On Publishing Crap

From Crooked Timber:

The absolute refusal of the Post to take a position on the truth or falsity of what it publishes (along with the continued scandal of anonymous sourcing) leads me to a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline. The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will’s recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.

More importantly as far as political and business news goes, there is almost always someone with an interest in having any given story published. If newspapers are unwilling to take a stand on which stories are true or false, their only function is that of gatekeeper – determining which stories see the light of day and which do not. The potential for corruption in this role is clear, and the reality was obvious particularly in relation to the Iraq war.

In other words, what difference does it make if newspapers have the power to actually go find news, to determine truth or falsity, if all they plan to do with these powers is pump out the same old horseshit?

As an aside, I believe that a Ontario Press Council complaint was once filed against an Ottawa Citizen reporter for recycling some old denialist chest-nuts, though I haven't been able to find the relevant material at their site. In any case, if newspapers are not willing to correct factual errors in science pieces, then perhaps there is indeed no hope for them.

The Death Of The Opinion Columnist

Teeing off on George "He isn't even phoning it in" Will's recent column on global warming, which reiterated 17 year ago talking points, John Quiggin tells how the Internet has made obsolete the journalistic practice of recycling old columns:

Moreover, the switch from newsprint to digital publication has changed things in a couple of important ways. On the one hand, self-plagiarism is now much easier to detect. Anyone with Google can check you it. On the other hand, the justification for repetition is much more limited. When yesterdays brilliant insights lined today’s bird cage, you could be forgiven for repeating them a few months later, for readers who might have missed them the first time. But now that every column is preserved for ever, there’s much less need. And when your column consists largely of a string of tattered talking points that anyone who wants to can already find on the Internet, it has very little justification for existing.

Of course the very fact that we write on computers--that the "rough draft" as an actual physical document scratched up with red pen marks and then re-typed entirely using a manual/electric typewriter--doesn't really exist anymore, changes things too. I am old enough to remember the agony involved in discovering a typo in the last two lines of something that required the whole page be recopied.

In short, the process of composition has been accelerated by the existence of the PC and the word-check program, which really ought to free up the journalistic mind to think more, and think more deeply, about the content of their writing.

Or they can use these technological efficiencies to hack out the same old crap and hit the bar 2 hours earlier.