it will cost you the same $ 150K that going to law school or medical school would. So the student gets the Master’s degree and then finds out that there are not all that many jobs in journalism and those that exist pay poorly. I mean, how do you manage to pay off 150K in loans if you accept a job that pays $ 40 K annually?
So then said journalism major realizes that to survive, they will probably need to accept a job as spokesperson at Monsanto or Health United. Where they may be morally compromised, but at least they can stop eating ramen and peanut butter.
John Batchelor’s podcast is a must for me every single day to stay informed. His reporting on the NY Times story about the “ultimate prize” is shocking that a journalist blatantly admits to the change in journalism since Watergate and sees its role as bringing down the president. Would he have written this during the Obama era? By the way, Prof. Cohen may be left wing, but he’s smart as a whip and seems to know what is going on inside Russia, particularly when it comes to Trump.
They are sick
In the early 1990s I watched a long-form interview with Tom Snyder where he said exactly this – the biggest change he saw in journalism was Woodward & Bernstein. Prior to Watergate the career path for a young journalist was to write good, factual stories and eventually become an editor. J-schools taught students how to be successful in this career path.
After Watergate every young reporter wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, and many of their young post-1960s radical Professors were more than willing to oblige.
And these are wonderful stories to break (DOJ/FBI/Obama and Hillary’s e-mail server and Urianium One) that if actually investigated and publicized, they’d be able to ‘dine out’ on for 50 years like Woodward and Bernstein.
I love Tom Snyder.
The media are all statists. They want high taxation and central planning. They would freak out if they thought about the reality that it doesn’t work. Everything they do is in support of that. They hate math, they like government power, and they like big political personalities. If they don’t have that, there is nothing to write about.
Red Eye Radio has excellent analysis, too. It’s similar to John Batchelor in that it’s not really a rabid style that always takes X amount of calls like you hear during the rest of the day. Good culture and entertainment stuff as well.
Mark Levin is good too, but in my opinion the callers just detract from it.
I’ve been worried about John Batchelor since his surgery. He doesn’t sound good. I’ve always thought Mark Levin sounds too strident, but he’s much calmer sounding on his new Fox show.
Yes! I’ve been saying this for years! It just kills me that we have all these would-be Woodward & Bernsteins, so determined to make up scandals where none exist, when there are such rich motherlodes of dirt on the Left – Obama, Hillary, Benghazi, etc – if only they’d look. But they don’t want to see that. Also if they did look, they’d probably be found dead of “mysterious causes.”
There’s also immediate gratification syndrome at work here, both in the reporters/news editors aspirations and the stories they promote in the 24/7/365 news cycle. It can’t be enough that Trump makes an unforced gaffe, the hype machine and the desire to believe that this will finally be the story to ‘get’ Trump causes the media to rush from alleged crisis to crisis every day, hoping they can find something that sticks (where merely lowering Trump’s approval ratings before 2020 is still only a secondary goal to removing him from office before 2020).
Trump actually has played this to his advantage at times, in that when he does have a real problem, he can simply fire up the Twitter app and post something that will make most of the media completely forget about what they were obsessing about yesterday and jump on the new impeachable offense today, because whatever the focus was yesterday didn’t work, because Trump’s still in office, and the person(s) who pushed yesterday’s bombshell aren’t famous like Woodward and Bernstein yet.
I’ve been watching “All the President’s Men” the last few nights – not for the politics or history, but for the way it depicts my profession. The computer-free office with typewriters seems familiar, but primitive. The absolute chaos and disorder of the cubicles reminds me of every newsroom I’ve ever worked in. The profession, in general, is full of slobs. If only the movie had shown Woodward and Bernstein as neat-freaks.
Absolutely. Mark Levin’s voice gets yappy, like a smaller dog, on radio. His long form interviews are much better.
Part of it’s show biz. Haven’t you noticed that he tends to get strident just before the commercial break?
Joy Behar laid the cards on the table this week:
Some good discussion on this on the Rico pod this week, how it was much less likely to see erroneous “stuff” in print due to the checks a good editor brings (stuff not passing a sniff test gets binned quickly), how the profession has changed, and largely how the internet broke open the vehicle by which you could “report” news.
I’m confident bias has always been there. Of course it is. Reporters are, (with the exception of Costa), human, whether it was 1974, 1874, or 2004.
Today the access and desire to blast your bias across the genitals-sphere, er, I mean, the world, creates the conditions that incentivizes bad behavior. If anything is different, it’s now that advocacy has replaced bias, and they’re public about it.
The other thing is something Rob Long talked about when Rosanne’s revival became a big success last year, in that it blew up the narrative TV producers and networks had sold advertisers, which was that due to the massive number of options viewers have, you couldn’t possibly hope to get the ratings shows got 20-25 years ago. Just settle for the low numbers you have today, which has led to ‘niche’ programming, especially on the late-night shows — they simply pander to progressive viewers and don’t try to get a wider audience, as Carson and then Leno did, by appealing to everyone.
Same deal with modern news outlets — you can’t get the circulation or TV ratings numbers of 20-25 years ago due to the huge level of competition, so why try? Just pander to your niche audience and be happy with your smaller share and tell advertisers that’s all they can get. That means more outlets play to those biases, justifying it by thinking hyperbolic ‘scoops’ will attract like-minded people. That puts the emphasis more on being first than being accurate, and giving your self-selected readers the red meat that satiates their conformation biases, just as the progressive jokes (screeds) of the late-night show hosts do.
When I used to listen to talk radio, I actually appreciated Levin for just being a conservative that, like me, was fed up with the lies, and being lied to, and lied about. He’s angry, and he’s going to call it like he sees it. And he doesn’t pretend his show is a debating club. There’s no such thing as a formal debate when one side is in control of the show, so why bother pretending?
In my view, he’s actually mad and he’s not going to calm down during the commercials. The main thing is, he’s very smart, very educated, and very experienced, so he gets worked up when he thinks he’s right.
On the other shows it’s more like a schtick, which is fine by me.
Just to clarify what I was trying to say above: the three shows I mentioned can really get into the weeds at will and not lose their audience, which is really great. They each do it in a different way.
Last night redeye radio just tore AOC apart with great analysis of the cost and ROI of a green economy and single-payer. It was around the middle if you want to hear it.
***edit***
I think Mark Levin is best in his one hour video formats and no callers. I haven’t subscribed to his blaze one yet. I knew somebody that got his podcast and just edited the callers.
FIFY. They spent no effort trying to take down Obama and Clinton.
Unfortunately, there are lots of mistakes in print. I’m repeating a story, but Annie Jacobsen’s book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. She had three pages about GPS in the book and almost every word was incorrect.