Japhy Grant
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08:00:26 pm on June 13, 2008 | # |
Here’s my take on "The Establishment Media Elite ". Good journalism has to be for everyone. If you’re tailoring your coverage to a specific audience as Fox, most blogs and to some extent MSNBC (*hack* Olbermann *hack) do (you could make an argument "gay media" does this as well, but that’s an argument for another day) there’s a level of dishonesty involved.
While I blog and love everything about blogging, it’s not journalism. I know Andrew Sullivan seems to think blogging is less vain than journalism , but here on Planet Reality, that’s just not the case. I think having discussion and commentary on the days events are great, but let’s not confuse reporting on an issue with commenting on it. One requires legwork, fact-checking, corroboration and attention to detail, the other requires nothing more than the ability to flap your lips. That legwork and research needs to be exhaustive and that’s why you need large news gathering agencies.
I have feet in both the journo world and the blogging one and I try to make a clear difference between the sorts of things I do here and the sort of things I do when I cover a story for The Advocate . I come from the school that journalism is a public trust, that it serves a vital function in democracy and we need people like Tim Russert asking difficult questions to our national leaders in a way that holds them accountable.
I agree that often mainstream media gets things wrong, sometimes outrageously so. But as I tell people time and again, the media’s bias is towards a good story. There are definite downsides to this — it’s why we’re constantly subjected to car crashes and fires on the evening news, but as an avid Meet the Press watcher, what impressed me is that Russert was ultimately telling the story of America. He constantly put current political events in their historical context and he did it with passion. MTP really has become "the first draft of history" because of Russert. It’s imperfect, but there’s nothing else like it. I think what makes Tim Russert such a hero to journalist’s (myself included) is that he wasn’t afraid to get his hand’s dirty discussing the details of the day. It is extremely easy to criticize and comment, but Russert never did either. He let the facts and the people he interviewed, speak for themselves and let us, the viewers draw our own conclusions.