by Ellis Dean
Rocky Mountain News media critic Jason Salzman wrote a column recently about media critics, in which he proposed a Code of Behavior for Media Criticism. I think the idea is worth considering since, at least since the Nixon administration, critics have furthered partisan agendas by demonizing the messenger. If nothing else, his Code is food for thought, as is the sobering (and conceivable) notion that Denver may someday have no daily newspaper service at all.
However, I am frankly more concerned about the state of journalism itself these days. I agree that bloggers and talk-radio hosts are “dependent on mainstream professional journalism”, but American citizens—voters—are even more dependent on the quality of information they receive from the press. In the face of this desperate need, journalism is a profession in disrepute – to the extent that it even considers itself a profession.
I can think of no more significant example of the catastrophic consequences of journalistic negligence than the almost-universal complicity of the mainstream media in accepting and supporting the Bush administration’s deceptions prior to and since the beginning of the Iraq war. Scott McClellan’s recent comments about the media’s role as enablers of the war caused a brief round of self-reflection, after which journalists like Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams declared themselves innocent of any dereliction of professional responsibility (in spite of tape demonstrating confident support of the invasion by the likes of Brokaw, Williams and the now-sanctified Tim Russert). On the print side, Judith Miller’s unconscionable reporting (among others’) further enabled the manipulation of American public opinion in favor the war.
It is no wonder that in survey results last year, “the press” ranks next-to-last in a ranking of institutions in which U.S. adults have confidence (barely beaten out for last place by Congress). First, a profession whose single most fundamental purpose is the discovery and communication of truth, overlooks contradictory evidence and supports, without question, the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in modern American history. It then judges itself to be without blame, in spite of the revelation of even more undeniable evidence of the criminal malfeasance that led to the invasion. These are actions that demand the low regard in which this profession? craft? occupation? is held.
The Iraq disgrace is only one of many journalistic failures in recent years. And yet I am aware of no widely-established professional standards for journalists. I am aware of no formal processes (other than libel suits) for the review of journalistic incompetence, or for the disciplining or removal of professional credentials in cases of journalistic negligence. I am aware of no widely-established standards for the credentialing of journalists. Using Colorado as an example, the qualifications for styling hair are significantly—shamefully—higher than those for practicing journalism.
Perhaps that is one reason why journalists seem less well-respected than hair stylists. Regardless, it seems to me that the best way to disarm critics of journalism has less to do with standards for critics than with standards for journalists themselves. A group with so little respect for itself has no right to expect better from others. As long as journalists ignore (or in some cases, ridicule) the need for the kind of professional standards that most occupations embraced in the last hundred years, they should be considered of a kind with such archaic tradespeople as blacksmiths and barrel makers.
In the meantime, when I hear journalists wince from the words of critics, and worry about the future of their jobs, my sympathy is muted. I shift my attention to bloggers like Bill Moyers, Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald for a whiff of the truth I so seldom seem to catch from mainstream journalists. And although I dread the day when no newspaper arrives on my driveway, my first thought that day will not be of the critics, but of the journalists themselves whose negligence had so much more to do with their own demise.
