When things are bad it’s easy to look for people to blame, but for my money there’s a lot more simple incompetence at work than there is downright conspiracy. Looking for secret schemers as an explanation for the hidden dynamics of life, we often overlook dullness and underachievement as forces in play.
Part of the reason we overlook the incompetence larded throughout our national activity is the mediocrity of reporting itself. For illustration, nothing serves better than the abysmal job of reporting on Obama’s trip to China done by the mainstream media that feeds us our news and analysis. In one big blue pencil slash, the media shows that incompetence needs no controlling hand, it runs itself quite well.
Of course we know that a lot of today’s journalism in America is paid for by a small handful of corporate owners, and this suggestively has accompanied the irrelevance of the media. We also know that the standard of reporting in the mainstream media today is far less than it once was, but has this happened because of editorial suppression, or is it simple incompetence?
President Obama went to China and the press corps proved inadequate to the task of analyzing and portraying accurately this event. Fortunately, the Web offers us quick review of the entire journalistic performance, and attention to subtleties easily clickable for extended analysis, and we can decide for ourselves what really happened.
James Fallows of the Atlantic has written half a dozen posts over the last few days tearing the press to pieces for their crummy work. The series stands as a useful review of Obama’s trip to China, with all its subtleties. He ends this theme today with a wrap up that you can take to the bank:
As Thanksgiving draws near in America, readers can give thanks that I will bid adieu to this topic. To sum it up: the Administration may or may not end up getting what it hoped for from this trip to Asia, especially China. But its members had a clearer idea of what they were after, how they could get it, and how to represent American interests and values than most coverage gave them credit for. The words that stick with me through this whole episode are those in the subtitle of Tish Durkin’s piece last week: “Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese people managed a clearer view of Obama’s visit than the US media did.”
Last words on Obama and China
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Alexandra Fenwick also converged on this quickly in an excellent interview with Howard French, a former Shanghai bureau chief for The New York Times. Here’s a key quote:
“I don’t think that [the press] have gotten it right, to put things very simply. I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.
Not For All the News in China
Journalism itself will flourish I think. It’s the institutional system that’s lost its class, and allowed the hacks to prosper. But whether courage and independent thought will find its way back into the established fourth estate is beyond me.
I view the system-wide failure of the mainstream media to provide real news as a waste-making situation. Simon Johnson, an economist I’ve often cited, illustrates the loss to our national discourse in his call for in-depth reporting that few editors are prepared to subsidize nowadays. Where, for example, in this financial crisis that has shaken the entire world, are the new Ida Tarbells, asks Johnson.
Tarbell, writing for McClure’s Magazine, published between November 1902 and October 1904 a 19-part series exposing the monopoly powers and collusive practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company [...] In 1999 a 36-person panel of prominent journalists, under the aegis of New York University’s journalism department, selected Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil as fifth in a list of the top 100 works of American journalism in the 20th century.
- A need to ‘dig beneath the corporate surface’
My answer is that if they’re anywhere, they’re on the Web. A few of them are in the mainstream media, more when you include the monthlies. And all good journalists with voices nowadays heed the numerous correspondents further to the edge, those with less of a voice but often more of an insight. Somewhere I read that there are now 190 million blogs. This speaks of a lot of desire to communicate, and to report reality accurately.
Biology teaches us that diversity supports survival, and that hegemony leads only to extinction. Diversity provides the survival edge simply because no individual competence can embrace all the changes presented over time by reality. Diversity allows accurate response. Hegemony, on the other hand, breeds gridlock even in the face of impending disaster.
The institutions of America are no longer young; plenty of hegemony has arisen and stratified. The gridlock we see everywhere in American life today, including in its communications and national discourse, is a survival disadvantage. Meanwhile the planet warms, and the global economies stretch existing capital thinner and thinner, spinning the remaining sugar into the last of the candy floss.
And reality lies elsewhere than in the mainstream media.
