Media Research Center: CNN spreading disinformation about Global Warming, making people think it’s real. No doubt those ill-informed men and women on the street have relied on the preponderance of fear-mongering media reports. (That’s the problem with…

Argumentum ad verecundiam is a problem precisely because (among other things) reporters too often fail to be custodians of fact and/or fail to report other discernible facts regarding what motives drive the source. And they aren’t very good about explaining their own motives either. I would go so far as to say that a whole bunch of journalists can’t explain their own motives in news gathering/making/producing. As evidence, I offer the odd and vague definitions of news that pervade the j-textbooks and the professional-war-story books by journalists.

re: “reporting terrorism or presenting “experts” without context of their background”

I agree.

This idea of news becoming a conversation instead of a lecture is important here. What effects will/should that metaphor change have on the rhetoric of journalism. At least one change should be a greater need to make the subtext transparent, or, add the meta-narrative specifically.

This is also true when reporting terrorism or presenting “experts” without context of their background. The difference being that the reporter’s active role in “making” the news is more obvious to the reader when the reporter hides the identity of the source.

I also would like to tie this (superb) essay to a comment at PressThink …

Steve Lovelady:

You don’t have to be a carpenter to determine if the house is shoddily built or well put-together.
And you don’t have to be a colonel to determine if the the strategy worked, if the battle was won or lost, and at what cost, or if the colonel himself was sandbagged by shifting directives from above.

This resides at the core of journalism’s religion and is the source of much criticism by readers.

I agree that specialized expertise is not needed to report who, what, when and where … but I do not agree that it is unnecessary when reporting why or how.

The result is a structural fallacy masked by journalism’s belief system.

This also exposes the conflict in journalism’s belief system between story-telling without reportorial authority, relying on a cottage industry of outside “experts”, and reportorial suspicion of experts/authority.