Watching Fox News and CNBC lately has been painful for Beezer, who was trained initially as a professional print journalist.
Start with CNBC, which bills itself as the world’s premier news channel for business. While the channel does spend much of its time reporting actual business events, both in the US and around the world, the same people who are reporting spend a lot of time commentating. It’s as if the journalist who pens a front page news story, also writes the day’s official editorial.
There’s an old adage in journalism. The editorial writer has an audience of one: The Publisher. In professional journalism the two writers are kept separate and the need for such a distinction is understood.
When the reporter melds with the editorial writer, you get bad journalism. Which means you get poor, honest reporting of the facts. Which means, inevitably, the audience is fed inaccurate, or at minimum, unbalanced, reporting of what’s truly going on. Editorial writers will subsume facts that don’t support the ideas of the publisher, and highlight those that do. Journalist are supposed to draw attention to facts that may be inconvenient to one or both sides of a story.
Journalists do have opinions, of course. But professional journalists take a sort of grim pleasure in playing the devil’s advocate, even if they agree strongly with the side of a debate that they discomfit with their questions. They must do this, because not doing so invariably leaves important information in the dark, unseen by the viewer.
Journalists, in a sense, are the world’s referees. They are supposed to be as unbiased as possible, trained in the art of writing clearly, and knowledgeable enough to challenge questionable assertions by one side or another debating an issue.
Exhibit one for CNBC would be Larry Kudlow. An economist with experience on Wall Street, Kudlow is much more commentator than journalist. The facade of honest reporting crumbles almost immediately when Kudlow is at the desk. Kudlow commented today that “Republicans were put on the earth to cut taxes.” Which is fine to say if you preface the remark by noting that you are writing an editorial. But CNBC exists to no small degree based upon the audience’s assumption they’re getting an honest recitation of the facts. Of course CNBC may exist to get Kudlow’s particularly misogynist form of economics into the mainstream of American thought.
Guests on Kudlow’s show who might knowledgeably present a different opinion appear as foils only. If they start to make sense (and most do because they are professionals in the area to which they speak), Kudlow waste no time interrupting them, and if that isn’t immediately successful in shutting them up, he literally hollers over them so the audience can barely tell what’s being said by anyone, including Kudlow. As journalism, as a tool for honest reporting, Kudlow’s show is a total waste of time. As a platform for espousing Ayn Randian, conservative economics, it is quite good.
To make matters worse, every segment of the CNBC channel is dominated almost exclusively by Kudlow clones. They don’t have his chutzpah and are more polite, but given the opportunity they will trot out what amounts to the Kudlow editorial line (the opinion of the publishers).
Experience tells Beezer to be wary of the reportage on CNBC. People so openly ideological are bound to latch onto facts that might satisfy their preconceptions, but will be relatively unimportant in helping inform the audience about what’s truly going on out in the business world.
Fox news suffers from some of the same ills. This news channel started out asserting it was going to be “fair and balanced.” The implication, one assumes, was that the other news channels weren’t fair and balanced.
That’s possible. TV journalism has always been held in low esteem by print journalists. Most TV stories are simply rehashes of a print journalist story. An “exclusive” for TV is getting to a newsmaker first “live” where the newsmaker repeats what he’s already said, normally many times, in print.
Fox seems to be constructed, instead of fair and balanced, as a counterbalance to its perception of the liberal bias at the other news channels. Instead of truly being “fair and balanced,” Fox is the conservative counterweight to other news channels. Here again, honest reporting is tossed in the dustbin as a result.
For CNBC and Fox, both quite conservative news organizations, it’s partisan debate in lieu of accurate and unbiased reporting. Sort of like the US Senate, which is partisan debate instead of sensible leadership and legislation. Under these circumstances the first victim will be honest fact exposition and truthful news journalism. The second victim will be the audience, who will inevitably end up being ill informed.
Contrast these two conservative channels with MSNBC. From an editorial perspective, MSNBC is liberal compared to Fox or CNBC. Other than that bias distinction, there is another important one where MSNBC separates itself from the other two: MSNBC still maintains the distinction between its journalists and its commentators. It may be biased, but it clearly identifies it’s biases as coming from “commentators” not journalists.
If you want real business reporting you’ll have to get Bloomburg, which not only does a more thorough job than does CNBC, but also has an extensive reporting organization with desks around the world. It’s quite a delight early in the morning to hear journalists from around the world explaining their particular geographic area. And nary a Kudlow, or Kudlow wannabee in sight. Refreshing, and more informative.
As for Fox news, I have no clue where one can go for respite. If Fox is correct and everyone else is liberally biased, then there is no alternative to get truly balanced reporting. Maybe you can watch Public television and Fox to get a balanced mix. Like mixing oil and vinegar, with a few spices, to get a tasty salad dressing.
I would like to point out one TV show, Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show ”GPS” on Sunday, as a notable exception to this sorry state of affairs. As I’ve written previously, Zakaria is refreshingly well informed, and fearless in his questioning–no matter one’s bias. If you want to see how a good journalist works, watch Zakaria.
It would be nice to get a non business focused news channel equivalent to Bloomburg on business. But such is not the case, at least it seems to this writer.
The real antidote is to read. Despite the sorry state of financial affairs in the print news business, there’s still terrific journalism being written. The New York Times is the unquestioned leader in this field. The New York Times, a generalist newspaper, has become so good at business analysis that many believe it to be superior to that of the Wall Street Journal. And there’s numerous general and specialist magazines that regularly churn out great news and analysis.
It’s a lot of work, and costs some money. But reading may be the only alternative available to the sorry state of reporting by big media, particularly television.