The shamelessness of our news media -- its serial gullibility and willingness to transmit blatantly bogus, hateful rightwing horseshit -- is frustrating to a lot of people. When, they ask, will the news media stand up for itself? When, they wonder, will reporters and editors realize that they're acting not a disinterested observers but as conservative water-carriers?
People, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen for reasons having to do with the self-interest of the people who own media companies. It's not going to happen because of cultural reasons like the weird self-loathing of generally liberal-on-social-issues news industry workers.
But mostly, it's not going to happen for structural reasons I'll discuss below the fold.
I work in the less-glamorous precincts of the business press. The subject matter is mostly non-political, but the setup is pretty much the same as any other news org. Over the past decade, the news industry has entered a severe contraction (some would say death spiral) as the Internet has eliminated or severely diminished non-advertising sources of revenue like subscriptions and classifieds, while readers have migrated online, where ad rates are a fraction of print. Meanwhile, many of the surviving outlets have been through a succession of private equity owners who've taken the opportunity to downsize editorial staff and leverage the crap out 'em, regardless of the company's financial position, before passing them on to the next venue of vultures for a tidy profit.
It is, in short, the toxoplasma gondii business model -- burrow into your host, rewire their brains by plastering the synaptic circuits with LOLcats porn and steer them into the jaws of a predator.
So news outlets are absurdly understaffed. Morale is shit. Gone are the days of the roving, glad-handing shoe-leather reporter who developed unique expertise and tapped a broad base of sources and was afforded the time to develop blockbuster exposes and thoughtful wrap-ups. Your average hack, much like the page-view monkeys at Politico, is basically chained to their computer all day, desperately grasping at the low-hanging fruit of news release dreck that flows from the electronic transom, a sluice of toxic waste ginned up by PR shops and think tanks. She has no time to develop original stories, no time to develop sources beyond those that turn up in her inbox, escorted by some young sharpie from Burson-Marsteller or Hill & Knowlton or CATO or Heritage or God-knows-what-else. "If you're writing about X today, here's a source for you. Oh, and do you need a sensational Drudge-bait angle to go with that?"
Here's the pitch: We'll do almost all the work for you. We'll give you the background, we'll tell you what to think, we'll give you people to quote, and we'll trust that your story will reflect the angle we give you, because we know you haven't got time to do it any other way.
The reporter might feel a little dirty about it, but she's got bills to pay and there aren't exactly a shit-ton of career options in that industry at the moment. She's just trying to get through the day, keep the lights on and mouths fed at home. She went into journalism to save the world and ended up working for the PR industry at half the salary. Her editor's in the same boat, only he has to go to the publisher's meeting where he probably gets the memo from management on what we think about X, Y and Z. Management, of course, tends to think more or less what the Grand Old Party thinks about matters economic if not social.
Like Atrios says: Get a quote, write it up, call it a day. Only rinse and repeat about 20 times between "write it up" and "call it a day."
So if you want to see fewer eye-gouging headlines like "Analysis: Obama again sucked into race debate," hope for more non-profit news ventures like ProPublica or for George Soros to launch a challenger to News Corp. The right's Byzantine influence apparatus -- puke funnel, Mighty Wurlitzer or whatever Atriosism you prefer -- has critical mass, as it has for a quarter century. Only big changes in the economy and the ecology of the news industry are going to change that. 'Til then, there's just no shaming 'em.