MediaFlect

I’m an inveterate listener to On the Media, and often find the most interesting parts of the material there to be things said almost in passing. A couple of weeks ago, talking about coverage of hurricane Katrina, weather historian David Laskin told host Bob Garfield that “it’s very difficult to remain fresh and reactive when you’re a reporter of whatever sort. I mean, I think you’re always playing to expectations.”

He has, in a nutshell, talked about a true dilemma of reporting from the field, and reporting in today’s media environment. As a foreign correspondent, I sometimes found myself subject to editors’ expectations of how to frame what I was seeing and hearing, and if I didn’t write to those expectations, the stories could be rejiggered, or rewritten, to conform.

In today’s echo-chamber media environment, that sense of pre-formed expectations — essentially going in with preconceptions, or letting preconceptions shape conceiving, writing and producing of a story — can be especially severe. If, for example, you write to a liberal audience of postitive conservative actions, or vice-versa, you can be drummed out of the room. If you asked conservatives after President Bush had named Harriet E. Miers as a Supreme Court justice whether the president might know what he was doing, you could have been drummed out of the room.

It’s tough — and not just in a hurricane — to be reactive to the storms, and not let the expectations form one’s ideas.

So, we’ve got a drama starting tonight on FX about a war that, for the first time, is on WHILE the war is happening. M*A*S*H really being about Vietnam aside, is it really that surprising? How soon until some solders get a little stipend to give us a “helmet cam” view of what they’re doing and up to? How commercial could it get? Maybe helmet cams could be a way to defray some of the cost for taxpayers?

I hope you’re wondering whether I’m kidding.

With U.S. senators about to demand that the makers of Grand Theft Auto close a backdoor that allows characters to have sex, maybe sales of the game will spike as folks rush to get it before the door is closed. (Brilliant marketing that. And any sexual innuendo in previous sentences is unintentional.)

My friend Daniel Gross points out the absurdity of letting our young folk blow characters up, but G-D forbid they be allowed to have them make love. Is it cuz Danyell and I are both children of the 60s and 70s? I think we’re both just rational.

Now a journalist fired for fabricating has written a book about his ordeal when someone else — a murderer — scammed him by using his name soon after he was fired for the fabrication.
Michael Finkel tells On the Media he thought at the time he was serving a higher truth, but what this gets me to thinking is: With all the Jack Kelly, Michael Finkel, Steven Glass, Jason Blair, Janet Cooke and other fabricating journalists, how many are there that have gotten away with it? How many of us have knowingly made up a source, or put something in we didn’t know to be provably accurate?

I never did, to my knowledge, make anything up, but there were times when I felt an edit squeezed a story into a preconceived notion, a quote was used to fit that notion even as the nuance of the situation might have been different or more muddy. I also know that, when translating from other languages — something I’ve done from time to time as a journalist (one small example here) — there can be an array of accurate word choices. You’re not making anything up. You’re capturing the truth of a situation. But you also have some latitude.