David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. “Apocalypse Now,” starring the New York Times
We discussed last week that New York Times article intimating that John McCain may or may not have been dallying with a lobbyist; we’re not sure but maybe and if so – well, hey, right?
Naturally, the piece came under intense fire from many sides – readers, both pro- and not-so-pro-McCain, the liberal-media-hating-right, even other journalists and, yesterday, from the Times’ own public editor, Clark Hoyt. He wrote:
“But in the absence of a smoking gun, I asked (Times editor) Keller why he decided to run what he had.
“‘If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,’ he replied. ‘But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.’
“I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.”
It’s hard to believe that a paper like the New York Times did not learn anything from CBS News, who got thumped and hard thanks to its story about George W. Bush’s time (or lack thereof) in the National Guard. Locating a single mistake in Dan Rather’s story, a falsified document, Bush’s champions managed to discredit the whole shebang, even though there seemed to be compelling evidence that the President didn’t actually serve his full tour of duty.
And so, with the Times and McCain: Though the bigger issue is whether the Republican Presidential candidate’s relationship with lobbyists compromises his reputation as a reformer, dropping that titillating bombshell in the second paragraph utterly clouded the point they were trying to make.
The offending line in the Times story read, “Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself…” The same point could have been made, and less salaciously, had the line simply been rewritten: “Concerned by perceptions that might arise over the lobbyist’s ubiquity around McCain during his campaign…”
As Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz points out, “The hardest thing in journalism is to spend months on a story and then admit you haven't got the goods. There is, instead, a tendency to dress the thing up with fine writing and larger themes in an effort to demonstrate that it's not just about sex, when of course that is the only element most readers -- and the rest of the media -- will focus on.”
Not like the media needs any more lousy news or bad press at this point. Newspapers are hurting, in case you hadn’t heard, and investigative journalism is one of the costliest things a paper can invest in: Assigning reporters to weeks and even months on one story isn’t exactly cost-effective, particularly when an expose on corporate malfeasance may not even get as many hits on your website as photos from Oscar’s red carpet. So if your best efforts blow up in your face, well, your trigger finger’s going to get a little hesitant (has CBS News broken a big story since its bloody nose from the National Guard story?). And if people in positions of power understand that there are fewer watchdogs out there, they’re going to make people like Enron’s Ken Lay and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski and Blackwater’s Erik Prince look like pillars of ethical resoluteness.
And then, of course, we’re all doomed. But you knew that already.