Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines popped out of his Pocono Mountains retirement this week to take on Fox News in the editorial section of the Washington Post.

His point was that newspaper reporters should take on Fox News for the biased way the cable network has covered the health care reform debate.

“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines asks.

Everything he says is true. It’s just that it comes a bit late in the game, long after Raines himself was in a position to do something about the kind of bad, corporate journalism that was already developing while he was still in it full time.

Some of us on the Web Press have been calling Fox biased and wrong for years.

Where was Raines in this fight when he ran the New York Times as executive editor in 2002 and 2003?

Fox was already on the scene promoting the likes of our idiot former president George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, justified by bad, false intel.

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly countered Raines in his Web column this week. While I can’t stand O’Reilly, and he’s certainly no journalist and doesn’t even bother to call himself one — he’s an “entertainment personality” — he has a point here.

“You may remember The New York Times ran a series of articles saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was dodging U.N. inspectors. Largely because of that reportage, the WMD scenario that President Bush used to invade Iraq was accepted by the mainstream media,” O’Reilly writes. “I mean, if the liberal Times was saying it…”

Roger Ailes and Fox News only misappropriated “fair and balanced” and made a corporate news slogan out of it.

Scientifically objective journalism was already on the ropes. Corporate chain newspapers were headed in this direction starting in the 1980s when I first got into the newspaper business.

The New York Times was already practicing a form of this too, and it has gotten way worse since Raines was run off from the paper in 2003.

Where was Raines on the question of biased, corporate, Republican media when he ran the Times‘ editorial section from 1993 to 2001?

Raines and the Times‘ editorial page is remembered for vicious attacks on Democrat Bill Clinton in the name of “fairness and balance” for the scandal that turned into nothing, Whitewater, and for sensational criticism of Clinton’s sexual liaisons in the White House with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Excuse me for being the most astute student of American journalism and the history of the New York Times from Alabama (and maybe in the country), but it is obvious the Sulzberger family, with a controlling interest in the stock then, should have taken the Times out of the stock market six to eight years ago — if they really expected to retain the title as the national newspaper of record.

It is not good enough to carry that title today, in spite of the TV commercials claiming they have the best reporters in the business. Clearly they don’t.

In fact, from my observations of late — after reading the paper for 15 years in print and another 15 on the Web, after studying the academic literature on it for 10 years, and after working for the paper for three years from 2002-2005 — the management’s idea of saving the paper is to move it to the right and coddle up to corporate America. That’s where the money is, after all.

They tried charging for the Web version of the Times in 2005-06. As a result, they lost readers, online advertisers and the influence of their columnists. So they gave it up in ’07. But the word is they will try again next year.

What will their journalism look like then, when few will be reading it?

For a very recent local example of what I’m talking about, notice how this new Times correspondent handled the coverage of the controversial Oxford Mound in Alabama.

This is NOT an investigative piece of journalism. It is a news feature that is so fair and balanced it concludes with and sides with the corrupt mayor of Oxford, who says the Native American ceremonial mound will (by god) be bulldozed down, the dirt will be used for a Sam’s Club store, and something will be built there, maybe a restaurant.

That’s not how I would have handled the story for the Times. I am in the process of investigating the mayor and the story for myself.

Now, no one remembers this, but there was a memorable moment when Raines was the top editor at the Times when he was interviewed on PBS by Charlie Rose, before the Jayson Blair scandal broke. He said basically that if somebody wanted to create an institution like the Times now it would be impossible in today’s corporate culture. That’s paraphrasing, but what I said is actually more accurate than what he said.

Is it possible to create a news organization to do what the Times did for American democracy in the 20th century, like publishing the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam?

I don’t know for sure. I think it is.

But it won’t be published with ink on paper and delivered by truck. It will be published on the Web Press and written by people dedicated to creating a new, honest form of journalism — using a definition of objectivity based on science, not the economics of an owner/publisher and his cronies in business who advertise.

The key question facing Web publishers today is how to fund this new, new journalism.

Some, like Truthout.org, will use a non-profit model. That saved Harper’s magazine back in the 1980s and keeps it publishing today.

Others will opt for a Web advertising approach, like the Huffington Post and LocustFork.Net.

While the Washington Post is doing some things better than the Washington bureau of the New York Times, and its free Website is better in some ways than the Times‘, it’s also pretty clear that the Washington Post has its own corporate journalism problems, especially on the editorial page.

If Mr. Raines wants to help us develop this new approach, I would welcome an e-mail message or a phone call to discuss it. Anything else is just words on paper published with ink, for the very same old purpose of seeing one’s name in print.

That’s not what American journalism is about. That is not what gives us special rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Our job is to watchdog government, promote democracy — and yes, to educate citizens so they can form a more perfect union.

As I have now written a thousand times at least, democracy and capitalism are NOT one and the same.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Tags: Fox News and Journalism Objectivity, Howell Raines

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Connecting the Dots, Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.