Reporter in Exile

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After many years of using GoDaddy.com for registering domain names, I've transferred them to another service after learning how founder Bob Parson likes to vacation. He doesn't need my $9.99 to shoot elephants.

 

 

 

 

On the Media

Your humble narrator and Olivier Sarbil at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand on June 10, 2010. The one on the left, lost in high-fevered delirium, was left to fend for himself by the villainous Frenchman Corsican at right. Coalition of the willing, indeed.

As a novice staffer for a large media syndicate in Los Angeles, I pledged myself to a pragmatic idealism and certain inviolable tenets. My hope was to anticipate and avoid the mistakes I saw plaguing the Fourth Estate;  a profession for which I held deep skepticism.

'Accessibility' was among the virtues to which I committed. I would respond earnestly to every e-mail, phone call or smoke signal blown my way. Aiding this was the inclusion of my e-mail address helpfully affixed below my every soy-inked dispatch in the newspaper.

By my second year, I had abandoned this as a conceit. One counterproductive to the very values to which I'd aspired. It wasn't the poetic elegance of "Hope you die in a fire you [liberal/conservative] shitbag" messages. Those brighten a reporter's day and join the constellations of cubicle-clutter. Good material for a coffee-table book. Nor did the problem lie with sincere inquiries, accurate corrections or fair comment/criticism.

It was the articulate and quasi-reasonable, yet fact-averse and logic-broken missives which proved the pretty poison.

Much has been said of bias in the recent reportage of Thailand's political crisis, particularly after  Bangkok's sanguine-streaked streets became stained with the real stuff.

Anytime people start lobbing gripes about "the Mediuh," they're really only talking about the major broadcast networks: The television people who reach a disproportionate audience share compared to the legions of photogs, radioheads and writers.

Written stories, generally, provided a more adequate representation of the conflict. Words remain more apt tools for nailing nuance and capturing context, partly because they can take more time. There is a negligible-to-nothing cost difference between publishing a 500-word or 5,000-word piece online. But who wants to read, amirite?

Market forces, corporatization, competition, commercialism, diminished attention spans -- and yes, the 'action'-news, Geraldoized  culture of egocentrism -- contribute to the challenges of doing good broadcast journalism.

Try distilling your next profound thought into 90 seconds of airtime. On deadline.

To different degrees, the bias debate erupts with any significant reporting. Like all narrative, news coverage is anchored in conflict. Whether between warring states, elected officials or commercial property developers. The more divergent and incompatible their perspectives -- taken to extreme in Thailand where the world looks entirely different through yellow- or red-colored lenses -- it is impossible to satisfy both sides. And dangerous to begin thinking in those terms.

Some journos argue good reporting should irritate both sides. Explore their mutually exclusive, polar viewpoints without validating or invalidating either, beyond what facts and history can establish. Yet bad reporting has an identical effect, only more corrosively so.

The problem is that bitching about bias is effective. American journalism has been under siege since before there were states to be united. The North American media has skewed far to the right as decades of "Blame the Liberal Media" moved from bumper-sticker rant to 'conventional wisdom.' A 'fact' accepted by many reporters, making them (more) schizophrenic.

Why is this? Many reasons. But it doesn't help that reporters tend to be thin-skinned egotists who worry too much about what people think about them. Add blogging and comment-enabled online stories to the job profile -- oh and that  awful e-mail address -- to the ivory tower is breached faster than you can say "Judith Miller."

I reconsidered my ethic of accessibility because it proved a huge window for influence. Influence is to be avoided. Kept at "arm's length" according to most ethical manifestos. Newsrooms have metaphorical and sometimes physical walls to protect reporters from internal influence; should they so readily discard those firewalls against the external? In the name of satisfying consumer preference? Most of the numbingly brilliant MBA-holders throttling today's newsrooms think so.

But the cat's already out of the bag and it's got our tongues. Or ears. Roll your own metaphor.

As we know, a keyboard and high-speed lack of accountability is the leading cause of spontaneous Tourette's syndrome. People on the Internet say the darndest things. It's just too much; the reporter's fragile psyche splinters in response.

Overcompensation is far too often the result.  See the effect on American journalists, many of whom have accepted the lie that it's impossible to be objective, a belief I once held as truth. They pivot and swing to please and appease. "Just in case," they rationalize.

CNN's Dan Rivers, target of a vocal campaign by the Thai status quo, has vacillated between attempting to appease his critics or mount a shrill defense. Instead of operating as an agent for his profession and representative of a serious news organization, he reaffirmed it was about himself through his Tweets and a defensive letter read aloud at a recent FCCT panel on the media experience. (Dan sent the letter but said he couldn't attend.)

Eschewing outmoded vestiges of integrity, honesty and reliability, Daniel J. Rivers' Twitter profile seems to telegraph "Damn, I make this look good."

Yet Dan Rivers isn't the problem (Certainly Walt Cronkite's ascension to "Most trusted man in America" would've been aided by some vanity backdrops) and CNN doesn't have a dog in the fight. Eager to reassure themselves of their right-ness and press their advantage, its critics miss the point: the network just doesn't practice excellent journalism. Too many years staring after Fox's market share and mistaking it for a competitor.

That distinction however, is academic. Bias takes many forms and doesn't look much different than reporting that is merely incomplete or inch-deep or incompetent.

Those failings are much more common than hidden slants or ulterior motives.

From behind the bamboo

Come to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand this Thursday evening to hear journos  discuss our favorite topic: ourselves.

View from the Trenches: The Dramatic End to the Red Shirts' Rally

Cameramen and journalists discuss their first-hand experiences

8pm Thurs, June 10, 2010

Members: Free Non-members: 350 baht

Cameramen and journalists who covered the street battles in central Bangkok will gather at the club again this Thursday to present their work and give witness accounts about the dramatic end of the epic red shirts protest. Representatives of major news outlets and photographers who captured the riots leading up to the army dispersal on May 19 will join us to outline what they saw, and what they think about the two-month-long protest that left 88 people dead and about 2,000 injured.