NewsJunk.com

DAVE WINER'S LATEST PROJECT is dangerous stuff for political news junkies. Available in web, RSS, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Goodbye CNN, Hello Reason

/ RANT ON /

HERE'S A SCREEN CAP of CNN online this morning (click the pic to see it full-sized). It's an important screen capture, one I'll likely keep and maybe even print, placing it in the same Rubbermaid bin we use to keep important newspapers for our yet-to-be-born children.

Let's see ... what's in that bin ... "Too Close To Call," from Nov. 8, 2000 (the day after the 2000 election); "Pope Dies," from Apr. 3, 2005; "U.S. Attacked," from Sep. 12, 2001 (and others from Sep. 13, 14, 16, 17, 29); "Baghdad Hit," from March 20, 2003 (the Command Post's birthday, BTW).

Surely "U.S. murder suspect faces UK court" has a place among such meaningful historical artifacts.

Note the bold headline. The photo of Neil Entwistle and the family he apparently murdered. The striking, blood-red "BREAKING NEWS" banner across the masthead. Also note the smaller, less noteworthy stories to the right: "Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks," "Israeli, Palestinian diplomats face of on peace process." We should be glad our computer monitors have high resolutions lest such less meaningful stories slip entirely off the page.

If you've not noticed, the news media has lost its collective mind. Yes, we've always had tabloids, yellow journalism, and jingoist editors. Indeed, some would claim that for much of its history advocacy and sensationalism was what the news was for. Half the founding fathers got into the news biz so they could have a stage upon which to beat their political drum. Newspapers in the 1850s were instrumental in building the shrill divisiveness preceding the Civil War. In the 1940s the news often served as an external outlet for the Roosevelt / Truman propaganda machine.

But today is different than 1776, 1876, and 1976. Today, with web pages and pager alerts and Blackberrys and web-enabled phones and 160 TV channels and satellite radio and AM talk radio and FM radio and broadband Internet connections and wikis and chat rooms and instant messaging and online forums and static web pages and podcasts and streaming video and Flikr and social bookmarking and blogs ...

... today with SARS and avian flu and Darfur and Hamas and China and outsourcing and Dow 10,000 and hedge funds and GM layoffs and Davos and WTO and global warning and el Nino and immigration and the Olympics and sex trafficking and briefcase nukes ...

... today we need help navigating the noise. It's a complex world. The stakes are high. We need news that helps us identify the wheat of our world from the damn chaff.

And the fact that Mr. Entwistle may have murdered his family and has been caught does not help me live my life, it does not entertain me, it does not make me more learned, it does not help me reason. It's an excruciating, terrible, sad story, one deserving the greatest sympathy ... and CNN is blaring it from the headlines simply for its shock value and base appeal. Like motorists passing an accident, most of us can't help but look. CNN knows that, and they're using the murder of a wife and child to sensationalize and sell their product.

It's wrong, and it should stop.

Today we need our news editors to actually act the part -- to muster the guts to make editorial choices based on what will add the most value to their audience. Not because they're an elite class that knows best, but because they have common sense and appreciate what it takes for the average Joe to reason about the world.

Back in the day, when my grandfather was editor of the Logan Herald Journal and taking my dad down to tear the early stories off the AP wire, he wouldn't have talked of journalistic ethics or editorial obligations. He would have simply said that as the person who held the keys to the news, who knew everything that was happening in his small town, serene or sordid ... who had the power to inform, educate, distract, and ruin ... he needed to show good sense. He would have said he felt a duty to his community, to his neighbors, to judiciously exercise that power. And he did.   

That's what I long for: News media that shows good sense. Some glimmer of obligation not to attract attention and sensationalize, but to inform and educate. To help us reason.

I was struck by this passage from last month's Atlantic Monthly, to which I subscribe, and which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year:

[I]f some things about The Atlantic Monthly have changed in 150 years, the most important things have not.

First, the founders of the magazine understood that breaking news was not always worth paying attention to, and in fact could distract the public from important stories that needed to be told—and that took more time to tell. One of our early contributors, Henry David Thoreau, noting the impact of the telegraph, warned that soon we would be hearing minute-by-minute updates on Princess Adelaide's whooping cough. This concern is all the more relevant in our own era of round-the-clock cable and Internet news. Nobody in America complains, "I'm not getting my news bites fast enough!" People do complain that they're not getting the full truth. They do complain that the foam of headlines, and of what Philip K. Dick might have called "pre-news," conceals vast shoals of reality.

Second, from the outset the magazine's vantage point had no roots in political ideology. The Atlantic would be a forum, not a pulpit. It would cover potentially anything and be open to the sharpest thinking and reporting, no matter how contrarian. There is of course nothing wrong with partisan newspapers and magazines—they are one of the glories of the free press in America. But The Atlantic was designed to be something else.

Third, the magazine has always tried to be entertaining as well as informative. From the beginning it has set aside a place for a special kind of humor, a kind that may be gentle, cerebral, or utterly off the wall, but is rarely broad. Mark Twain once said that he liked writing humor for The Atlantic because the editors allowed him to be funny without asking him to paint himself in stripes and stand on his head. Garrison Keillor (whose poetic parodies are published in this issue) and Christopher Buckley carry on this tradition.

Finally, the founders of The Atlantic believed in what they called "the American idea." This was not some saccharine notion of American exceptionalism or a hyper-patriotic American boosterism. It was a recognition that America was an experiment, based on certain principles—an experiment that could fail, but would if successful offer a rare kind of hope. It could be easily contaminated—by ignorance, venality, selfishness, hatred, hubris. The founders were realists: the biggest threat of all, the slave system, was at the peak of its power, and the challenge of race, they knew, was destined to become the nation's central concern.

What is "the American idea"? It is the fractious, maddening approach to the conduct of human affairs that values equality despite its elusiveness, that values democracy despite its debasement, that values pluralism despite its messiness, that values the institutions of civic culture despite their flaws, and that values public life as something higher and greater than the sum of all our private lives. The founders of the magazine valued these things—and they valued the immense amount of effort it takes to preserve them from generation to generation.

That is the tie that binds fifteen decades. In the years before the Civil War it was not certain that the American idea would have a future. It still isn't.

[T]he foam of headlines, and of what Philip K. Dick might have called "pre-news," conceals vast shoals of reality. Indeed.

Fortunately for me, this is something over which I have control. Our media is a marketplace, one with many choices. So goodbye CNN. Goodbye ticker with your inane, superficial factoid distractions. Goodbye Larry and your fawning, grumbled interviews of tragic figures. Goodbye overhead news-chopper coverage of petty criminal car chases. Goodbye Wolf and your breathless, urgent Situation Room lacking meaningful situations. Goodbye Nancy and your morbid, shrieking courtroom voyeurism. Goodbye Paula, goodbye Anderson, goodbye Lou.

Goodbye FOX. Goodbye MSNBC. Goodbye local Action News. So long, goodbye, good riddance.

Hello Atlantic. Hello NewsHour. Hello FRONTLINE. Hello New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Hello Glenn, hello Kos, hello Manolo, hello citizen journalism.

Hello self-empowered editorial license.

Hello reason.

/ RANT OFF /

Tags: cnn, journalism, citizen journalism

Perp Walk

Ebbers gets 25 years, with a requirement to serve 80 percent of the term. At 63, that's essentially a death sentence for him. That's hefty sentence, but so is $11 billion in fraud. Federal Court sends a message: "SOX or not, mind your fiduciary responsibilities if you're a big-time CEO."