Jay Rosen Says that the Press Corps Heads for the Greasy Grass...

Jay Rosen gives a talk about why oh why can't we have a better press corps:

PressThink: Migration Point for the Press Tribe: [E]ven more difficult—and more challenging to the political wisdom of the [professional press] tribe--is that on the terrain where the press has to be re-built, there are people already there... building a kind of alternative civilization to professionalized news and commentary.... One of the most perplexing questions journalists today face is what to make of these determined settlers and their ways, how to stand toward them.... Horizontal sharing is as important as top-down messaging. Readers have become writers and the people formerly know as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers.

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform... [and this] idea... had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild...

I think that the press corps's flaws are much deeper than that--it's not just that it doesn't understand the new ground to which it is migrating, it's that it did a lousy job on its own ground as well. Consider the Washington Post. I think of:

• Len Downie minimizing and suppressing what his people knew (by, e.g., putting Walter Pincus on page A16)
• Clay Chandler lying to his readers in order to gain street cred with Alfonse D'Amato
• John Harris misrepresenting his sources
• Fred Hiatt hoping his readers are too stupid to read public documents
• Jonathan Weisman unwilling to learn enough to cover his issues reliably

None of these problems have anything to do with "new media." They all consist of doing old media badly.

Comments

[Robert Waldmann]

The post to which you linke after writing "Clay Chandler", that is,
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/what_is_wrong_w.html
is awesome. It's up there with the Belle Waring pony post if you ask me.

I fear that, back in the day, I skipped it thinking "oh that's just Brad dumping on the Wapo as always." Now I understand that it, among other things, helps explain you beliefs about and feelings towards the Post (I recall in 1994 that you said that working for the administration you had found yourself turning into H.R. "Bob" Haldeman).

It is strengthened by the fact that you are indignantly arguing that Chandler was improperly trying to shift blame from you, J. Bradford DeLong to Lawrence Summers. That is integrity of a sort which probably shocked the fecal material out of the people at the Post.

In fact, speaking of cleaning out colons, don't you find the change from the Treasury clipping service version of the article to the archived version highly suspicious ? You wrote

"A earlier version of the article--the one that made it into the Treasury Department's daily clips--included a short quote from one of the three memos that D'Amato leaked to Chandler: "bottom line: peso overvalued.""

Now why did that 4 word phrase not make it into the archive ? I would guess that it was removed, because it constitutes proof that one of the memos discussed in the article was the memo written by you a fuller quotation of which would show how Chandler grossly mislead readers by removing context. Wouldn't want to keep the smoking gun available to anyone with access to google would we ?

What am I to make of Mr Chandler's post Post career path

"Clay Chandler is Asia Editor at FORTUNE. He is based in Beijing, where he covers China, India, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. He maintains the blog "Chasing the Dragon".

Before joining FORTUNE in October 2002, Chandler was Asian economic correspondent and Hong Kong bureau chief for the Washington Post. He opened the paper's first Shanghai bureau in 2000, after serving as chief economic correspondent in Washington, D.C."

http://www.timeinc.net/fortune/information/presscenter/fortune/bios/FOR_chandler.html
Now China is, indeed, a dragon, but might he have been Shanghaid because you nailed him dead to rights ?

I mean was deceit punished at least this once ?

I guess the case of Jonathan FBD Weisman suggests otherwise, but I like to think that the answer is yes.

[sfguy]

The point that Rosen misses is that his determined settlers have always been there, it's just that they've never been able to effectively communicate with one another and with an audience that rivals the audience of the "news tribe". Now that the settlers can, they can point out where and how the "news tribe" truly functions as a fourth estate and tool of the other estates.

[Kaleberg]

Rosen is guilty of base cargo cultism. He is confusing the medium for the message. The media abandoned their customers when they switched to the right and consolidated. Alternative viewpoints were simply given no outlet. In the 1960s there was a similar problem. The new media physically resembled the old media, but its outlook and politics was totally different. Our new media looks quite different from the old media, but the real difference is not Dreamweaver (web page) versus Indesign (print layout). It is what is covered, what is emphasized, and the point of view taken. If you can't decided between Dreamweaver and Indesign, take out a mortgage and buy Creative Suite 3, but it might make more sense to look at the drek you are producing and win back your customers with a new and better product, one more focused on their needs.

[dilbert dogbert]

Who is "Yellow Hair"? and who is Reno? Who, also is chief of the hostiles? Will there be a "National Monument" erected and where?