Here's a hint:
Having brought up the charge in a
previous post,
I should probably take a minute to spell out exactly what I'm talking
about. I'm using a very broad reading of the term 'tribalism' (perhaps
so broad I should say something like 'tribalism and other social psych
phenomena'). The traits I'm thinking of include:
1. Us/them mentality;
2. Excessive reliance on in-group social norms;
3. Deferring to and preserving hierarchies;
and as a consequence
4, A tendency to use different standards to judge interactions based on the relative positions of the parties.
There is inevitably going to be a degree of subjectivity when deciding
who goes where in the hierarchy, but I think it's fairly safe to say
that Maureen Dowd and (till his death) Michael Kelly were in the
innermost circle with writers like David Brooks and most prominent,
established Washington and, to a lesser degree, New York journalists
fairly close.
In this tribal model, it makes perfect sense that Politico would view
Chris Hughes' (outsider) request for a small change in the copy of
Timothy Noah (insider) as a major affront. It also explains Politico's
attacks on Nate Silver (outsider) when his work started making
established pundits (insiders) look bad.
The press corps's treatment of Al Gore in 2000
is another case in point. Following the lead of Dowd and Kelly and
reinforced by a general dislike of the candidate, the group quickly
established social norms that justified violating the most basic
standards of
accuracy and fairness.
The poster child for this kind of journalistic tribalism is Jack Shafer,
or at least he was a few years ago when I was first experimenting with
blogging. One of my main topics was the press's inability to face up to
its problems and Shafer was the gift that kept on giving (I haven't read
him much since). That blog is gone now but I still have my notes so
here are some highlights.
Shafer was openly disdainful of readers and generally dismissive of
their interests which is an extraordinary starting point for a
journalism critic. Consider this passage from the aptly named "
Why I Don't Trust Readers"
I'm all for higher standards, but I draw the line when journalists start
getting more complaints about less serious professional lapses.
Serious: Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors,
bribe-taking. Not serious: campaign donations in the low three-figures
for reporters distant from that beat; appearance of conflict of
interest; a point of view; friendships with the rich and powerful.
First, notice the first item on the list. Plagiarism is certainly a
serious offense, but the other serious offenses are the sort of things
that can destroy people's lives, conceal crimes and enable corruption.
Even more interesting is what didn't make the list: unintentional
distortion due to laziness or bias; patterns of minor errors; isolated
cases of serious errors due to negligence; selective reporting (as long
as it doesn't rise to the level of distortion); failure to dig into
important aspects of a story; cozy relationships with subjects as long
as it doesn't involve the quid pro quo of a bribe.
What's important here was the victimology. In plagiarism, the primary
victim is a fellow journalist. In all of these other cases, the primary
victim is either the subject or the reader. Shafer was a tribalist and
his main objective was almost always the defense of his tribe and its
hierarchy.
There's a remarkable inverse correlation between the rank of Shafer's
subjects and the harshness with which he treats them. This is
particularly apparent when different subjects of the same article have
different positions. Shafer provided an excellent example when he wrote a
post complaining about liberals writing books that actually called conservatives liars in the titles.
The books were Al Franken,
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Joe Conason's
Big Lies and David Corn's
The Lies of George W. Bush.
Of these three, Conason was something of a pariah (Shafer dismissed him
as a Clinton apologist) and Franken was clearly a journalistic
outsider. Corn, on the other hand, was very much an insider in the
Washington press corp (Shafer even described him as a friend in the
post).
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that Shafer finds a way to shield Corn from much of the blast.
This criticism applies more to Franken and Conason than it does Corn—you
can't expect a book about Bush's lies to also be about Clinton's lies.
And Corn acknowledges in his intro that Bush isn't the first White House
liar and that Clinton lied, too.
Of course, you could easily make a similar but more persuasive argument in Franken's behalf.
Lies
was largely focused on the relationship between the GOP and
conservative media and since the book was published in 2003 when there
was no Air America and MSNBC was just starting to experiment with
liberal programming, there was no way to provide similar examples on the
left. Just to be clear, I'm not making that argument; I'm only saying
that it's just as viable as the one makes for Corn.
For an even more dramatic bit of paired data, consider two obituaries
Shafer wrote, separated by only a few months. The first was for
Walter Annenberg, best known as a philanthropist and founder of
TV Guide. The second was for
Michael Kelly, journalist and former editor of
the New Republic.
Once again there's a clear hierarchical distance between the subjects:
Annenberg, though decades earlier a power in publishing and to his death
a major force in philanthropy, was not a journalistic insider; Kelly,
on the other hand was about as inside as you can get.
As you've probably guessed by now, Shafer's approach to these two
obituaries differs sharply. Though they don't fully capture the
difference, the epitaphs give a good indication of the respective tones:
Michael Kelly: "Husband. Father. Journalist"
Walter Annenberg: "Billionaire Son of Mobster, Enemy of Journalism, and
Nixon Toady Exits for Hell—Forced To Leave Picassos and van Goghs at
Metropolitan Museum."
The contrast is sharpest when Shafer addresses journalistic scandals and
cozy relationships with controversial right wing politicians, areas
where there are definite parallels between the two men. Shafer actually
explains away
the New Republic/Glass scandal as an instance of Kelly being too loyal for his own good.
Shafer often judges figures on the periphery of the journalistic
establishment based on a much higher standard than "Plagiarism, willful
distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking." For someone
like Larry King, a few disputable errors and minor discrepancies (such
as changing the date of an incident from 1972 to 1971 when retelling an
anecdote)
merit an entire column.
(It's worth noting that this column ran in the middle of 2009, a period
when the coverage of politics, the economy and the European crisis were
raising all sorts of journalistic questions, questions that
didn't get a lot of space in Shafer's column. This raises the issue of trivialism in media criticism -- see
On the Media for a myriad of examples -- but that's a topic for another thread.)
If marginal figures committing minor offenses are treated harshly by
Shafer, what happens when someone at the top of the hierarchy does
something that Shafer normally considers a serious offense like
plagiarism? We got an answer to that one when Maureen
Dowd was caught lifting a passage from Josh Marshall.
Here's her explanation in
Bloggasm:
“i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who
suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed
spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but,
clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without
mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit,
and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”
And here
Shafer explains why it's not so bad:
1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)
2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a
correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).
3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.
4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."
5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.
6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.
And here was my response at the time:
1. 'Responded.' Not to be confused with 'confessed,' 'owned up,' 'took
responsibility,' or any phrase that uses a form of the word
'plagiarism.'
2. "[A] little soft"?
3. Yeah, near verbatim quotes make it through convoluted processes all the time.
4. "[M]y friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." -- What exactly would an excuse look like?
5. No, she just implied it wasn't plagiarism. That definitely gives her the moral high ground.
6. What a trooper.
(I apologize for the tone. I was in a snarky phase, but I'm trying to play nicer these days.)
I've spent a lot of time on Shafer because he's a good example, I was
familiar with his work and, as a media critic, he has an important role
in journalism's self-correction process, but he's is not an isolated
case, nor is he the worst of bunch (particularly not since the rise of
Politico).
The point of all this is that journalism has a problem with tribalism
and other social dynamics. These things are affecting objectivity,
credibility and quality. What's worse, journalists seem to have so
internalized the underlying mindset to such a degree that most of them
don't even realize what's going on.
Posts
