Obligatory Reading of the Day

Here is a great long essay on the current state of journalism, with Bob Woodward as an example of what is wrong, and Bill Moyers as an example of what is good. Here are some choice excerpts, but you have to go and read the whole thing - it is brilliant:

Fatal balance: An Ice Age falls on the newsroom by Hal Crowther.

I have a serious problem with Bob Woodward. As venal conglomerates, an indifferent public, a septic culture and a hostile government rapidly drain the lifeblood from a free press that was once the envy of the world's democracies, it's no time, I know, for journalists to turn cannibal. But this legendary reporter, who took a crooked president's scalp and was once the torchbearer for every journalist who hoped to make a difference, has become, instead, a symbol of everything that's desperately wrong with the media culture in Washington, D.C.
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This nonsense is the final insult. After 40 years in that same business, I can't recall a time when it was easier to form opinions with confidence. Without benefit of Woodward's high-level sources, I've yet to make a prediction about the Iraq war that proved inaccurate, or offered a criticism of this administration that proved to be unfair--though many were too timid or too generous. In spite of its obsessive secrecy, the Bush White House is as obvious as Donald Trump's combover. Liars, bullies and bunglers, these conspirators are the authors and owners of the single worst mistake an American government has ever made. Ever. It takes no insight whatsoever to see through them, yet considerable courage to oppose them. They've created a national crisis where every credible voice can make a difference, where experienced journalists who close their eyes or mask their responses are something worse than useless.
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"I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news," Silverstein wrote. "The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn off our brains and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. 'Balanced' is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers." In a column headed "A False Balance," Paul Krugman of The New York Times mocked "journalists who believe they must be 'balanced' even when the truth isn't balanced."
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There are two critically important messages in Clooney's film. The explicit one, expressed by David Strathairn as Murrow, is that certain events--in this case the Communist witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy--push a responsible journalist beyond the convention of reportorial "balance." There are times when it's a question of right and wrong, not Right and Left, and a journalist's "objectivity" becomes a lame excuse for cowardice.
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The word "liberal" has been too ruthlessly overworked and misused to retain any stable meaning. The innocent creatures it once called to mind exist only on hermetically sealed college campuses and small magazines, a remnant slightly less influential than the Branch Davidians. In current usage, "liberal" seems to cover everyone who doubts that the United States of America can survive much more of George W. Bush. "The Hollywood liberal," that vain, superficial limousine lefty who pontificates on talk shows, has become such a weary cliche that every time I hear it I expect, in the next breath, to hear about "liberal bias in the media." Maybe entertainers like Clooney and Warren Beatty, not to mention Michael Moore, shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of dissent because self-serving celebrities like Hillary Clinton and Bob Woodward--and a timorous host of other politicians and journalists--lack the clarity and courage to take the lead.
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On the Richter scale of history, Watergate and the McCarthy hearings were mild tremors compared to this globe-rending, nation-grinding earthquake with its epicenter in Iraq.
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Impartial? Think instead of Tom Paine, of Martin Luther King Jr.--of Martin Luther. Moyers has at least 95 grievances to nail on the door of the White House; his hammer is raised and ready. He sees bad faith, arrogance, atrocious judgment and irreversible damage. The media and the Democrats, he believes, are nearly all intimidated or self-servingly supine. It breaks his heart to see Americans accept deceit and abuse from an empty suit like George Bush, whom every unposed photo seems to expose for what he is--an inept con artist, a furtive low-rent hustler about to be caught in the act.
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As Murrow demonstrated in 1954 and Moyers is telling us now, any journalism of substance has a moral, judgmental component. Two sides, sure--but rarely two sides of equal merit. And at the point when the side with the power begins to ignore the facts, the laws, and other people's rights--a point Bush passed years ago--anyone with special knowledge, access or influence is ethically obligated to tell the public what he knows and what he thinks. No matter who proclaims it, "objectivity" that ducks this responsibility is a contemptible sham.