Balance vs. accuracy: Josh Marshall's take
In a speech delivered last month at Ithaca College and newly published at Alternet, the Talking Points Memo founder makes a compelling case that independent/alternative media can get at the truth more effectively than big organizations like CNN, which want to please everybody all the time. Note, as you read, that the implications of his argument are actually nonpartisan:
There are a number of reasons why
it's important that there be an alternative media, not a media culled
by a handful of major corporations. The one I want to focus on is the
way that the mainstream media consistently and, as part of the ethos,
prioritizes balance over accuracy in reporting the news -- particularly
political and campaign news. The way that John McCain has had a series
of specious commercials and campaign events in which either he or his
running-mate say things that aren't spin or stretching the truth, but
by any conventional English-language definition: lies, things that are
false and are said knowing that they are false. Until the last few
days, the headline would be: Lots of lying in campaigns, everybody's
sad about it.
There's a lot of reasons why that is a flawed
conception of journalism. It's not a personal fault of the journalists
in question -- that's the model they're trained to operate in. As the
concept of journalistic objectivity has evolved, it's become a corrupt
model of journalism, rooted in the economic changes of business in
journalism over the last half-century. Earlier in the last century, you
had a medium-sized city like Pittsburgh or Louisville or Phoenix, the
model of those newspapers was not that they would serve an entire
community.
But then there is CNN's model: Everybody should be
watching CNN, everybody. If that is your model, if you are the single
newspaper in San Francisco or Kansas City or St. Louis, you are just
highly constrained about how rigorous you can be in the accuracy of
your reporting. Because the whole model is: You are appealing to
everybody. With the conglomeration of media -- not just the major
corporations nationally, but even at the regional and city level -- you
have single news organizations that have something close to a monopoly.
It creates a great deal of pressure to embrace that flawed model of
journalism.
One of the things that is most important about
independent media is that you have news organizations not part of the
model where they ideally want to be everybody's dominant news source.
If that's not the case, you don't have that need to satisfy everybody
-- and that underlying need to prioritize balance over accuracy.
That's
why the existence of an independent media sector is so important. Also,
the more voices you have, the more takes on the news, you're just going
to have a more vibrant and diverse news ecosystem - as opposed to
having two or three gatekeepers that control the news.
(Via Romenesko.)