Greenwald writes: "I've long been rationally aware of how frequently
deceitful and inaccurate claims are passed off by the most respected media
outlets as fact, using highly authoritative tones. By itself, the Iraq War
should have taught all of us that."
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
A Crucial Realization About Journalism Is Learned by Being Its Subject
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
26 July 15
In the early 1990s, my father had an outlook-altering experience. A
life-long South Florida accountant for individuals and small businesses, he
had no involvement in politics and harbored a basic patriotic trust for
American institutions, including its media - the type of uncritical faith
we're taught to have and easily adopt if we're not paying close attention.
But then one of his accounting clients, a manager of a Native American
casino, ended up in a public business dispute with the tribe that owned it,
and the local media extensively covered the dispute.
Because he had much first-hand knowledge of the controversy, he was able to
see how many misleading claims and outright factual falsehoods were
regularly stated as fact by the media covering that story. And he was both
shocked and outraged by it. For the first time, he viscerally understood how
easily and often false claims are circulated by respectable media outlets -
whether due to laziness or gullibility or manipulation or malice or the
difficulty of understanding complex events. And that personal realization
made him much more skeptical in general about what media outlets told him
and much more critical in how he assessed and processed it.
I was reminded of all this by a self-reflective, three-tweet observation
from Hamilton Nolan of Gawker, which has been the subject of extensive media
coverage over the last several weeks:
I can't overstate how much I empathize with these sentiments. For the past
decade, I've been writing critically about the American media, usually with
a focus on the specific policy and legal topics I know best. So like most
politically engaged people, I've long been rationally aware of how
frequently deceitful and inaccurate claims are passed off by the most
respected media outlets as fact, using highly authoritative tones. By
itself, the Iraq War should have taught all of us that (though I regard the
repeated attempt by ABC News to blame Iraq for the anthrax attack as a
perhaps even more extreme example).
Still, nothing drives home that point viscerally like being personally
involved in matters the media is reporting and thus having first-hand
knowledge of what is being claimed. Over the past two years, there's been
extensive media coverage and public discussion of both the Snowden story and
the building of First Look Media/The Intercept, in which I've been very
personally involved. So much of what has been said and still gets said about
those things - not just by random online commenters and conspiracy-mongers
but by the largest and most influential media outlets - is just plainly
wrong: not "wrong" in the sense of resting on unpersuasive opinions or even
casting a misleading picture, but "wrong" in the sense of being factually,
demonstrably false.
It's so frequent, so common, that it's impossible even to note all or even
most of the falsehoods because one would never do anything else. And even if
one devoted oneself to that task, many of the falsehoods would continue to
thrive because of our reflexive assumption that what we read from
respectable media outlets is true even if unaccompanied by evidence, and
because most people lack the time and inclination to independently verify
what they're told about matters in which they have no personal stake.
But it's a monumentally important experience for any journalist to have. It
teaches a crucial lesson: It's simultaneously humbling about the limits of
one's ability to fully understand complicated situations about which one has
no first-hand knowledge, and illuminating about the inherent subjectivity
with which we all view everything. After I briefly made this observation on
Twitter in response to Nolan's tweets, former Reuters editor-in-chief David
Schlesinger wrote this:
Indeed. But that realization is equally vital for consumers of journalism.
Journalistic objectivity is a sham, a horribly misleading and
self-flattering conceit. Don't simply trust claims made in authoritative
media tones - even if, perhaps especially if, journalists work for the most
influential media outlets - unless they point to evidence that confirms or
at least suggests their truth. And when consuming journalism products,
always consciously realize that, even when malice or other forms of bad
faith are nonexistent, so much of what is said and claimed by journalists is
simply untrue. Again, that's an easy and seemingly obvious proposition to
embrace in the abstract - few people would say they disagree with this - but
as Nolan's tweets show, its visceral truth becomes most apparent from
personal experience.
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Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/26/crucial-lesson-journalism-lear
ned-subject/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/26/crucial-lesson-jou
rnalism-learned-subject/
A Crucial Realization About Journalism Is Learned by Being Its Subject
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
26 July 15
n the early 1990s, my father had an outlook-altering experience. A
life-long South Florida accountant for individuals and small businesses, he
had no involvement in politics and harbored a basic patriotic trust for
American institutions, including its media - the type of uncritical faith
we're taught to have and easily adopt if we're not paying close attention.
But then one of his accounting clients, a manager of a Native American
casino, ended up in a public business dispute with the tribe that owned it,
and the local media extensively covered the dispute.
Because he had much first-hand knowledge of the controversy, he was able to
see how many misleading claims and outright factual falsehoods were
regularly stated as fact by the media covering that story. And he was both
shocked and outraged by it. For the first time, he viscerally understood how
easily and often false claims are circulated by respectable media outlets -
whether due to laziness or gullibility or manipulation or malice or the
difficulty of understanding complex events. And that personal realization
made him much more skeptical in general about what media outlets told him
and much more critical in how he assessed and processed it.
I was reminded of all this by a self-reflective, three-tweet observation
from Hamilton Nolan of Gawker, which has been the subject of extensive media
coverage over the last several weeks:
I can't overstate how much I empathize with these sentiments. For the past
decade, I've been writing critically about the American media, usually with
a focus on the specific policy and legal topics I know best. So like most
politically engaged people, I've long been rationally aware of how
frequently deceitful and inaccurate claims are passed off by the most
respected media outlets as fact, using highly authoritative tones. By
itself, the Iraq War should have taught all of us that (though I regard the
repeated attempt by ABC News to blame Iraq for the anthrax attack as a
perhaps even more extreme example).
Still, nothing drives home that point viscerally like being personally
involved in matters the media is reporting and thus having first-hand
knowledge of what is being claimed. Over the past two years, there's been
extensive media coverage and public discussion of both the Snowden story and
the building of First Look Media/The Intercept, in which I've been very
personally involved. So much of what has been said and still gets said about
those things - not just by random online commenters and conspiracy-mongers
but by the largest and most influential media outlets - is just plainly
wrong: not "wrong" in the sense of resting on unpersuasive opinions or even
casting a misleading picture, but "wrong" in the sense of being factually,
demonstrably false.
It's so frequent, so common, that it's impossible even to note all or even
most of the falsehoods because one would never do anything else. And even if
one devoted oneself to that task, many of the falsehoods would continue to
thrive because of our reflexive assumption that what we read from
respectable media outlets is true even if unaccompanied by evidence, and
because most people lack the time and inclination to independently verify
what they're told about matters in which they have no personal stake.
But it's a monumentally important experience for any journalist to have. It
teaches a crucial lesson: It's simultaneously humbling about the limits of
one's ability to fully understand complicated situations about which one has
no first-hand knowledge, and illuminating about the inherent subjectivity
with which we all view everything. After I briefly made this observation on
Twitter in response to Nolan's tweets, former Reuters editor-in-chief David
Schlesinger wrote this:
Indeed. But that realization is equally vital for consumers of journalism.
Journalistic objectivity is a sham, a horribly misleading and
self-flattering conceit. Don't simply trust claims made in authoritative
media tones - even if, perhaps especially if, journalists work for the most
influential media outlets - unless they point to evidence that confirms or
at least suggests their truth. And when consuming journalism products,
always consciously realize that, even when malice or other forms of bad
faith are nonexistent, so much of what is said and claimed by journalists is
simply untrue. Again, that's an easy and seemingly obvious proposition to
embrace in the abstract - few people would say they disagree with this - but
as Nolan's tweets show, its visceral truth becomes most apparent from
personal experience.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
