A couple days ago I went on a jag about hard news reporting. Here’s a quote:
What is news? As a hard news reporter I think it’s truth, or as close as I can get to it. It’s context and fact and expert opinion. I’m in the minority in this view.
Many people in the news business believe that news is whatever sells. Truth doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. Context doesn’t matter. Only demand matters.
A few days before that I went off on all the attention paid to a TV host getting himself suspended:
Today a talking head got suspended from MSNBC. I don’t care what the motivations were. I don’t care about MSNBC or FOX News or any other corporate machine with a money-making agenda that lends itself to political goals. I care about whether the job of government gets done. The degree of uproar over a television host tells me everything I need to know about what we care about in this country. Less that ten years after 9/11, when everything supposedly changed, nothing has changed.
After writing those self-indulgent posts I felt a little self-indulgent. Like a TV host.
In today’s Washington Post Ted Koppel reminded me why I shouldn’t back down:
Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts – along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.
Over the years the Washington Post has faltered in this way, too, unfortunately. And whatever Nightline used to be when Koppel was in charge, it’s now tabloid idiocy. But Koppel’s right.
I don’t expect most people to get it. I hope you do. Get away from the machine.
Go to the truth. Even if you think it will kill you.