There’s an interesting Politico story (8/22/12) about Andrea Seabrook, who until recently was a Capitol Hill reporter for NPR. She’s moved on to a new independent reporting project, but it’s what she said about her previous gig that’s most revealing:
“I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say,” Seabrook told Politico. “And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real…. I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters…. To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”
She says her new Web-based project will try to “decipher Washington’s Byzantine language and procedure, sweeping away what doesn’t matter so listeners can focus on what does.”
Seabrook seems pretty clear that the problem isn’t the media: “I think the problem is the Congress itself. And we’re all in the same positions, scrambling to figure out how the hell to cover these assholes.”
So if a reporter is covering politicians who are lying to her every single day, what is preventing that reporter from saying as much? Why just repeat the lies?
The crystal clear implication here is that, for whatever reason, an NPR journalist doesn’t feel comfortable challenging lies and spin. It’s a pretty important admission, and one that NPR listeners–and management–should think about.
NPR long ago stopped being a credible media organization. I don’t believe their reporting now any more than I believe the Washington Post or Fox News.
Why just repeat the lies?
I think a major reason is that the corpress – and NPR is certainly part of that, in spirit if not in actual structure – shares the same ideological foundation as the political system.
And if you dig too deeply under that foundation, you put yourself as well as your subjects at risk.
Journalistic integrity’s all well and good.
But let’s not get fanatical about it.
I don’t think so; I think the Corpress has it’s own agenda, and that is to make money without doing any work.
Can you think of anything easier than ‘just parroting’ what was said; no need to think, no need to work and find out facts, you simply Bleat or Peep exactly what you hear, and Viola, all money no work.
There seems to be a big leap of logic in this article. She feels like she is ‘lied to all day every day’ somehow becomes ‘reporters can’t report the lies’. Perhaps it is true but she didn’t say that anywhere in the quote.
This article implies there’s some sort of media muzzle on reporting the lies. Perhaps there is and that would be a great story to have properly researched. There may be other reasons she didn’t report the lies (i.e. she believed they were lies but couldn’t back it up or didn’t have time to do the research or a hundred other reasons).
I would love to read the story that the headline promised, one day. Today does not seem to be that day.
I should hope that you all realize that there’s a difference between “feeling like you’re being lied to” and “actually being lied to,” much less “being able to prove that you’re actually being lied to.”
Journalists have to deal with facts, with things that are verifiable in some way. Calling someone a liar without any evidence is a sure-fire way of getting sued for libel, even if it wasn’t bad journalism to make baseless accusations.
I’m sure politicians lie all the time — but the thing that separates the journalists from the bloggers and talking heads is that the journalist will do the work to uncover the truth that proves a politician a liar.
@ M.M. Robare:
“…the journalist will do the work to uncover the truth that proves a politician a liar.”
What planet are you living on? I’d like to move there.
While I agree that NPR reporting is generally shallow, tepid and subservient to authority, it’s worth pointing out that just last night, ATC had a story about a major lie of the Romney campaign, and characterized it as such. Ari Shapiro reported: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/08/22/159791065/despite-fact-checks-romney-escalates-welfare-work-requirement-charge
It can be done. Here’s a (rare) example of one Australian journalist using facts to expose lying by the Federal Leader of the Opposition http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3573785.htm
We know the answer to this one, it’s “access”. If you call a politician a liar, in print or on the air, they’ll never talk to you or your organization again, and neither will any other politician. It doesn’t matter if your accusation was demonstrably, provably true. It doesn’t matter if you’re some obscure blogger or Walter friggin’ Cronkite. Use the L word, and your career is over.
Now, you could take that and run with it if you wanted to. You don’t *need* interviews with politicians to report on politics. You could simply report on their speeches and ads and press releases. But America’s current journalistic culture holds, wrongly or rightly, that this is not Serious Political Reporting and that it Won’t Sell.
the thing that separates the journalists from the bloggers and talking heads is that the journalist will do the work to uncover the truth that proves a politician a liar.
I think Matthew Robare is in for a rude awakening when he graduates from fourth grade.
Fox was created to get away from what they call the “lame stream” media. In other words, they wanted to be the mouthpiece for the GOP and Tea Party, and to guide and format the lies coming from those organizations. MSNBC came along to do the same thing for the Democrats and Progressives–out of need to combat Fox. CNN is somewhere in-between, waffling and wanting to find something that will sound “exciting,” but which is usually pure BS. The old network (CBS, ABC, NBC) stations are no longer useful–as they have pushed aside by the cable stations–blasting away 24-7 and repeating the same crap all day, everyday. Public TV has attempted to address the intellectual side of the news, but no one wants to think and study the news anymore. It’s all about entertainment, lies, crap, and repetition. The majority of the American audience is largely a bunch of non thinkers.
The reason why Seabrook continued reporting lies and was so complicit in deceiving her listeners was that was the job she was hired to do. Those are the unstated requirements. Had she done something different she may have been admonished or replaced for by ignoring the ideal of “objectivity.” Her truth telling behavior could mark her as unprofessional, maybe even frivolous.
Admonishment or replacement is rarely necessary. If she were recognized as the type of person who would behave differently in the job she would not have been hired for it in the first place.
Very few of the people that make it into these media jobs believe they are doing anything wrong at all. They are doing the job they are being paid to do. To them, their critics must be uninformed. Otherwise the critics wouldn’t insist that they violate professional standards by ignoring the deception and instead telling what they know. That would make them unprofessional frivolous people and they aren’t that. They are professionals.
Good to see Seabrook wised up. Those with any critical thinking skills left MSM(that would include NPR) years ago. There is little or no truth in the owned media
Because they’re not journalists, they’re paid propagandists. Like prostitutes but with a lot less integrity. When the SHTF they should get the first bullets.
Doesn’t New York Times v. Sullivan (376 U.S. 254 (1964)) still apply when a newspaper reporter quotes a politician’s lie in his/her story?
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.
You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300
million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated
its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce
a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars
in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s
responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this
common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a
Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force
the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating
and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He
and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his
veto if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of
incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.
When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what
exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.
If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan …
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it
that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish;
to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators,
to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like
“the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from
doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.
They, and they alone, have the power.
They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees…
We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.
Apparently the job of a reporoter is not to report the emperor has no clothes, but to praise his fashion sense but privately complain it is not real, not notincing the part the reporter is playing in advancing the spin by repeating it…
I assume Jim is quoting Charlie Reese. In any case, he has defined the problem and put the blame on all the appropriate parties. The problem is that our politicians are spineless and would rather have the lobbiests do their research (one said: “we need the lobbiests to tell us how to vote…”) or have their staff to it (and hire people who can do it well). In stead they whine about the number of pages in the bills and how difficult their life is, i.e., it’s really hard to get to National to catch the plane home on Thurs. afternoon, especially if I don’t get priority parking. Getting re-elected has become far more important than serving the people you were elected to serve.
Some of us do try to throw the bums out. Unfortunately, there is a large group of uninformed voters who are more willing to assign all the power to the president and continue to vote for the dodos who actually have it. Not thinking has become the American way of life.
Has anyone actually checked out her website decodedc.com ? The few blogs she has posted have little to no “decoding” and are in line with the same type of shallow reporting she did for NPR. There is no hard hitting investigative journalism there. There is no deconstruction of lies and political speech. I was hopeful that Seabrook’s project would do what it purported to do. It should not be that hard for someone with a journalism degree, access to Google and LexisNexis, and connections inside government to expose the everyday lies and distortions that come out of Washington and a compliant press corp. Maybe Seabrook will eventually get to that sort of work. For now, based on the generic (read: safe) populism I’ve heard her espouse, and her numerous promotional appearances, she seems to be more interested in branding. In a perfect world, the quality of the product you create would establish your brand. Politics, business, and the media prove otherwise. It isn’t that the quality of your product doesn’t affect your brand, it’s just that the effectiveness of your pr campaign has a much greater impact…
Oh, and whoever said that MSNBC was created as a liberal alternative (and I would dispute just how much of the programming has a liberal perspective) obviously doesn’t remember that the network at its founding was home to Laura Ingram, Ann Coulter, John Gibson. The network was also home to Michael Savage for a while. And this same network, still in it’s early years fired Phil Donahue for being skeptical in the build-up to the Iraq War… but I don’t live in the United States of Amnesia. I live in a place where history happened as it happened, not as I choose to remember it.
Even in an NPR story *about* how fact-check organizations all say Romney’s “Obama’s gutting welfare reform work requirements,” is false, NPR manages not to come down on the side of truth and accuracy.
NPR never says anything like “the fact check organizations are correct; Romney’s claims are false.”
Instead, NPR muddies the issue further by casting more doubt on the trustworthyness of the fact-checkers with quotes like: “I think we always have to look at who the fact checkers are,” Ken Mohn said. “There’s lots of … groups that purport themselves to be neutral, nonpartisan, but often are [partisan].” Also: “When told that’s not actually what had happened, Testa replied: “At this point, [I] don’t know exactly what is true and what isn’t, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket, and I do not trust Obama.”
Republicans freely use the word “lies” while Democrats equivocate with weaker words like “extreme views” or “unsupported claims.”
*sigh* As an independent voter with historic heros from both parties (Roosevelt, Eisenhower, LBJ, Carter, Lincoln,) who cares deeply about truth and accuracy in very complex issues, is it any wonder I feel so frustrated and hopeless?
I remember when that NPR story started, my ears perked up and I thought how different, and welcome, it was that they were going to tell this story. But I was frustrated with where the story went. They interviewed and quoted a lot of Republicans and then spent a lot of time on one guy’s claim about racism, which was very much off-topic and irrelevant, and even giving yet another Republican the opportunity to tell lies about the other guy’s racism claim. They ended the story with one of the mainstream media’s usual non-conclusive non-committal statements.
“There seems to be a big leap of logic in this article. She feels like she is ‘lied to all day every day’ somehow becomes ‘reporters can’t report the lies’. Perhaps it is true but she didn’t say that anywhere in the quote.”
If you heard any of her reporting on NPR, you would know that she apparently couldn’t report to us about the lies.
“Oh, and whoever said that MSNBC was created as a liberal alternative (and I would dispute just how much of the programming has a liberal perspective) obviously doesn’t remember that the network at its founding was home to Laura Ingram, Ann Coulter, John Gibson… also home to Michael Savage… fired Phil Donahue…”
Thank you, Mr. Freeman. I was thinking something similar.
“Doesn’t New York Times v. Sullivan (376 U.S. 254 (1964)) still apply when a newspaper reporter quotes a politician’s lie in his/her story?”
What is this about?
Jim summed it up. The politicians are in it just for their own aims. We don’t really have representatives in our government. How can we fix this when they have all the money and control?
Umm,
well, I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the mass media has conglomerated quite a bit over the last couple decades, and these conglomerations send lots of money to Congress. Why would you expect these conglomerates to then publish accusations of lying about the people they are sending money to? Further, given the popularity of Fox’s propaganda machine, why should we expect others in the same business to do something different? It’s the Entertainment Industry, didn’t you know?
I listen to NPR on my work commutes and I don’t think it’s any better or worse than the other corporate media, it’s just a different flavor.
My guess is that their response would be that they are merely news “reporters” and must maintain a neutral stance. Of course if the reporting amounts to “such and such GOP senator continues to claim that Obama is a Muslim and a bunch of other nonsense”, but then no opposing view, or, rather, no position is taken on the veracity of those statements, then what we have is pure propoganda.
NPR is frequently held up as a “liberal elite” institution, and somehow is seen as more intellectual – I think the “intellectual” bit comes from the overall lack of teeth and/or humor in the broadcasts – but in this election season (which started, what, 3 years ago? I can’t remember anymore…) their reporting every day is littered with quotes and soundbites from Republicans or the Tea Party which go unchallenged and without comment. If the Tea Party issues a statement “Obama is going to make the sun rise in the West!”, is it valid “reporting” to merely repeat the claim unchallenged? Or is there a duty to the public to exercise a little of that alleged intellect and actually provide some truth? It is possible – and NECESSARY – to be an objective reporter of the news of the world while parsing out for listeners what is real and what is not.
Both sides lie, and both should be called on it when it happens. But the GOP/Tea Party is much, much more organized in their party-line propoganda that gets repeated ad nauseum than the Dems. It has reached a point in the last 20 years where the Right will say whatever they feel is needed to “win”. Truth and good of the country are far, far away from their real concerns.
Andrea Seabrook and other Capitol Hill reporters of course would never call out the lies in a noisy or public matter – they are following the orders of their news organization, which does not want to get “banned”. This has been a frequent complaint of White House reporters for many years – you have to keep things friendly, or else you lose access.
So much for democracy, truth and freedom. Sorry for the long rant.
I agree.Hold our political leaders to their promises.
“If i don’t turn this economy around in three years I will be a one term president”.Barack Obama said that.Lets all agree to hold him to his words and swear not to vote for him.