Live by the gotcha, die by the gotcha
: Doc, like me, didn’t stay on top of the Rather story — and many of you piled on top of both of us because of it. But after reading and due consideration, he writes a wise post today. Money quote and conclusion:
That credibility has never been better than every good journalist’s commitment to do the best they can, under the circumstances (which usually involve constrained time and resources). Which is to say compromised, though understandably so. What’s changed is the involuntary outsourcing of fact-gathering and -checking to a growing assortment of amateurs and professionals who are largely external to the profession. What we need isn’t competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two….
Right now Dan and CBS are losing the same Gotcha! game they’ve played for decades on 60 Minutes. I don’t think that’s any kind of poetic justice, or karma, or anything to cheer. It’s a tragic story.
Because the truths we need to know aren’t just the one Gotcha!s expose. And getting to those will take another kind of journalism: one we won’t copy off TV, and we won’t need to save
