For Journos, It's Miller Time, Ad Infinitum

I count Jim Romenesko's MediaNews among my regular reads, but yesterday his blog-avant-la-lettre was positively surreal. I'm writing this close to midnight on Thursday, and MediaNews still doesn't have a single post on the attacks in London, which occurred around four o'clock Eastern time Thursday morning.

Instead, Romenesko's writings are pretty much all about the Times' Judith Miller going to jail for refusing to reveal her source to the grand jury.

I'm sorry for Miller, but her ordeal is petty, even laughable stuff next to the brutal violence perpetrated by terrorist evildoers in London, which also happens to be one of the biggest news stories of the year. MediaNews has the unofficial imprimatur of many U.S. journalists, who consider it an indispensable site (as do I). So it's worth contemplating if, collectively, we're really that egocentric and insular (my take on that is an embarrassed 'yes'). Come on: Terrorist pond scum unleashes death and destruction on innocent civilians in one of the West's great capitals, and all we journalists talk about is the injustice supposedly done to one overprivileged, overrated reporter in a wholly unrelated case?

I'm afraid this extreme navel-gazing and self-absorption is a big reason why we've largely lost the respect of ordinary people everywhere.

Comments

[CM]

I'm not sorry about Miller. With her conflicts of interest she might prefer (spinnably) righteous jail time to answering questions for Fitzgerald. The thought of what happens if he decides to become a "runaway" prosecutor has to scare the hell out of her.

I got here via this article and was amused. There is another reason the press hemmoraging credibility. The segmentation of media markets to conform more closely to readers' selection biases is an intentional phenomenon.

Apropos of how I found you, examine FrontPage magazine for a minute (or better yet a couple weeks). They are fine with jettisoning reporters who cross the line, it really is part of the business plan. They'll jump on anything if it fits within their readers' selection bias, as they did the following story. As I listened to Scott Wheeler hyping this October Surprise of Mylroie quackery and INC faked documents on talk radio, he made the statement that he wouldn't work in this town (Washington) again if he was proven wrong. That statement, at least, seemed and seems to be accurate. However it is a simple matter to duplicate him. Simply get Christopher S. Carson, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute ... an attorney in private practice in Milwaukee to pick up the torch and carry on. Chris, in this article , grabs the torch and attempts to rally the readers. An excerpt:

I spoke at length with the reporter who broke the story, Scott Wheeler. I asked him about his authentication efforts with known Iraq experts. “I can’t find anyone who won’t authenticate them,” he said, with an air of regret. Retired CIA official Bruce Tefft described the documents to Wheeler as “accurate.” I personally asked former Clinton campaign advisor and Iraq expert Dr. Laurie Mylroie what her confidence level in the (related) terrorist-ties documents was. She emailed back “One hundred percent.” Dr. Walid Phares, a renowned Lebanese-American expert on the Middle East, told Wheeler that the documents were a “watershed” and “big” in their implications. Scott Wheeler got a high-level former UNSCOM inspector to authenticate the documents, too. The UNSCOM veteran told Wheeler that he had “zeroed in on the signatures on the documents and ‘the names of some of the people who sign off on these things….[The Iraqis] were meticulous record keepers.’"

The press has little desire to wade into the spats between factions in our intelligence community and try to discern objective truths. This is understandable, if not particularly commendable. But alternate realities tailored to our filtering biases do not inspire confidence in a free press with goals that exceed media-as-entertainment. It is also not aided by political attempts to co-opt, purchase or create reporters for use as propaganda implements.

Are these efforts merely speeding the inevitable decline of "news" media? Perhaps. Even if it were inevitable, I could scarcely approve of efforts to hasten the death of informed democracy.