Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Death of Journalism

I was just thinking about that Washington Post article I blogged about earlier this afternoon — the one about Governor Kaine’s new order prohibiting gun sales to people who’ve been involuntarily committed to inpatient or outpatient mental health treatment centers.

And I was thinking about the questions I asked — about whether this will include drug and alcohol rehab centers. Since far more people are involuntarily sent for treatment of drug and alcohol problems than for treatment of other mental illnesses, Kaine’s order has the potential to affect a whole bunch of people, no? All those hunters who like to have a few beers after work and who have maybe been required to undergo alcoholism treatment after their 3rd or 4th DUI, for example. What’s going to happen the next time they head in to Bubba’s Gun Shack to buy a new deer rifle?

And then I thought: Why didn’t the Washington Post’s reporter ask about those things? What kind of “reporting” is it when the reporter doesn’t even mention the potential an order has to affect a great number of people’s lives? Did this not even occur to him?

And that led me to think about a really fine episode of Bill Moyers Journal that recently aired on PBS. It was called “Buying The War” and it was largely about how, during the lead-up to the Iraq war, “big media” pretty much just printed whatever the government told them. A notable exception was reporters at the Knight-Ridder newspapers that largely served the middle of the country. Knight-Ridder was sold last year and has since, to a degree, been dismantled.

That’s probably just a coincidence, though.

At any rate, the idea behind Moyers show was the same thing Al Franken (in his great book The Truth (with jokes)) describes Tom Oliphant complaining about:

You know, we’ve put a million stories in our wastebaskets over the years, because they don’t…check…out. Today, we publish, or we broadcast, the mere fact of the accusation, regardless of whether it’s filled with helium. That’s what’s changed in our business. We serve as transmission belts for this stuff without ever inquiring into its accuracy.

Certainly, a reporter failing to ask what the governor’s new order will mean for people ordered by the courts into drug or alcohol treatment is of an entirely different magnitude than a reporter failing to ask where all those “weapons of mass destruction” went, but I think it’s still a symptom of a very lazy kind of reporting.

Anyone can report the mere facts. It takes a journalist to tell us what the facts mean.