Media

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley thinks people are too harsh on journalists in general and Michael Gordon especially:

Here’s what I wish. I wish that the blogosphere could think in less dispositional terms. When Gordon, or anyone else, writes a bad article, we tend to attack them on dispositional terms; Gordon failed because he’s a friend of the administration, an arrogant stenographer, a neocon, etc. We don’t have a vocabulary that, for lack of a better phrase, allows us to hate the sin and love the sinner. I love the blogosphere, but I loathe this aspect of it. A few weeks ago, we all had a terrific rage fest against the hack pundit Joe Klein. Then, Klein started to write things that we liked, and the declarations of hackishness and bad faith went away. I still think that Joe Klein is a hack, but that’s rather beside the point; he’s either a hack or he’s not, and just because he starts directing his hackery in directions we like doesn’t change that fact. Same thing with the various writers for the New Republic, the blogospheric reaction to whom vacillates wildly between “foul servant of Dark Lord Peretz” and “Oh, hey, that’s an interesting point”. To use a nearer and dearer example, only part of what makes me loathe Mickey Kaus is his political position; much more irritating to me is his manifest inability to convey a thought in writing and his trivial approach to political questions.

Robert makes two complaints here: one that Michael Gordon is more than just a voice activated tape recorder as he’s been called by the progressive blogosphere and second, that the general treatment of journalists depends too much on whether the blogosphere agrees with what they’re saying.

To start with Gordon, I’d argue that he actually fits a pattern of journalists who are quite willing to criticise the government’s actions, as long as it’s either long after their criticism could’ve had any impact or in fora which are inaccesible to the hoi polloi. that sort of criticism isn’t helpful and certaintly isn’t damaging to the administration. It’s nice to read that the War on Iraq was doomed to be a failure after it had become a failure, but it would’ve been better if that case had been made before the war.

I do agree with Robert’s more general point, that you should be careful not to judge journalists just for whether they agree with you or not, but also on the quality of their reporting. A hack working for your side is still a hack. At the same time however there is merit in “training” journalists to get better at reporting the truth and not just Republican talking points, by praising them when they do things right and by getting out the sledgehammers when they don’t.

In the current climate, the left needs to be very very blunt and aggressive to even get itself heard through the haze of the wingnut media machine. The recent troubles with Amanda Marcotte are the perfect example. Within days something was ginned up and repeated at louder and louder volumes until she had to resign from the Edwards campaign.

With this sort of thing happening every day being consistently partisan in approaching the news media is not a sin; it’s survival. Which means keep hammering them when they get things wrong, reward them (but not too much) when they get things right and keep exposing hackery.