The End of News, and the Last Journalist

There is nothing news under the Sun... or the Times, or the Independent, or Post-Intelligencer.... Today, there is only commentary and opinion selectively garnished with whatever factoids and hearsay the writer can find to support his or her creation.

There was a time, not so many decades ago, when many newspapers grinded their political axes almost exclusively on the editorial and op/ed pages. Their news pages were filled with prose so detached and dispassionate, so reportorial, as to be almost unrecognizable as newspaper copy by a modern reader.

Consider the following excerpt from this syndicated May 18, 1954 UP (United Press) story on the Supreme Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education:

Dixie Forming Its Battlelines
Dixie segregationists formed battlelines today in an effort to preserve the South's traditional color barriers despite the supreme Court's historic position that segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional....

Georgia Att. Gen. Eugene Cook said he had contacted 17 states and had found none willing to submit to the decision without further litigation....

States on the fringe of the deep south expressed willingness to comply to the letter with the Supreme Court order, whatever it eventually may be. Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma were among them. Not so with the stronger segregation states like Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi.

Now contrast that with a currently breaking story about the deaths of 20 to 40 people in Iraq, near the border with Syria, at the hands of U.S. military forces. If you sift through most of the current media accounts, you can get the gist of the story: some Iraqis interviewed by reporters say the dead include women and children and were all part of a wedding party harmlessly discharging weapons in traditional celebratory zeal at 3:00am; U.S. military officials have offered statements saying they have no confirmation of the wedding claims, and are under the impression that the dead are foreign fighters who engaged U.S. troops, and upon whom U.S. troops returned fire.

That's the gist of it, but that's not how it is generally reported. Instead, most news outlets attach comparatively little skepticism to the statements of the Iraqis, and much to the statements of U.S. military officials.

I have no idea what actually happened, but neither do the reporters writing these stories. Nevertheless, some of them, and their editors, have made up their minds already. CTV News, a Canadian television and Internet news outlet, has the following headline on its "news" story about the event: "Dozens killed as U.S. fires on Iraqi wedding." Then, next to a photograph of a body completely wrapped in white fabric being lowered into a grave, is the caption: "Iraqi's dig graves for members of a massacred wedding party."

The problem with this caption is not just the spurious apostrophe. The problem is that, whether or not CTV staff are eventually proven right in their opinion of what took place, it's just that at the moment: an opinion. They're guessing that the interviewed Iraqis are right, and the U.S. military personnel are either lying or mistaken. Just guessing. That isn't reporting the news, it's making up the news.

All I can say is, whenever you pick up a paper or browse a media site: Caveat Lector--Reader Beware. Current "journalistic" practice gives a whole new meaning to the addage "No news is good news."

Posted by Andrew Coulson at May 20, 2004 12:15 AM | TrackBack