BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

It’s bigger than Dan Rather

25 comments on It’s bigger than Dan Rather

It’s bigger than Dan Rather

: It’s bigger than Dan Rather. It’s bigger than CBS. It’s about journalism and Big Media and their relationship with the citizenry and democracy. It’s about sharing authority with the people.

My fear is that CBS will create a commission — just as The New York Times had its commission and 9/11 had its commission — and out of that, some people will be fired [please, tonight, let us not make references to heads rolling] and new rules will be instituted and the network will think its problem is solved… while the network’s detractors will insist nothing will change.

But it’s bigger than that.

Tonight on Deborah Norville’s show, there was too much talk for my taste about CBS as the Tiffany network and the gold-standard of TV journalism. That’s not only a terribly outdated perception of CBS — which is just another news company — but the attempt to harken back to those alleged golden days also continues to separate journalism from the people. It tries to keep journalism behind stone walls, cathedral or palace, priesthood or monarchy.

As the Rather affair shows, journalists are nothing if not human, and nothing if not fallible.

The time has come for journalists to admit that. The time has come for them to take Dan Gillmor’s words to heart and realize that the audience knows more than they do.

The time has come to reshape journalism — and not just CBS or (if it were possible) Dan Rather’s brain.

You could argue that CBS is the last body to do that. Or you could argue it is the best to do it: Humbled, chastised, bruised, bloodied… What if CBS tried to imagine new relationships between news and the people? They certainly can’t do it singlehandedly. But they could make a start.

That commission could include not just news priests but also bloggers and news sources and news subjects (including those who’ve been wronged) and competitors … just plain viewers aka consumers aka citizens (the people who should matter most).

They could dig into what CBS did wrong — but that’s already pretty obvious. They should produce an object lesson for journalistic hotshots everywhere. And that has value.

But how much better if they started imagining a new view of news that involves the wisdom of the people. They should examine not just what CBS did wrong but what CBS could have done right.

That’s what journalism needs now.

: Jay Rosen speculates on the CBS commission here. (And I’m terribly flattered at the link to this blog.)

: Richard Bennett’s perfect line:

Dan Rather has plead guilty to Gross Stupidity in order to avoid a conviction for Extreme Bias in the court of public opinion.

25 responses to “It’s bigger than Dan Rather”

  1. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Brilliant. Though I sometimes disagree with what you write, this is the kind of insight that keeps me coming back.

  2. Ernest Miller Avatar
    Ernest Miller

    At this point, given that USA Today is reporting that Mapes touted Burkett to Joe Lockhart to get the documents, I really don’t know how far it will go or where it will lead next.
    This is an important story, we just don’t know how much more important it will get.

  3. itsover Avatar
    itsover

    MSM doesn’t matter anymore, blogging doesn’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, freedom doesn’t matter, the two towers hit by planes doesn’t matter, nothing matters anymore because Michael Moore’s praise of black-hooded “freedom fighters” and the sympathy we must have towards those militants whenever they behead the innocent is what will really persuade people to not elect Bush. Now that Moore’s fabricated and twisted film, done simply because Moore hates Bush, is hitting our soldiers overseas,we are done for.
    Bloggers on the left are eating this up and relishing in the effect Michale Moore’s fabricated movie is having upon their morale.
    And to think, Jeff, all those hopeful Iraqis you had helped in creating their own blogs will go back to the real Iraqi world Moore had created in his Fahrenheit 9/11 for all the world to see.
    News, who needs news when you got Moore and all of Hollywood to ‘splain things. Because of your entertainment industry, we will lose this war.
    Please do apologize to Alaa and Omar and all the rest of Iraq on behalf of your miserable industry’s function in losing this war.
    Fascist Hollywood at work against America and all because they HATE BUSH.
    Do you REALLY believe that after the morale of our troops has been completely decimated by Michael Moore, that Kerry will have any troops left in service?
    Do you really believe Kerry, who is now running on an anti-war platform, will somehow restore our depleted soldiers morale after what Michael Moore has accomplished?
    Your industry, jeff, is the downfall of this war.
    Leni Reifenstahl worked wonders for Hitler, didn’t she. Moore’s working wonders for Hollywood. Rounding applause for the propagandists give em a bunch of stupid Oscars.

  4. superhawk Avatar
    superhawk

    Hey itsover…CHILL! Give our soldiers a little credit. F 9/11 has been over there for months, by the way, in pirated copies. I’d gather that quite a few GI’s have seen it and there are no wholesale desertions.
    Morale, from what I’ve read at Blogs of War and other sites is pretty darn good considering the relentless assault by the media. It will get better when they’re allowed to do their job and get the hell home…i.e. kick some terrorist butt.

  5. DCRob Avatar
    DCRob

    The problem with CBS, which few in the MSM seem willing to consider, is not that it intentionally set out to deceive in order to slam Bush, but rather that its loathing of Bush is so deep-seated that no conscious choice was required. The same could be said of the coverage of the campaign and the Administration by the New York Times, which is so far in the tank, it doesn’t know there is a tank. What better argument could there be for more ideological diversity in the newsroom? At least there’d be somebody around to keep the others honest.

  6. Yehudit Avatar
    Yehudit

    I agree with your opinion on Moore, but F911 is going to impress some gullible young soldiers but not most of them. Unless you have some basis for that claim you aren’t sharing with us. I wouldn’t trust what lefty bloggers think is going on – they still think the Rather forgeries are real, and they overestimated what impact Moore would have on the American public.

  7. Brett Avatar
    Brett

    Maybe it’s me, but I see hope for Big Media on the horizon.
    On my blog, I do a daily run down of the stories that show up in the most media outlets and I look for bias. Up until about two weeks ago, it was pretty steady and easy to illustrate.
    In the past week, I’ve had two days of top stories that were essentially bias-free. Progress. Balanced, fact-based journalism.
    Total guesswork, but perhaps the word is getting out that the blogs will take down the credibility of Big Media and that bias is to be fought.
    In other words, maybe blogs are the commission and it’s already seated and there’s no need to go any further.

  8. James Avatar
    James

    Check out Marc Stiegler’s SF novels David’s Sling and especially Earthweb for some interesting speculation on the evolution of journalism. (Besides, they’re fun reads.)

  9. Kat Avatar
    Kat

    I think Rather apologized hoping that it will end here. However, we deserve to know how deeply the Kerry campaign was involved in Rather’s mudslinging and I believe they were.
    I remember Andrew Sullivan ( maybe quietly gloating) that this would be just devastating to Bush. Can we now say that if there is a connection between the CBS lie and the Kerry campaign, that this should be just devasting to Kerry? Is the CBS just another moveon.org??

  10. rivlax Avatar
    rivlax

    Agree wholeheartedly. I’m too big a person to mention that this is what we were trying to say in comments last week as you ignored this story.

  11. ras Avatar
    ras

    Jeff: Darwin was right; Lamarck was wrong, and CBS won’t change because they can’t. The change you want will come about thru evolution, which discards those who aren’t well-adapted in favor of those who are.

  12. Reid Avatar
    Reid

    “Morale, from what I’ve read at Blogs of War and other sites is pretty darn good considering the relentless assault by the media. “
    We owe these guys so much more than we are ever going to repay (I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, I’m just saying we won’t because we have too many selfish, short-sighted folks to do it). They are stretched way too thin because we threw a party in the 1990’s and decimated our military. Like every great war we have ever been involved in, the big threat arose when we let our guard down.
    I’m not pinning blame, because it was a bipartisan failure. Everyone thought history had ended with the demise of the Soviet Union and, nobody was willing to consider otherwise. Obviously, we were wrong.
    Haven’t we learned yet that weakness invites aggression? Damn it. Like it or not, we are the guardians of peace and prosperity in the world. There is nobody else even remotely capable of doing it. We either take charge and move civilization in the right direction, or we abdicate and, the world devolves into chaos. It is no longer the racist “white man’s burden”. It is our great society’s multicultural burden.
    I am middle-aged now and, not so enamoured of the genre as I once was. But, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf, I think, had the right idea:
    “Always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes another form and grows again.”
    It will ever be thus.

  13. Justthisguy Avatar
    Justthisguy

    “..That’s what journalism needs now.”
    Amen.

  14. old maltese Avatar
    old maltese

    I have not seen a Deborah Norville show ever (after her stint on the Today Show), but I just saw the show that I had taped earlier tonight because of your participation.
    Wow! She had good questions, great show coordination.
    Jeff, I had never seen you ‘live’ but wow again, well done although I’m sure that you said ‘uhh’.
    And Tom Jarriel — we miss reporters like him, a good man. And Hugh Downs, of course, although rather older.
    Great show, points well made.

  15. ElGrowlerGrande Avatar
    ElGrowlerGrande

    The BuzzMachine’s comments at “bigger than Rather” are absolutely on point. On Monday morning, I listened to a C-SPAN2 journalism forum with Walter Kronkite, Brian Wilson, and Betsy Ashton on the “past, present and future of TV news,” and Kronkite especially, but all three don’t, IMHO, ‘get it’ with respect to the value and power of the so-called ‘alternative media.’ Also, last evening, D.C.’s WMAL radio aired a one-hour show of veteran journalist Marvin Kalb interviewing PBS anchor Jim Lehrer. While Lehrer came across as a fairly straight shooter, several of Kalb’s comments reflected the same old arrogance of the major media as gatekeepers of information. Back to Kronkite, however, I couldn’t believe that he was arguing that traditional mainstream media such as NBC, ABC, and CBS don’t introduce, even inadvertently, a political bias into their reporting, and their dislike of FoxNews, especially, was obvious.

  16. Waffle King Avatar
    Waffle King

    My thought was similar to ras above. CBS will change, commission or no, but it will not lead the revolution or even the evolution because the culture will not change enough. You can try to turn the Titanic, but it’s still the Titanic. The industry will change through market forces, not through a conscious attempt to become something better than it is. The end result will be similar to “the commission” described in the article, but will take much longer. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t see enough self-criticism in old-line media to make me hopeful that they take these issues seriously.

  17. Matthew Cromer Avatar
    Matthew Cromer

    Excellent post, Jeff.

  18. Jack Tanner Avatar
    Jack Tanner

    ‘As the Rather affair shows, journalists are nothing if not human, and nothing if not fallible.’
    We’re all fallible but you’re buying in to them being unwilling dupes when at best they were complicit dupes. Fallible implies they made an honest mistake – well maybe – but then they lied to defend it – calling burkett an unimpeachable source – I mean which is it? Obviously they knew this guy was a rabid partisan so they neglected to check out his documents? Like Dan-O says it’s about honesty and integrity – or in this case neither.

  19. Brett Avatar
    Brett

    Here’s your commission:
    http://www.hughhewitt.com/
    I’m tellin’ ya – if CBS convenes a commission, then they’re ignoring the truth, which is that bloggers have been the commission, are the commission, and will continue to be the commission.
    Until Big Media realizes that, they’ll continue to get beat up on this.

  20. hey Avatar
    hey

    its the joe-mary-dan-bill-max show now…
    how many more people do we need?
    how far does the hole go? and will we overcome leftist resitstance (like that of our proprietor) to find the truth and hang the operators out to dry?
    i envision more “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” from JJ and his fellow travellers
    but jeff, the hammer is coming, and its going to take so many people beyond cbs down with it!

  21. Todd Avatar
    Todd

    Jeff,
    Your phrase ‘media priests’ is dead on. It reflects my own thinking on the matter; incidents like Rather’s (initial) reaction to criticism and Ted Koppel’s confrontation with Jon Stewart at the DNC indicate a sense of proprietorship and even entitlement on the part of MSM bigwigs. The message: “we own the news.”

  22. Tim Eldred Avatar
    Tim Eldred

    The media got to the bottom of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich & Clinton…if they want to, which is doubtful, they can find out where this started…we all have our opinions but these pros ought to get the facts.

  23. Duane Avatar
    Duane

    When Carroll Rosenbloom was the owner of the NFL Rams, one wag described his marital odyssey from his first wife to his widow, Georgia (Frontiere) as moving from “Class to Brass to Ass”.
    CBS went from Murrow, to Cronkite, to Rather. Hmmm.

  24. russ Avatar
    russ

    Where is the outrage by the citizenry at large over CBS’s attempt to sway the elections for cowardly and seditious Kerry?
    Where is the outrage over Kerry’s hob-nobbing with felons?
    Where is the outrage over Kerry’s obviously asinine disregard for American Security?
    Are people asleep to the fact that those so called allies who can help with Iraq are part and parcel to the UN’s Oil for Fraud scam?

  25. smartarse Avatar
    smartarse

    This is worse than Watergate, imo. I wonder what it would be like if it was the other way around. I shudder to think!
    As a (former) CBS viewer it sickens me how a “reputable” Network will play into dirty politics by reporting an obvious fraud against a sitting President ,just so to influence the outcome of an election. That’s downright criminal and a third world country kind of politics. Shame on you CBS, and shame on you DNC…!