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The Slacktivist starts us off today with a post so very CJR Daily that we had to check the URL to make sure that our design hadn’t changed overnight. We’ll excerpt it here but you should go and read the whole post. Slacktivist starts off with a tip of the hat to sports sections, writing, “It is, in some ways, the last bastion of reality-based journalism. … Turn to the sports pages and there you can read the unambiguous results of a sporting event. … A sports writer may detest Bobby Knight and may say so explicitly in his story, but he won’t therefore go on to question whether it is in fact true that Texas Tech has advanced to the Sweet 16 of the men’s NCAA Tournament.”
The same doesn’t go for the news sections, says Slacktivist, “Here the facts are rarely stated as plainly or as confidently as ‘Texas Tech 71, Gonzaga 69.’ Instead, all claims are treated as equally valid by virtue of the fact that someone is claiming them. [Emphasis added.] News reporters consider it their responsibility to quote these claims accurately, not to evaluate them against any notion of knowable reality or anything as seemingly objective as a scoreboard.”
He then offers up a comical hypothetical exercise. “Imagine trying to update your brackets for the NCAAs if your only source of information were, say, members of the White House Press Corps: ‘Texas Tech supporters were claiming victory Sunday after their regional quarterfinal game against Gonzaga. In Spokane, however, proponents of Gonzaga disputed this claim, noting that their team’s point total was equal to that of Kentucky’s and greater than that of Utah’s, and that both of these teams are advancing to the next round.'”
The Slacktivist realizes his analogy isn’t perfect, and he notes that sports reporting and news reporting are different. But, he writes, “Sports reporters, first and foremost, have a duty as indifferent arbiters of the facts. That’s a duty that hard news journalists have long since abandoned.” And the post goes on to examine how reporters following the Terry Schiavo case aren’t even remotely doing their job as “arbiters of the facts.”
More on Schiavo from Hit and Run’s Jacob Sullum, who thinks that the New YorkTimes “just isn’t trying hard enough” to gather the thoughts of “real” conservatives on the Schiavo case. In a story headlined, “GOP Right Is Splintered on Schiavo Intervention,” Sullum isn’t impressed with the “conservatives” that the Times came up with, who, according to his spectrum, are mostly moderates or libertarians, rather than by-the-book conservatives — whatever and whoever that may be. (We won’t even get into the neoconservatives versus traditional conservatives kerfluffle.)
World Water Day drew out the paranoia in Michelle Malkin’s readers yesterday. Roxanne, in a post titled “When Wingnuts Completely Lose It,” points us to the Malkin post in which she writes, “Lots of readers are writing about a graphic used on Google’s search page yesterday. It showed the word “Google” half full of water, dripping into a bowl. Readers have interpreted the graphic to be an anti-Terri Schiavo commentary.” As Malkin points out, the graphic was merely eye-candy for World Water Day 2005 and had nothing to do with Schiavo. Still suspicious, Malkin writes it off as “weird timing.”
Speaking of out of touch with reality, the Moose thinks that the right is “loosing [sic] touch with America.” His evidence: “The American people are clearly not buying Social Security privatization … And the Schiavo case reveals a gap between public opinion and the worldview of the Republican social conservatives.” For him, the Jedi is on the verge of returning: “Conservatives are as intoxicated by power and hubris as liberals once were. Barry Goldwater would hardly recognize this crowd. And should the right lose its populist touch, the conservative moment may not last for much longer.”
Finally, Ed Driscoll is smiling after reading that the Los Angeles Times is reshuffling the occupants of its executive suite. “To be honest though,” he admits, “just as when their East Coast namesake changed editors, I’m not expecting miracles.”
–Thomas Lang
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