Anyone mouth-breather can pollute an entry with his special brand of hatred, but it will be found out and corrected within minutes.
Yes, knuckledraggers on the periphery are constantly spouting idiocies, but the critical mass at the center is eternally vigilant, outing the bullshitters and shooting down the crackpots. "Ugh, the Internet," the old-schoolers moan. And the relentlessly subjective intellectual marketplace that is the Internet will fact-check their asses within an inch of their lives. The alternative is authentic, individual voices telling us what they believe to be true. And the alternative is not, as the old-schoolers would have us believe, hypocrites on the airwaves and/or raving loons typing away in their pajamas. That's just not really working for us anymore.
UTTERLY APPALLS CODE
The old-schoolers wrap themselves in their code of objectivity and ask us to believe that their exalted status as "journalists" gives their every utterance the force of scripture, when the mountains of half-truths that come pouring out of their mouths and word processors betray them at every turn. But they're not mutually incompatible qualities-and when done right, subjectivity and emotion can drive home the authenticity and truth of a story in a way that old-school reporting never will.
They certainly can have that effect, and there are millions of subjective, emotional, and utterly bogus blogs to prove it. What Koppel, Rabinowitz and their old school colleages don't get is that subjectivity and emotion don't necessarily undermine authenticity and truth. The stone-faced ignorance of reality that passes for "objectivity" in a disturbingly large number of broadcast pieces and newspaper articles is bullshit of the highest order, and we all know it.Īnd our discontent with these ludicrous stories is one of the most powerful forces behind the success of blogs and other sources of adamantly subjective citizen journalism. I understand Koppel's (and Rabinowitz's) concern: Appeals to emotion in journalism potentially start us down a slippery slope at the bottom of which we'll find ourselves subject to the worst sort of utterly phony hucksterism, the likes of which would appall even William Hurt's duplicitous journalist in "Broadcast News."īut they fail to recognize that it's two-way street, and there's more than one kind of phony hucksterism. Rabinowitz writes approvingly of Koppel's tart candor, an implied rebuke to the Katrina correspondents who wore their hearts on their sleeves: Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith, Chris Lawrence, et al. Koppel: "Because that's not your job and that's not my job."
"And they shouldn't let those show, in your view?"
But reporters should have feelings, shouldn't they, Mr. Kurtz then raised the issue of the Katrina coverage, and the fact that it ushered in "a more emotional style of journalism" because correspondents on the scene had become frustrated at the government's failure. Last week he appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources," hosted by Howard Kurtz, and although I didn't catch the broadcast, Dorothy Rabinowitz has a thorough write-up in today's Wall Street Journal: Even if the hair wasn't a dead giveaway, it's clear that Ted Koppel is an old school journalist with a capital J.
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