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CONTEMPORARY JOURNALISM USELESS
Bret Stephens on media myths:
The myth of Japan Inc took hold because there was so little Western reporting to suggest that not all was well with the Japanese economy. So, when Japan’s real-estate bubble burst and the economy flatlined for more than a decade, the world was caught unawares. The myth of an Iraqi quagmire took hold for similar reasons – the media was so busy telling the story of everything that was going wrong in Iraq that it broadly missed what was going right.
The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication.
The problem is not that journalists can’t get their facts straight – they can and usually do. Neither is it that the facts are obscure; often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts – facts with consequences – from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.
Such as the story of Iraq’s elections.
Speaking of the myth of Japan Inc, it’s interesting to note the media’s worship of the so-called Asian Tiger economies in the 90s. According to the journos (and lefty economists), these countries were going to be the next economic superpowers and Australia had to engage with our northern neighbours or miss out on the future boom. Naturally there wasn’t a word written about their huge levels of institutionalised corruption, mismanagement and lack of freedom so that the Asian crisis came as a huge surprise to the media.
The “next economic superpower” flavour of the month in the media at the moment is China. Once again, (perhaps in their eagerness for China to counter US economic dominance) the commentariat is missing the endemic corruption and structural flaws.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 03 10 at 12:37 AM • permalinkI gave up on newspapers and TV news long ago. I only hear the radio news when it interrupts the music.
Since relying on the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, as my primary news source, I’m better informed about current events than ever before. Moreover, I’m much better informed than those who continue to rely on the dinosaur media.
Since information is a key to power, I predict that those who use Internet information will, in the long run, prove more successful than those who depend on traditional journalism for their knowledge and insight.
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 03 10 at 01:07 AM • permalinkThat, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.
I’d phrase that as “...not thinking at all...”
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 03 10 at 01:23 AM • permalinkI think the reason for the myth of the invincibility of Japan Inc taking hold was not so much that there was so little Western reporting (there actually was quite a lot in the 1980s)but that the reporting came from a relatively tiny number of ‘Japan experts’ who had a vested interested in talking up the Japanese miracle. Readers would also remember that the Japanese bust did not become widely reported in the West until the late 1990s, by which time it was about 8 years old. A similar argument explains the unanticipated collapse of the Soviet Union. It is to be hoped that these sorts of things will be much less likely to happen in the era of the blogosphere however with highly closed societies (N Korea, Bhutan, Eritrea) this will still happen from time to time.
I offer one small codicil to Mr. Stephen’s terrific article: “The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history.” In fact, this is the problem. Journos get a swelled head thinking all about their awesome responsibility to capital-H History and nearly nothing gets said about getting the facts straight and staying the hell out of the way.
the reporting came from a relatively tiny number of ‘Japan experts’ who had a vested interested in talking up the Japanese miracle.
That raises the question as to what the hell all the other journos were doing. Rather than doing their own research and drawing their own conclusions, they merely recycled/parroted the opinions of the ‘experts’. Not surprising that group-think tends to be the norm in journalism these days.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 03 10 at 02:39 AM • permalinkApropos of Useless Journalism… very often, the “first draft” hits the headlines, the “followup”, if done at all, gets buried on page 93.
Consider the recent case of the riots in Sydney. Various commenters have opined that “Society is to blame” etc. Now, courtesy of The Australian, we have the following information - information that has not made the front pages.
The man finally arrested last night over a fatal car chase that sparked ugly riots in Sydney’s southwest had been captured on tape admitting he “lost it” when being pursued and was to blame for the accident that killed two mates ق not the police.
But in a secretly recorded conversation, released to a Sydney court yesterday, Jesse Kelly’s aunt Deborah Kelly insisted the 20-year-old blame the police.
Talking to Kelly about 3.15am on Saturday, February 26 ق three hours after he allegedly fled the crashed car ق police recorded Ms Kelly saying: “It’s not your fault, you know that. The coppers, it’s the coppers. It’s not your fault, Jesse, please. The coppers did this to you so it’s not your fault. You remember that they rammed you, didn’t they?”
When Kelly replied, “Nah, I just lost it”, she continued to attempt to draw her nephew into a deception with the words: “I mean, I’ve done 260 on that corner, Jess. There’s no way you can lose it.”
Ms Kelly, 39, faced Campbelltown Local Court yesterday charged with perverting the course of justice and concealing the indictable offence of her nephew. Magistrate Michael Stoddart refused bail.
As the topic of this post states, Journalists are good at finding out stuff. The ABC radio and so on all have reports on Jesse Kelly handing himself in. But none I’ve listened to gave this background. It doesn’t fit the party line, so gets buried - though the grave in this case is shallow, with the story available online.
aebrain,
I like Tex’s take on that issue:
Do society a favour: if you see Jesse Kelly on the street, run the fucker over.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2005 03 10 at 05:16 AM • permalinkSpiny Norman—
I disagree. Look, he’s an asshole who killed people, and he should be punished for that. Theft, flight, and running away from the consequences is wrong, and it’s serious when it results in death.
But it’s his aunt’s type that needs to be extripated. She didn’t tell him he was wrong, she didn’t tell him to turn himself in—she tried to get him to help her in a corrosive effort to place the blame for his mistakes on people enforcing the rules of a civil society. While as an individual he’s responsible for his actions and should be held accountable, she’s the type who helps create people like him by eroding accountability.
His actions were wrong, but finite; hers were evil, because they were wrong and promote further wrongs.
Posted by Warmongering Lunatic on 2005 03 10 at 06:15 AM • permalinkAny local journos telling you about this?Lebanon has been a much fractured polity for the last few decades. In a country that until the end of the civil war in 1990 has been dominated by Maronite Christians (now no longer an absolute majority), the Shia (not a majority yet but the largest group in Lebanon) see Syria as a protector and guarantor of their newfound political influence. Thanks to the demographic growth, Hizbollah is now the most significant force in Lebanese politics; thanks to Syrian protection, it is also the only military force outside the government which has been allowed to keep its weapons.
You can see how it happens. With friends like our local lefty journos it will happen here too.The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts – facts with consequences – from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.
On the contrary, it comes from thinking very hard about which stories hinder the revolution, and discarding them.
Posted by Jim Geones on 2005 03 10 at 08:27 AM • permalinkaebrain - WOW. And, natch, it won’t make a difference to the Root Causes Caucus.
As for the correction sitting on page A-33 while the riots make big news…well, that’s just the same exact behavior from the same exact interest group as the RCC. The difference is that journalists have to correct themselves, or nobody buys the paper; the activists get funded by force of law through the taxpayer, so they have no such counterweight on them.
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The problem is not that journalists can’t get their facts straight – they can and usually do.
No they don’t.
In fact, this to me is the real problem with journalists. They get the simplest and most obvious facts wrong, they don’t check things, and they don’t correct errors in following stories. (And you can apportion however much of the blame you like to the editors and publishers.)
The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect