Since Brad DeLong always has smart things to say, it’s no surprise that he’s on a roll lately in his criticism of the print media, particularly the Washington Post…. on Joe Klein’s shifting of conventional wisdom when it suits his bashing of "liberal Democrats"…. on a lack of knowledge about foreign affairs… on the silly claim by the Post that Abramoff directed lobbying money to both Republicans and Democrats. As he puts it:
A real reporter would know how many of the Indian tribes’ relationships with members of congress antedated the arrival on the scene of Jack Abramoff, and would not be talking about "195 Republicans and 88 Democrats" to whom Abramoff had "directed" Indian tribes’ contributions but rather about those representatives with no history of concern for or involvement with Indian issues who suddenly began getting money after Abramoff appeared on the scene.
What is surprising is that the conventions of media criticism have developed such that DeLong’s basic technique - contrasting what a paper reports over time, or contrasting a report with some reasonably objectiver arbiter of the facts - seems not to be part of the criticism toolbox. Media criticism is written by people who are interested in the culture, the institutions and the theory of journalism - which isn’t itself a bad thing - but seemingly not by people all that interested in the specifics of policy, foreign affairs, or governance.
Or maybe to put it more charitably, media criticism (those printed media columns or blogs like Romesko or more locally Dan Kennedy or Mark Jurkowitz) has grappled and grappled well with a trio of issues that has defined the journalistic field in the 20th century and now seem under attack: the dividing line between ownership and editorial control; the ideal and practice of "objectivity"; and the freedom from government intervention in journalistic practice (censorship, subpoenas, etc). What it’s been less interested in is the problem Walter Lippman identified of understanding insider and specialist knowledge and presenting such knowledge to outsiders and nonspecialists, particularly when a) insiders have every interest to dissemble and exploit the public sphere to its own ends and b) specialist knowledge will often not fit into the market needs of for-profit journalism.
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