The big type war of the yellow kids, 1898
Just a reminder that journalism wasn’t always professional. Well, whether it was ever purely professional could be debated. But William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers really did play a big role in getting the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.
Fast forward to today. Jacob Weisberg writes that Fox News is un-American. By this he seems to mean that Fox’s grotesque partisanship is outside the tradition of American journalism, and that it is bad for America. Regarding the tradition of American journalism — um, there are a lot of traditions. I think in the 20th century journalism really did create some professional standards and more or less upheld them, although that’s all out the window now. But Fox has done a great job of reviving the 19th century standard of yellow journalism for which William Randolph Hearst is remembered.
As for whether this is bad for America — of course it is.
In the October Atlantic, Mark Bowden writes that journalism is collapsing all over. It isn’t just Fox, although Fox played a big role in its collapse. He begins by recalling how all the news cable networks had the same clips of obscure Sonia Sotomayor sound bytes (the “wise Latina” comment and the clip about judges making policy) as soon as Judge Sotomayor was nominated to SCOTUS. “The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men.” He continues,
The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.
This process–political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts–is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men … who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor clips both originally described themselves to me as part-time, or aspiring, journalists.
The fact that interests groups churn up propaganda to feed to media isn’t shocking. That’s always been done. What’s disturbing is the degree to which the cable newsies throw the stuff at audiences undigested and unfiltered, without checking to find the context or noting where the obscure clips came from. Fifty years ago, that would have been considered a breach of journalism professional standards. Now, it’s what everybody does.