Rhetorica started out as a press-politics journal following, critiquing, and explaining the rhetoric of political reporting and politics. I gave up because I came to see my efforts as wasted on a system that cannot change. Whomping your head against a brick wall hurts.
Yesterday, while gathering some resources from the old Rhetorica on Archive.org, I stumbled across this post — my last press-politics post (although I continued to post about other topics of rhetoric and documentary filmmaking). Re-reading it struck me regarding how little has changed and how futile was my purpose.
As a final nail in the press-politics coffin, here is one of my my last press-politics posts from September 2015:
I laughed out loud when I reached the conclusion of Paul Krugman’s column today in The New York Times:
I began writing for The Times during the 2000 election campaign, and what I remember above all from that campaign is the way the conventions of “evenhanded” reporting allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to make clearly false assertions — about his tax cuts, about Social Security — without paying any price. As I wrote at the time, if Mr. Bush said the earth was flat, we’d see headlines along the lines of “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” Now we have presidential candidates who make Mr. Bush look like Abe Lincoln. But who will tell the people?
Just, wow.
You see, there are many people (e.g. bloggers, academics, academic bloggers, rational media critics of all sorts) who have been pointing this out for nearly two decades (confining my time frame to the blogging era).
Two decades.
If you read Rhetorica regularly back in the day, you know who I’m talking about. Some of them remain linked on my sidebar.
No one in journalism listens. In fact, no one in journalism listens to the advice given in one of the profession’s revered texts: Kovach and Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism. Sometimes I think journalists like this book simply because the words sound good. I mean literally “sound.”
We — a large number of cogent critics — have been pointing out (for nearly two decades) that the business-as-usual, view-from-nowhere, inside-baseball, poll-driven, personality-driven way of covering politics is, in fact, not covering politics in the sense of meeting journalism’s primary purpose: To give people the information they need to be free and self-governing.
That has to mean, among other things, operating as custodians of fact with a discipline of verification, i.e. reporting not stenography.
Quite frankly there is very little political journalism in the United States of America.
A modest proposal: Actually giving the people the information they need to be free and self-governing might stop journalism’s slide into entertainment and, finally, into oblivion. That, obviously, means journalists have to understand what that kind of information is. So far they show no aptitude.
Senator Numbnutz says X. Senator Blowhard says Y. The polls say Z. And the pundits blather about what it “means.” The current practice of stenography stops there and lets the citizen figure it out. We are reminded daily how well that works.
