Kay worries that journalism is being taken over by "a group of people with no ethics or reporting training whatsoever who understand how to write blogs and get them read." In other words, bloggers! What's weird, though, is what good reporting bloggers actually do, particularly as compared to many of those with "ethics" (?) and reporting training. Case in point is Glenn Greenwald's impressive, substantive, and long interview with Michael O'Hanlon, in which he digs beneath the original 1,400 word op-ed to, well, report out the actual facts of the O'Hanlon's trip. And the answers are deeply revealing.
After Glenn gets O'Hanlon to explain that the trips was organized by the Department of Defense, that the meetings were put together by the Department of Defense, and that the participants in the meetings were largely chosen by the Department of Defense, we get this gem of an exchange:
GG: Given that some of the claims in your Op-Ed are based upon your conversations with Iraqis, and that the Iraqis with whom you spoke were largely if not exclusively ones provided to you by the U.S. military, shouldn't that fact have been included in your Op-Ed?
MO: If the suggestion is that in a 1,400 word Op-Ed, we ought to have mentioned that, I can understand that criticism, and if we should have included that, I apologize for not having done so. But I want to stress that the focus here was on the perspective of the U.S. military, and I did a lot of probing of what I was told, and remain confident in the conclusions that we reached about the military successes which we highlighted. But if you're suggesting that some of our impressions might have been shaped by the military's selection of Iraqis, and that we might have disclosed that, that is, I think, fair enough.
Gotta love that "in a 1,400 word op-ed." I mean, a disclaimer could have taken up a good two or three percent of that! And yet those reporters, with all their training and ethics, saw no need to mention nor emphasize how fundamentally compromised O'Hanlon and Pollack were. What are they being taught?
Meanwhile, I can't tell you how many of my journalistic mentors have told me that the utility of reporting is that you can always find someone else who knows exactly what you need to know. This search for expertise-once-removed is fine, but considerably inadequate if you're not simultaneously developing your own, independent, expertise, with which you can evaluate the answers given by your sources. I was reminded of this by a recent post of Kevin Drum's on the lack of workable alternatives to objective reporting. "Who gets to decide whether an issue is still debatable?" He asked. "The reporter? But most reporters aren't subject matter experts."
That's true. They aren't. But there's no reason they shouldn't be. In her post, Kay worries about the future of journalism school. I hope that every journalism school in the country dies out, and that a J-School degree becomes worse than useless for this profession. It's time our newspapers began demanding expertise, rather than earnestness. If you want to be an economic reporter, you should have some training in economics. If you want to do health policy, you should have to demonstrate some fluency with the policy issues involved, and the relevant research. So far as I can tell, the problem in journalism is that there are far too many trained reporters, and far too few researchers, and experts in their subject matter. Kevin wants an alternative to objective reporting, and I'm willing to offer one: Expert reporting. Will it be perfect? No. But it will be better than what we have now, and far closer to the actual meaning of the word "objective," which is supposed to denote the dispassionate analysis of facts, not the innocence of babes.
