Tony Blair Rips The Press

Scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light.

Hard to argue with that one. There's a reason why we've spent the last two years talking about Valerie Plame.

Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.

We see this all the time. The Katrina relief effort, for example, wasn't just another example of an inept federal government that can't even issue a new coin or manage its passport offices. It was a racist plot!

Third, the fear of missing out means that today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out.

Anna Nicole Smith, rest in peace.

Fourth, rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than, the news itself. So--for example--there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean....

Classic case in point was the brouhaha following John Kerry's remarks about slackers getting "stuck in Iraq." It was a dumb thing to say, but he was quick to apologize and explain that he didn't mean for it to come out the way it did. That should have been the end of the controversy, but instead we spent a week psychoanalyzing what his gaffe really meant.

In turn, this leads to a fifth point which is the confusion of news and commentary. Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism. But it is supposed to be separate. Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course.....

This is why we get ledes like the one in today's AP treatment of Bush's embryonic stem-cell veto, which appeared on the front page of the Daily News:

The public disagrees with him. Congress is against him. But when it comes to embryonic stem cell research, President George W. Bush isn't budging - although he's trying not to look inflexible.

Nope, no commentary here! But back to Blair ...

The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grey is almost entirely absent. "Some good, some bad"; "some things going right, some going wrong": These are concepts alien to much of today's reporting. It's a triumph or a disaster. A problem is "a crisis." A setback a policy "in tatters." A criticism, "a savage attack."

This is true not just of the media, but of our political climate at large. It is common practice to assume that one's politicial opponents aren't merely wrong, or prioritize shared values differently, but that they're evil, promoting an evil agenda purely for evil's sake. Indeed, they're not political opponents at all, but enemies.

Whether the media is a reflection of this problem or a contributing factor, or both, I don't know. But I can't imagine such a climate is hospitable to the long-term health of a democracy.