A Tale Of Investigative Journalism
Posted by J.P. Freire November 6 at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
From Riehl World View:
A few dots to connect here, but it looks like a journalist, John Cheeves of the Lexington-Herald-Leader, with current and previous ties to McClatchy and Knight-Ridder respectively, has been involved in one dubious scheme that at least suggested pay for play journalism. And given where his name also turns up, he might not be the most objective journalist to be leading a witch hunt against current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
...Cheeves turns up with a fellowship in the offices of a Liberal Democrat with some potentially pertinent terms and conditions. Must be nice having someone recently with the status of Congressional Staff penning hit pieces on the opposing party's leadership. Not that that's political or anything, right? Think maybe if he does a good job he'll end up back on the Hill with a nice paid position? It's a thought. And it certainly doesn't look much like objective journalism.
In a pragmatic sense, I disagree. I see the point, but frankly, not very many journalists are actually doing their jobs in investigating people in Washington.
The way most big stories explode is that somebody with an axe to grind approaches a reporter. The reporter gets as much information from the source and goes to verify it. Many times, however, verification doesn't go as far as it should. When the work gets hard, a good editor might kill the story. But an editor looking to have a big piece would run with it, peppering the article with words like "allegedly" and "calls were not immediately returned." It's a wager based on how likely the story is. One recent example comes to us from Howard Kurtz.
The Hill did a gotcha piece in which Hillary was accused of skipping a hearing she herself requested. But the basis for the accusation likely came from an opponent's office, not from an attentive reporter. So excited were they to get the information, they ran with it.
BR> But it turned out that Clinton was there -- and Inhofe's quotes were taken from a July press release -- prompting an embarrassing correction. "Any mistake is regrettable," says Hugo Gurdon, the Hill's editor, "but it's more painful when it negates the story entirely."
There are those times when people go out to get the real dirt -- like Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard and the blogosphere when dealing with the Baghdad Diarist. But those are, unfortunately, highly unusual circumstances.
Take this election, for example. Most coverage focuses on what strategies are being used by the campaigns. Those are neat, insider views into the sausage-making process. They are also easy, particularly when it comes to a deadline. You chat up the communications person in a campaign, ask them how they're going after others, and they'll tell you off the record. Then, you look at how it corresponds to polls, and say that it's either a shift or in keeping with what the electorate wants. And then, you get reaction from a political science professor, a member of the opposing campaign staff, or a voter if you want to get some local flair.
What does that article accomplish? Perhaps it can be argued that it's a preview of how the candidate would run an administration. It could be, but it could also be a way of distracting the press from covering the policy positions of candidates at length. I refuse to believe that readers wouldn't be interested in knowing where Obama stands on healthcare, what the criticisms of it are, and how it has played out in another country. Maybe some editors think that insider campaign strategy is sexier -- but that's only important to Beltway types, not to locals who want to know whether a candidate truly believes what they believe. Policy guides the country. Strategy just guides a job search.
So when I come across a line like this in the article I mentioned in the last post, imagine my frustration. Here it is again:
Voters in Iowa have been so concerned about her vote in connection with the Iraq war that she now declares, at the start of every speech, that she will end the war if she is elected, although she does not detail how.
FIND. OUT. Look for people who are her foreign policy advisers. Interview them. Interview people who have worked with them. Then, under a big heading, write, "Hillary Likely To Do X With Iraq Strategy." And once someone has done that story, somebody else go look at John Edwards's career in politics. Someone read all the critiques of Giuliani and re-report them.
In other words, get off the campaign bus if you're not going to do anything while you're on it. But if it takes having a conflict-of-interest, having a stake in a race, as Cheeves clearly does, it might not be ethical, but gosh, at least somebody's doing *something* with their paycheck.
|
