We Don't Need No Stinking Journalism

According to cliché, journalism is the first draft of history. To me, that seems to be an accurate characterization. Meaning it probably wasn't the product of a journalist. Remember, they create first drafts, which implies clunky prose, typos, superficial reasoning, false starts, dead ends, and first and foremost, mistakes (and in my case, gravy stains on the cover page).

In other words, it's a product not really worth considering for longer than it takes to read it. Maybe they get some of it right, maybe they don't. And whatever valuable insights they've identified might get brought out after a careful review by a competent advisor, then some intellectual rigor, introspection and actual scholarship by the author. But who's going to provide that - the Star Tribune!? (rim shot - oceans of cascading laugher)

Bret Stephens of the WSJ has further thoughts on the matter:

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight: They can and usually do. Nor 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.

Maybe they have such a difficult time deciding what's significant because no one can be expected to accurately document the significance of something as complex as human relations and politics and WAR! when the deadline is a few hours after the events take place. This would be near impossible for someone who approached their duties to report the facts in good faith. But throw in the ego-driven need to make a difference, to afflict the so-called comfortable and speak truth to the power that isn't wielded in concert with your ideology and you've got no shot at accurately identifying what needs to be reported and what doesn't. But that, my friends, is your daily newspaper, especially when they get in the business of providing commentary and analysis.

For examples of first drafts of history destined for the paper shredder of time and perspective, see the hyperventilating about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay or any piece written by noted first draft scribbler, Jim Boyd.

In contrast with that snake oil, I direct you to Victor Davis Hanson. This week in NRO, as he does every Friday, he addresses the most vital current events of the day and it reads like a doctoral thesis from some decades in the future, explaining what happened and why during the critical, confusing, tragic year of 2005. Excerpt:

If President Bush were a liberal Democrat; if he were bombing a white Christian, politically clumsy fascist in the heart of Europe; if al Qaeda and its Islamist adherents were properly seen as eighth-century tormenters of humanists, women, homosexuals, non-Arabs, and non-Wahhabi believers; and if Iraq had become completely somnolent with the toppling of Saddam's statue, then the American people would have remained behind the effort to dismantle Islamic fundamentalism and create the foundations to ensure its permanent demise.

But once the suicide murdering and bombing from Iraq began to dominate the news, then this administration, for historical reasons largely beyond its own control, had a very small reservoir of good will. The Islamists proved to be more adept in the public relations of winning liberal exemption from criticism than did the administration itself, as one nude Iraqi on film or a crumpled Koran was always deemed far worse than daily beheadings and executions. Indeed, the terrorists were able to morph into downtrodden victims of a bullying, imperialistic America faster than George W. Bush was able to appear a reluctant progressive at war with the Dark Age values of our enemies.

And once that transformation was established, we were into a dangerous cycle of a conservative, tough-talking president intervening abroad to thwart the poorer of the third world - something that has never been an easy thing in recent American history, but now in our own age has become a propagandist's dream come true.

This isn't a first draft of history, it is history, with current events merely serving as one example in a convincing litany. And VDH has no problems in identifying the significant facts from the insignificant. For these reasons I give him the highest compliment a writer can receive. He is no journalist.
Posted by Saint Paul--Link

On Tuesday, the Star Tribune editorial board once again brought much disdain and mockery upon itself. This time, the subject was Dick Durbin's comments on Guantanamo, which the Strib editorial heartily endorsed. The arguments presented in the editorial have already been put through the shedder in many places including: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, so I'm not going to continue beating that now quite dead equine mammal.

But this latest in a long line of outrageous editorials to disgrace the pages of the Minneapolis Star Tribune once again raises a critical question for conservatives of conscience in the Twin Cities metro area:

What the hell are you doing still subscribing to this laughing stock of leftist looniness?

Reports are that some of you finally come to your senses and are bailing on the Strib as a result of this most recent offense to common decency. But I know for a fact that there are thousands of folks who consider themselves conservatives in good standing who STILL are forking over their hard earned cash to get the Strib. Why?

Here are some of the common objections I hear to canceling your subscription outright:

- The Pioneer Press isn't as good as the Star Tribune and I'll miss my daily paper.

First off, I think the Pi Press is getting better and, if I could get it where I live, I would subscribe to it. It's far from a perfect paper. It's editorial voice is often schizophrenic and it suffers from numerous other shortcomings. But very rarely does it descend into the fever swamps that the Strib seems to now wallow in on a regular basis.

Secondly, I know the notion of giving up your daily paper is not an easy one to swallow. Last year, I struggled with it myself for some time before finally being pushed over the edge (by an editorial). But let me tell you straight up that's it not as bad as you think it will be.

Sure, I miss the ease of catching up on the baseball box scores and standings (although not as much of late with the recent Twins swoon), looking up movie and TV listings, reading the few decent columnists that paper has, and staying on top of the local news. But all of that is available on the Strib's website too. Better to go through a little extra work to read it online for free than to pay for the hard copy and continue to feed the beast.

- We like to get the Sunday paper for the ads and the coupons.

Understandable. It's nice to look at the fliers and clip the coupons for grocery shopping. But you should ask yourself whether saving a few shekels at the local market is really worth the price you pay to support people who are pretty much diametrically opposed to everything you believe in politically. Because at the end of the day, you're helping to keep guys like Jim Boyd and Nick Coleman in business when you subscribe to the Strib (or buy it at the newsstand). Would you subscribe to this just because they had Cub coupons? Didn't think so.

- Just because the editorial board is nutty, doesn't mean that I should not enjoy the rest of the paper.

As I already pointed out, you can still access the parts of the paper (Lileks, Kersten, etc.) you like to read online without subscribing. But I don't think that you can, in good conscience, continue to subscribe to the paper if its in-house editorials so blatantly offend your political sensibilities. I'm not talking about editorials that disagree with positions that you hold. Having your views challenged with civil and rational arguments is a good thing and you should be reading opinions that vary from yours. But you should not have to put up with the condescending, gratuitously insulting, and often childlike rantings that the Strib editorial board cranks out on a fairly regular basis. There is no place for that in serious debate (which you should expect from a serious newspaper) and there should be no place for that in your home either.

Some argue that the editorial board is nothing more than just another voice in the paper and should be given no more consideration than that. James Lileks is in that camp:

A few people wrote today to ask how I could possibly work at the Star Tribune after they wrote that editorial. Well. First of all, I am not going to throw away my livelihood because someone on the other side of the building writes something with which I disagree. Second, they don't speak for me, and there is no suggestion at the paper that they do, or should. I know, I know -- the editorials express the will and thoughts of the paper, its publisher and editor, etc. That's the standard line. But I have my doubts. I cannot speak for my superiors, obviously, but if the editorials spoke for the entire paper it would be impossible for anyone to do their job. If an editorial came out for raising taxes on the rich by squeezing their scrota until dimes shot out their nostrils, it would be impossible for any reporter to cover a legislative debate on the matter. Well, they could cover it, but the assumption would be that the reporter favored higher taxes -- did not the editorial establish the official paper position? -- and the piece would have to be read in that context. It just doesn't work like that. The paper is made up of individuals who believe a wide variety of things, believe it or not. Trust me. There is not a bust of Lenin in the lobby with a shiny spot on his head we rub for luck when we enter the building. I'm not saying that the journalism profession isn't predominately liberal, because it is; I'm not saying biases don't color pieces in ways reporters may not realize, because it happens. But the idea that the editorial page speaks for the entire paper would, I think, strike most of the paper's journalists as presumptuous: hey, I speak for me. We don't get into bar fights defending editorials out of team pride.

Unsigned institutional editorials on Deep Global Matters are an anachronism, a vestige of the top-down, shut-up-and-listen era when newspapers monopolized the municipal ear. Those days are done. The entire idea of an editorial board, with its overtones of egghead think-tanks staffed with MacNamara clones, may have worked for the Univac era. But those were the days of The Authorities. You know: whenever there was a problem in a sci-fi movie, someone Alerted the Authorities. That meant the big omniscient grey seamless apparatus with a million meshing parts. The Army, the Government, the FBI, the TV stations, the newspapers, the guy who got on the loudspeaker and told everyone to stay in their homes or flee for the hills, depending on whether the threat was Martians or irradiated giant ants. Authority is now a distributed network, to use an old buzzphrase, and no more so than opinion journalism. (To use another cliché: Some readers interpret a StarTribune editorial as damage, and route around it.) Opinion is now in such abundant supply that there's no reason to value a newspaper editorial above a Powerline reposte.

I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment. James is right to say that the world of opinion has become such a vast expanse that the influential power of an individual newspaper's editorial board has diminished significantly. But it is still widely regarded as the institutional voice of the newspaper, whether everyone (or even most people) at the paper recognize it as such. An editorial in the Star Tribune is not the same as a Kim Ode column (although at times they are difficult to distinguish) and it carries more weight. It also should carry the burden of higher standards and expectations of well-reasoned, thoughtful discourse. All too often the Star Tribune editorials fail miserably to live up to these expectations.

The rubber is meeting the road. It is time (actually it is well past time) for conservatives to break their cycle of dependency and just say no to the Star Tribune. It's not easy and there will be withdrawal pains. But the joy you feel after kicking the nasty habit more than makes up for it. It's a cleansing. liberating experience and, at the end of the day, you'll be a much better person for it. You know in your hearts that it's wrong to continue to subscribe to the Star Tribune.

Take the first step today towards a brighter future by canceling your subscription. Better yet, call in to The Northern Alliance Radio Network in the third hour tomorrow and participate in our live drive to encourage people to dump the Strib. We'll be collecting the names of people who have reached the end of the line with the Star Tribune and passing those names on directly to the paper.

Let's see those hands conservatives. Those formerly ink-stained hands that once bore the shame of your relationship with the Strib, but are now clean and free of guilt. The hands of freedom.

(Note to the powers that be at the Wall Street Journal and Pioneer Press: You might want to consider switching to a blue or maybe red ink just so there's no confusion with the whole "ink stain of shame" idea. Thanks.)

Labels: Media-Local (05-07)

Posted by Chad--Link

An Expert Marksman?

The genius that is JB Doubtless has not escaped the attention of one of the most thoughtful, interesting bloggers of our time. JB's twice monthly posts have apparently so impressed this well-known blogger that he has offered JB an opportunity to post on his blog as one of his "expert witnesses." Which means that we'll probably see even less of JB (if that is indeed possible) here in the future. Gee, thanks Joe.

Yes, Joe Carter from the evangelical outpost has been poaching on our turf and the result is the first installment of Expert Witness: JB Doubtless on Country Music. As the title implies, the post reviews a couple of recent country music releases, while also taking shots at one of JB's favorite targets.

Joe does a good job of capturing the essence of JB with this descriptive byline:

JB Doubtless is a hard-drinking, Star-Tribune mocking, country-music loving crank.

I suppose that there's more than enough of JB to go around and that showcasing his skills for a new audience is a good thing. But if Joe has any further thoughts of rustling talent out of our stables, I would suggest that he think again. You go after Atomizer and the gloves come off.

Posted by Chad--Link