{"id":2992,"date":"2010-03-04T16:44:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T20:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=2992"},"modified":"2010-03-04T15:50:11","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T19:50:11","slug":"qotd-the-problem-with-modern-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/03\/04\/qotd-the-problem-with-modern-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The problem with modern journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Times<\/em> seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now \u2019skeptic\u2019 has been a dirty word at the Times<\/em> when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed<\/em> to be skeptics. They are supposed<\/em> to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed<\/em> to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.<\/p>\n

Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.<\/p>\n

This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what\u2019s wrong with the mainstream press isn\u2019t \u2018liberal\u2019 — maybe the term is something like \u2018credulous\u2019 or \u2018naive.\u2019 The gradual substitution of \u2018professional journalists\u2019 for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don\u2019t lie.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting \u201cThe emperor has no clothes!\u201d They\u2019ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they\u2019ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor\u2019s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth \u2018clothing deniers\u2019 still have any doubts.<\/p>\n

Walter Russell Mead, “Treason is a matter of dates”, The American Interest Online<\/em><\/a>, 2010-03-03<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now \u2019skeptic\u2019 has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,28,53,41],"tags":[245,86,156,240,39,213,101],"class_list":["post-2992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-climatechange","tag-criticism","tag-fail","tag-globalwarming","tag-junkscience","tag-newspapers","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Mg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2994,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2992\/revisions\/2994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}