Exile from Rochesterturning and
Evan Dawson have both posted another installment of the Blogversation. Evan's post is a good round-up of what's been said recently, and he even admits that sometimes, some reporters are lazy. (Gasp! Where are my smelling salts, I feel a faint coming on!) Exile notes that bloggers often can tell hard truths because they're outsiders, and a lot of the press corps (in Washington at least) have become insiders.
I think we're about ready to wrap up, though I hope we do it again. In closing, if you think that I'm tough on the D&C and local media, let me direct you to a
recent interview with the creator of
the Wire, David Simon. He's a former journalist at the Baltimore Sun, and he focused the final season of his show on his old paper. However, he did it in a clever way, because the real point of the season was everything that the paper missed:
The main theme is that [...] it's a newspaper that is so
eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong
things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it
singularly misses every single story in the season.
[...]
This was a story about a newspaper that now -- on some fundamental
basis -- fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what --
between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on
impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the
economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting
loss of revenue and staff, there are a fuck of a lot of newspapers that
are failing to cover their cities substantively.
I hope our real media in Rochester is in better shape than the fictional media in the Wire. Thanks to Evan, Exile and GOP for an interesting conversation.
Comments
It's been an interesting conversation, Rotten. Your links in this post are gold; I have to admit that I'm not a Wire watcher, though many tell me I should be.
Bottom line, and I'll say a bit more in my concluding post, is that reporters can be worried about the appearance of bias when it's often easier to just report facts. I've been there. It's a growing process. But I can say it's easier to be free with facts when you're confident in your study and you don't feel scared for your job. That's a feeling that is empowering. At WHAM, I'm fortunate to have it, though I don't take it for granted.
Thanks, Evan, I've enjoyed this, too.
If you do watch the Wire, one of the things you'll probably enjoy is
figuring out the Rochester equivalent of the characters in Baltimore
City Hall, as well as local and state Government.
Reporting facts is harder than re-writing press releases, but I think you've got it pegged when you say that you're standing on a more solid footing with the facts.