Media: If you can't do your job . . . [View all]

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Media: If you can't do your job . . .

by delphine

An open letter/Op Ed to the Talking Heads Media

What has happened to Journalism?

In 2004, John Kerry, a verifiable war hero, had his military war record savaged for weeks based on the unsubstantiated claims of a few men. To believe those men, you had to believe that Kerry’s official military records were doctored in some way, that the man he saved was a liar, that the very act of piloting a swiftboat into enemy territory wasn’t brave, that two tours in Viet Nam didn’t earn him our respect, and that the military erred in awarding him medals because he wasn’t wounded “enough”.

The media, rather than researching the issue, ignored all of that and actually amplified these malignant lies designed to attack his greatest strength by giving these guys a huge amount of air time. Those lies and their media-fueled amplification are together known as “swiftboating”.

The media also spent weeks vilifying Dan Rather over the typeface on some memos, and virtually none of them compared the content of those memos to the official military record that Bush himself released. If they had, they would have found that every single one of those memos corresponded chronologically with documentation in that military record supporting the content of the memos. Those journalists that did this comparison were marginalized and ignored.

One man’s excellent, official record was trashed, while other man’s rather pathetic record was ignored.

Those of us who understood the concept of journalism began to mourn its absence.

Also during that campaign, two stories shared the front page of the Los Angeles Times. One was written by a reporter traveling with Cheney, the other by a reporter with Kerry. Cheney had attacked Kerry, and Kerry had responded. In neither case did these reporters practice actual Journalism and find out who was correct. But the story by the reporter traveling with Cheney did not even include Kerry’s refutation. I emailed the reporter about it.

His response to me: “It’s hard to write stories while you’re traveling on a bus all day”.

My response, aside from pointing out that his colleague had the Kerry response and he had a cell phone, was:

If you can’t do the job, get off the bus.

This week the subject is Mitt Romney’s role in Bain Capital, the company he founded and managed as CEO, President, and sole shareholder for many years. This is what his campaign claims as his strength – his ability to run a business. He claims this means he knows how to create jobs.

There is no dispute that Bain went into several businesses, increased their debt substantially, then closed them, and fired all of the employees, in some cases leaving them without their pensions – and walked away with millions in profits.

Yet the media has left it up to the Obama campaign to reveal this. They have left it up to Romney to spin it. They have left it us to up to figure out the facts. This is what they consider to be “balanced”. This is what they consider to be Journalism. The facts are the facts: either Bain did this, or they didn’t. Why isn’t that a story worthy of researching and reporting?

Instead, the story this week is about comparing Obama’s ads with the swiftboaters.

This is not only patently ridiculous, but insulting to the concept of an “informed electorate” as well.

<...>

In fact, the Romney campaign and Romney himself have lied consistently and the media looks the other way.

For weeks the GOP has been saying Obama is "on a spending spree" when in fact he is spending less than other presidents. They claim he has raised taxes when 98% of us have received tax cuts. Romney's stump speech has included claims that Obama did not once mention the debt or deficit in the State of the Union address. That's only one of Romney’s out and out lies about the SOTU that can be revealed by a simple viewing of the speech.
And Romney, incredibly, claims that Obama has not offered a jobs bill.

Romney’s campaign has been caught creatively editing Obama speeches, but that was a small blip in the “news”. Romney’s very statements are laughably untrue – even his statements about his own record. The lies are virtually endless, and virtually all of them are easily researched and refuted.

And why are the Romney campaign and the GOP so unconcerned about spouting easily refuted lies? It’s because Journalism has been exiled from the mainstream media, and they know it.

- more -

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/14/1109954/-Media-If-you-can-t-do-your-job

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