He-said, She-said Journalism

As I've expressed before, conventional journalism in this country has lost its way. Instead of digging for facts to establish the veracity of a person's statement -- especially when it relates to a political position or topic -- journalists today will simply trot out another person from "the other side" to either provide an alternative viewpoint or to deny the original statement as being true. In other words, it becomes a game of he-said, she-said. This may -- or may not -- be proper journalistic procedure when the topic is one of political, religious, or other theory, but is never correct when the topic is a statement of fact. When this is the case, sure the reporter should get the story of/from the "other side" as well and report on it. Then, however, it is incumbent upon that reporter to actually dig for the facts and report which side is telling the truth.

We can see this malaise in our journalism today in recent stories regarding the right-wing smear campaign linking Barack Obama to supposedly anti-American Islamic persons/ideologies. (No less a paper than The Washington Post was at the root of that debacle, which is completely factually false.) So, too, have we seen that the vast majority of the mainstream media have given Rudy Giuliani a pass when he continually, repeatedly invokes incorrect statistics to paint a completely incorrect picture of his time as mayor of New York City. He and his campaign are built on a house of lying cards. (Ironically, the New York Times, which heretofore has been as big an enabler of Guiliani's cult of personality as any media outlet, has finally started targeting his false claims.)

Ultimately, our mainstream media has become an enabler for our corrupt political systems. As Glenn Greenwald put it for Salon.com:

It isn't actually that complicated. When a government official or candidate makes a factually false statement, the role of the reporter is not merely to pass it on, nor is it simply to note that "some" dispute the false statement. The role of the reporter is to state the actual facts, which means stating clearly when someone lies or otherwise makes a false statement.

It's staggering that this most elementary principle of journalism is not merely violated by so many of our establishment journalists, but is explicitly rejected by them. That's the principal reason why our political discourse is so infected with outright falsehoods. The media has largely abdicated their primary responsibility of stating basic facts.

Just as we need to work to right our political systems, by holding our government officials accountable for their corruption, we must hold our journalists accountable for the abandonment of their responsibilities to our society as well. True democracy can only be achieved through knowledge and truth being spread collectively throughout a society.

30 November 2007