Ben Smith in this NYT Piece gets squarely at an issue that has been discussed indirectly in several ways on this list over last few years. I strongly recommend reading in its entirety (a few fair use excerpt ps follow below).
I think it gets to the real threat to the credibility of television news, much more than the (really, relatively rare, as a fraction of all stories reported) straight errors in reporting like the one recently about William Barr by MTP. They should be rare, but factual mistakes will happen, and when they do they should be owned up to promptly and corrected. When that happens, the real damage is minimal. A bigger problem is a habit of allowing a juicy and simple narrative to trump complicated, less interesting evidence based reporting. It is this drive for compelling story-telling (and ratings), more than ideological bias, that drives bad television news reporting at all TV news shops (other than Fox, which is Equally and promiscuously open to all possible sources of bad reporting). No major tv news organization (even Fox) is as mendacious and disdainful of the truth as Trump, but the culture of the “Trump Resistance”, as manifested on social media and the moist holes under dirty rocks in the deeper recesses of the hard core Bernie Sanders death-eater culture (does anyone here monitor “Crystal Ball?) has left a mark on some parts of main stream media. Nowhere is this more true than in the work of Ronan Farrow. It’s not that Farrow is always wrong (Weinstein and Lauer are bad actors, corroborated by multiple sources, outside of Farrow). But he is sometimes dead wrong (e.g. his Michael Cohen story) and other times exaggerated claims and fudges holes in his evidence with passion and flair, rather than candor. This is not the case of an overworked reported on tight deadline making occasional mistakes that he later corrects. It is millennial gonzo infotainment, where the reporters empathy for the story seems to carry more weight than actual evidence. While his best selling book accuses NBC News of a conspiracy to kill his Weinstein story out of fear Weinstein would out Lauer (a claim the crucial elements of which are not supported with evidence in the book), NBC’s refusal to air Ronan’s story is probably more a credit than liability to their credibility; though as Smith notes, the real sin there was a major news organization entrusting such a big story to such a green reporter, and then not supporting him better with experienced supervision when he got in over his head. Those who really want to be part of a meaningful “Resistance Movement“, whether to Trumpism, Predatory Patriarchy or Late Stage Capitalism, are better off opposing them not just ideologically, but also methodologically. We are better than them not when we can be more successful than they are with the same dishonest tools, but when we do our best to stay as close to the facts as possible (and yes, even taking into account human subjectivity, there are facts that we can more or less successfully approximate). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farrow.html?referringSource=articleShare (Free-ish) “Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/ronan-farrow-reluctant-tv-star.html> and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting....he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize.... ...if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.“ -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKGtkYJJWbDXDtaaJBu0_kTroTcuQxv432wdkDeu21G1YvF8Tg%40mail.gmail.com.
