Kathleen Parker has raised a ruckus once again, calling out critics of the media for their failure to grasp the importance of actual journalism and a functional fourth estate.
There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.
But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic.
Constant criticism of the “elite media” is comical to most reporters, whose paychecks wouldn’t cover Limbaugh’s annual dry cleaning bill. The truly elite media are the people most Americans have never heard of — the daily-grind reporters who turn out for city council and school board meetings. Or the investigative teams who chase leads for months to expose abuse or corruption.
This, of course, has caused the usual – list – of – suspects to rise up on their hind legs and howl in protest, claiming that Parker is no longer a “real conservative” or that she has sold out to the corrupt and dying dead tree media machine. The truly delicious bit of irony in posts by her detractors is that they all share one trait: they are linking to an article in a newspaper.
There are two issues with this argument I’d like to cover. First, no matter what value or quality you may feel remains (or is lacking) in the professional journalists who work in and operate the newspapers, the fact is that bloggers would be leading a pretty lonely life without them. I decided to take a very brief look at the latest entries from two large volume blogs, one from the Left and one from the Right, and see where they are getting their “news” to comment on.
Over at Daily KOS, we find the following stories:
Pelosi: Congress to try to recover AIG funds (Wall Street Journal)
This Week in Congress (actually links to a congressional web site)
Obama: Relief For Small Business Owners (Yahoo News via their AP feed)
Abbreviated Pundit Round-up (New York Times)
Over on the Right side of the aisle we find Hot Air:
Is Mullah Omar a Taliban moderate? (The Hindustan Times?)
Even Obama supporters worried about White House incompetence (New York Daily News)
Kundra’s Record? (after one jump, Yahoo Finance news from their AP feed)
Ron Silver RIP (New York Post)
Video: Cheney on Rush v. Obama debate (CNN via YouTube)
The bottom line is, if the linked pundits complaining about Parker didn’t have newspapers to use as sources, what pray tell would all of them be writing about? Would you sit on your couches and watch television and just write about what you saw there, rather than what you read in some newspaper’s online feed? If the newspapers go out of business, the vast majority of bloggers dry up and blow away the following day.
The second issue is the one that really sticks in my craw, and it is the insulting and vain assumption that most of us are unable to recognize the bias or slant in newspaper reporting and digest the news on our own. Is it the job of these drive-by caped crusaders to point out this bias and explain the real story to us because the rest of the nation is too addled and dim witted to figure it out for themselves? There is also an assumption by most of these sites that the media bias in papers and television is almost entirely liberal. Bias there is, but you can find it all across the spectrum. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times… all certainly suffer from a left wing slant. They are more than made up for, though, by the New York Post, The Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. MSNBC is more than compensated for by the Fox News Channel. Oddly, I never hear any of these self-styled pundits complaining about the latter category of sources. I suppose the Right leaning ones aren’t biased, right? They’re just correct? It is to laugh.
Criticize the newspapers all you like, but most of the time you’re carping about a problem that you help to perpetuate every single day. And if you mange to hound them out of existence, you’ll be back serving slurpees at the convenience store in short order. Good luck with that.