The Truth About Journalism

There is a Great Truth in Matti Friedman’s Atlantic article, “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel”, that goes far beyond Israel and which I wish more people understood:

To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is important first to understand that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

and

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel, similarly adrift in a new country, undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, and everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

More times than should make us comfortable reporters write the story that’s easy to write rather than the true story.

There are all sorts of different ways in which a story may be easy. Some stories are physically dangerous. We’ll never get good reporting on tyrants in power or ISIS. That’s too difficult and dangerous.

Nobody every got fired for writing the story their editors wanted written. That’s another way in which a story may be easy. The story may support the prevailing wisdom or not provoke criticism of the reporter on the grounds of racism, not caring about the climate, or being insensitive to the plight of the poor. And, finally, a story may be easy because it is reassuring—it supports the ideas and prejudices with which the reporter was equipt when he started reporting it.

Keep all that in mind when you read the coverage of the White House or Ferguson or Ukraine. If what you’ve read are the easy stories what are the hard ones?

Update

Bret Stephens touches on the same subject:

Mr. Bradley’s sharpest observation is that the journalistic fabrications that most often make it into print are those that “play into existing biases.” In the UVA case, he notes, those include biases against fraternities, men and the South—exactly the kinds of biases that led to the fabricated rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players in 2006.

Much the same could be said about other recent media sensations, Ferguson most of all. The killing of Michael Brown was many things, but for the media it was largely an opportunity to confirm an existing narrative, this one about trigger-happy cops, institutionalized racial disparities and the fate of young black men caught in between.

That narrative, also conforming to pre-existing biases, overwhelmed what ought to have been the only question worth answering: Was Darren Wilson justified in shooting Brown? If the media had stuck to answering that, the damage inflicted on the rest of Ferguson—not to mention all the squalid racial hucksterism that went with it—could have been avoided.