Mining Misinformation

"Sending Rita Cosby and Anderson Cooper to the site of the mineshaft tragedy, where cameras can record family members' every painful reaction, is in the great ghoulish tradition of journalism.

"It's routinely justified as fabulous 'storytelling'; these are said to be 'human interest dramas' that magnetize audiences. But other than pandering to our ratings-generating appetite for melodrama, is there any legitimate justification for this kind of saturation coverage? Sure, 13 accidental deaths are important, but there are easily as many American deaths, every day, that never get reported, let alone accorded the full anchor-compassion treatment. It can't be the quantity of lives lost, or the virtue of the lives led; church vans tumble into ravines and scores of our countrymen are killed, but their deaths rate only a mention by the wire services. Why? It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's because the mineshaft story is good television . We can watch it unfold. It's a voyeur's paradise. The suspense, the anguish, the knife-edge of hope and despair: it's grief porn, dressed up as breaking news.

"On the other hand, the Abramoff plea deal may, in retrospect, turn out to be the pivot-point of GOP dominance of national politics. This would be a great day for television journalism to connect the dots: DeLay's K Street project, Grover Norquist's drown-the-baby project, the Christian Coalition's culture wars project, the neo-cons' above-the-law project. . . . The terrific and terrible story to be telling today is how the American people have been played for fools by the fabricators of family values rhetoric. And instead, what the networks are serving up to us is soap opera. Are the pictures from West Virginia really that much more compelling than the shots of Washington hogs at the trough? Will audiences really turn away from the story of how their government was stolen from them because it's too complicated to understand?

"It wouldn't be shocking to learn that Republicans in Washington were privately, shamefully grateful that the media beast today has something to feed on other than their corruption. The sad truth is that there will always be a runaway bride or baby-down-a-well more worth covering than the innards of Congress, or the vulnerability of voting machines, or (fill in the blank). That's because the geniuses who decide what's worth covering get to call what they do 'news judgment' instead of what it really is, which is marketing."

Grief porn seems a little strong. After all, this wasn't months of live shots from Aruba about Natalee Holloway, but coverage of a tragedy that unfolded within hours.

Look who's also belatedly getting into the act:

"Democrats called yesterday for congressional hearings into mine safety and the Bush administration's enforcement of mine regulations, after the explosion and collapse in West Virginia that left 12 miners dead," says the Boston Globe.

Twas a busy day for media reporters yesterday. Here's my report, after a visit to Discovery Networks, on Ted Koppel's new job, and one on the Baltimore Sun's ouster of veteran columnist Michael Olesker for unattributed borrowing.

On the Abramoff front, National Review's Byron York examines the GOP's damage control:

"Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to 'get ahead of' the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership 'decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session,' and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online.

"Santorum's efforts will be apart from the work of Senator John McCain, who has already introduced a proposal for lobbying reform. That proposal, McCain said in mid-December, 'provides for faster reporting and greater public access to reports filed by lobbyists and their employers under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It requires greater disclosure of the activities of lobbyists, including for the first time, grassroots lobbying firms. The bill also requires greater disclosure from both lobbyists, and Members and employees of Congress, about travel that is arranged or financed by a lobbyist or his client.'"

The New Republic's Jason Zengerle isn't surprised by Newt's latest:

"So Newt Gingrich is calling for Tom DeLay's scalp. The Washington Post reports. . . .

"How psyched is Newt? Remember, DeLay was part of the failed coup that tried to remove Newt as Speaker in 1997--and after he was busted, he wasn't exactly Mr. Contrition. 'The problems that created this are still there,' DeLay said. 'The next time this happens it will be even worse.' Don't think Newt has forgotten."

Kit Seelye of the NYT had an interesting piece the other day on how media targets play defense:

"Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts - taping interviews, gathering e-mail exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations - and publish them on their own Web sites. This new weapon in the media wars is shifting the center of gravity in the way that news is gathered and presented, and it carries implications for the future of journalism.

"Just ask 'Nightline,' the ABC News program, which broadcast a segment in August about intelligent design that the Discovery Institute, a conservative clearinghouse for proponents of intelligent design, did not like very much. The next day, the institute published on its Web site the entire transcript of the nearly hour-long interview that 'Nightline' had conducted a few days earlier with one of the institute's leaders, not just the brief quotes that had appeared on television.

"The institute did not accuse 'Nightline' of any errors. Rather, it urged readers to examine the unedited interview because, it said, the transcript would reveal 'the predictable tone of some of the questions" by the staff of 'Nightline.'"

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