Lessons to the Press

Jeff Jarvis has the lessons the press should take away from Jordangate:

First, journalist-priests are no longer the gatekeepers in either direction -- to authority and truth for the public, or from newsmakers to the people. Now the public can demand answers from the powerful and the powerful can avoid the press and talk to the public in new ways.

Second, news just speeded up and old media isn't ready for this. We used to control the speed of news because we were the gatekeepers. No more. That is a big disconnect between big and citizens' media: We want answers and we don't want the press or the powerful to take their sweet time to give them to us.

Third, off-the-record is dead. Now that everyone has access to a press -- the internet -- anyone you talk to could be a Wolf Blitzer in sheep's clothing.
Welcome to the age of transparency.

Finally, big media won't get away with portraying the citizens at the gates as serfs and mobs for long or they will storm the place. But the better way to look at it is this: Big media should welcome the voice of the people for now we can work together; now we can find out what the people want to know and help them know it; now we have more eyes and ears where news happens. Now every witness can be a reporter and every citizen a pundit and that is good for news and the democracy.

So - do they get it?

The Wall Street Journal makes me doubt it:

The writers of these columns believe that, in addition to having opinions, we are ultimately in the same information business as the rest of the press corps. Which is why we try to break news whenever we can if a story merits the attention.

What the Jordan flap shows is that the threshold for what "merits the attention" is now determined by a free-flowing information market rather than a coterie of editors. When it came to Jordan, clearly the blogosphere thought that Jordan's remarks were curious - and his pattern of such remarks, and his subordinates' pattern of worse, is noteworthy, the machinations of the editors be damned.

So I'd say lesson one is still begging for attention.

Back to the WSJ, which sniffs...:

So it was only normal for our Bret Stephens to report a January 27 panel discussion he attended at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during which CNN's Eason Jordan appeared to say--before he tried to unsay it--that U.S. troops had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. Mr. Stephens's story appeared the next day in our Political Diary, an e-mail newsletter for subscribers that is part of this Web site. It is the first account by any news organization of what has come to be known as Easongate.

First account "by any news organization" indeed, but it trailed the big blogs by several days. Lesson two.

By now, everyone on the Good Ship Earth knows that this particular story ended Friday with Mr. Jordan's abrupt resignation from CNN. This has certain pundits chirping delightedly. It has been a particular satisfaction to the right wing of the so-called "blogosphere," the community of writers on the Web that has pushed the Eason story relentlessly and sees it as the natural sequel to the Dan Rather fiasco of last year.

But Easongate is not Rathergate. Mr. Rather and his CBS team perpetrated a fraud during a prime-time news broadcast; stood by it as it became obvious that the key document upon which their story was based was a forgery, and accused the whistleblowers of the very partisanship they themselves were guilty of. Mr. Rather still hasn't really apologized.

As for Mr. Jordan, he initially claimed that U.S. forces in Iraq had targeted and killed 12 journalists. Perhaps he intended to offer no further specifics in order to leave an impression of American malfeasance in the minds of his audience, but there is no way of knowing for sure. What we do know is that when fellow panelist Representative Barney Frank pressed Mr. Jordan to be specific, the CNN executive said he did not believe it was deliberate U.S. government policy to target journalists. Pressed further, Mr. Jordan could only offer that "there are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out" for journalists, and cite two examples of non-lethal abuse of journalists by ordinary GIs.

None of this does Mr. Jordan credit. Yet the worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony.Lesson four goes begging. The people who assume the WSJ editorial board tells the whole and nothing-but truth will never know Jordan's long history of such "dumb" remarks.

Again, the dog ate lesson four.

Posted by Mitch at February 14, 2005 06:31 AM | TrackBack