media

The Crisis in Journalism — More Reporting Needed

December 20, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

There is a lot of dither about the future of journalism. Make no mistake, it is the essential commodity.

If you know what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine or Syria, it is because brave journalists told you. Not the government, not some academic institution, not artificial intelligence, and not hearsay from your friends or from a political party.

The crisis in journalism isn’t that it failed analytically in the last election, or that we — an irregular army of individualists — failed, but that journalism has run out of money and its political enemies have found that the courts (and the fear of libel prosecution) can terrorize the companies that own the media.

In 2016, the gossipy site Gawker was sued by the pro wrestler and political figure Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was financed by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Now come two suits, filed by President-elect Donald Trump: One that he won against ABC News, and one to be filed against the Des Moines Register. It is reported that conservative interests plan a series of these legal interventions against the media.

This will have a frightening effect on news coverage. When there is fear of prosecution, there is less likely to be investigative news coverage.

So far, the most troublesome of the prosecutions has been the one against ABC News. The network caved in early. It agreed to pay $15 million plus legal fees into a fund for what will be the first Trump presidential library.

Could it be that ABC is owned by Disney, and Disney wants good relations with the incoming administration?

However, a much bigger problem faces the media than the fear of prosecution. It is that the old media, led by local and regional newspapers, is dying. Although there are thousands of podcasts, they don’t take up the slack.

You could listen to an awful lot of podcasts and not know what is going on. State houses and local courts aren’t being covered. The sanitizing effect of press surveillance has been withdrawn and, frankly, God help the poor defendants in a local court where there is a disproportionate desire to plead cases, to avoid honest trials even when there is conspicuous doubt.

I never tire of repeating what Dan Raviv, former CBS News correspondent, said to me once, “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so. However, there is a problem: Journalism needs to be concentrated in a newspaper or a broadcast outlet where there is enough revenue to do the job. Otherwise, you get what I think of as the upside-down pyramid of more and more commentary, based on less and less reporting.

We are awash in commentary, some of it very good and some of it trash. It is all based on news gathered by those news organizations that can afford to employ a phalanx of reporters.

Regional newspapers used to have Washington bureaus and foreign bureaus. At one time, the Baltimore Sun had 12 overseas bureaus. Now it has none.

This is the story nationwide. Fewer people actually cover the news, digging, checking and telling us what they have found.

Throughout the history of journalism, technology has been disruptive, sometimes advantageously and sometimes less so. Modern printing presses developed at the end of the 19th century were important boosters, as was the invention of the Linotype machine in 1884.

On the negative side, television killed off evening papers, and podcasts are taking a toll on radio. Now, the internet and tech companies have siphoned off most of the revenue that supported newspapers, radio and television.

As one can’t have a free and fair society without vibrant journalism, we clearly need a new paradigm which is internet-based news organizations that are large enough and rich enough to do the job in the time-honored way with reporters asking questions, whether it is at the courthouse, the White House or on the battlefield.

There is a clear choice: News and informed analysis, or rumor and conspiracy.

Denigration of the Media Has Become a Political Mainstay

February 2, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

In the 1990s, someone wrote in The Weekly Standard — it may well have been Matt Labash — that for conservatives to triumph, they had to attack the messenger rather than the message. His advice was to go after the media, not the news.

Attacking the messenger was all well and good for the neoconservatives. Still, their less-thoughtful successors, MAGA supporters, are killing the messenger.

The press — always identified as the “liberal media” — is now often seen, due to relentless denigration, as a force for evil, a malicious contestant on the other side.

No matter that there is no liberal media beyond what has been fabricated from political ectoplasm. Traditionally, most proprietors have been conservative, and many, but not most reporters, have been liberal.

It surprises people to learn that when you work in a large newsroom, you don’t know the political opinions of most of your colleagues. I have worked in many newsrooms over the decades and tended to know more about my colleagues’ love lives than their voting preferences.

This philosophy of “kill the messenger” might work briefly, but down the road, the problem is no messenger, no news, no facts. The next stop is anarchy and chaos — you might say, politics circa 2024.

Add to that social media and its capacity to spread innuendo, half-truth, fabrication and common ignorance.

There is someone who writes to me almost weekly about media’s failures — and I assume, ergo, my failure — and he won’t be mollified. To him, that irregular army of individuals who make a living reporting are members of a pernicious cult. To him, there is a shadow world of the media.

I have stopped remonstrating with him on that point. On other issues, he is lucid and has views worth knowing on the Middle East and Ukraine.

That poses the question: How come he knows about these things? The answer, of course, is that he read about them, saw the news on television or heard it on radio.

Reporters in Gaza and Ukraine risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, to tell the world what is going on in these and other very dangerous places. No one accuses them of being left or right of center.

But send the same journalists to cover the White House, and they are assumed to be unreliable propagandists, devoid of judgment, integrity or common decency, so enslaved to liberalism that they will twist everything to suit a propaganda purpose.

That thought is displayed every time Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is interviewed on TV. Stefanik attacks the interviewer and the institution. Her aim is to silence the messenger and leave the impression that she isn’t to be trifled with by the media, shades of Margaret Thatcher. But I interviewed “The Iron Lady,” and I can say she answered questions, hostile or otherwise.

Stefanik’s recent grandstanding on TV hid her flip-flop on the events on Jan. 6, 2021, and failed to tell us what she would do if she were to win the high office she clearly covets.

I have been in the journalist’s trade too long to pretend that we are all heroes, all out to get the truth. But I have observed that journalists tell the story pretty well, to the best of their varied abilities.

We make mistakes. We live in terror of that. An individual here and there may fabricate — as Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, did when he was a correspondent in Brussels. Some may indeed have political agendas; the reader or listener will soon twig that.

The political turmoil we are going through is partly a result of media denigration. People believe what they want to believe; they can seize any spurious supposition and hold it close as a revealed truth.

You can, for example, believe that ending natural gas development in the United States will lead to carbon reduction worldwide, or you can believe that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection with loss of life and the trashing of the nation’s great Capitol Building was an act of free speech.

One of the more dangerous ideas dancing around is that social media and citizen journalists can replace professional journalists. No, no, a thousand times no! We need the press with the resources to hire excellent journalists to cover local and national news, and to send, or station, staff around the world.

Have you seen anyone covering the news from Ukraine or Gaza on social media? There is commentary and more commentary on social media sites, all based on the reporting of those in danger and on the spot.

This is a trade of imperfect operators but an essential one. For better or for worse, we are the messengers.

You Need to Be Brave for This New World

June 1, 2018 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Pondering the future requires an extrapolation from a data point in the present. But different data points give very different futures. Beware of the prognosticators.

Take this as a data point: Stephen Entin, senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, a think tank devoted to tax studies since 1937, predicts that with an aging population and low birthrates, we’re going to need more immigrants to fill the federal and state coffers with their taxes. We’re also going to need hundreds of thousands of workers for health care and aged care in the years ahead, he says.

Or take this as a data point: MIT Sloan Professor Tom Kochan fears that artificial intelligence will substitute for millions of employees. Retraining is possible, but can you see a long-haul truck driver pushing wheelchairs in an assisted-living facility? Not easily.

Upheaval in work is the most predictable aspect of the future.

It is, if you will, already arriving in the workplace. New techniques and new concepts of what is work are afoot.

The old concept is that a person leaves school, gets a job and signs on to the social/work contract — gets company-paid benefits and expects security and stability. The infrastructure of society pointed the way to employer-employee model.

The new concept is the gig economy, where contract work and freelancing rule. The work/social infrastructure where medical insurance, Social Security and retirement are part of the deal is dying. But a one has yet to emerge in concept and in law.

Business is in the throes of its own future adjustment. Take 3D printing, more correctly called additive manufacturing. What was novelty a decade ago is now a tool used in industrial plants across the country. Instead of taking a chunk of metal, say aluminum, and cutting and lathing it to make a part, which wasted most of the metal, there’s no waste with 3D printing.

Now to make a part, you print it from metal powder to a design lodged in a computer. The saving in material, shipping and manpower is enormous.

And additive manufacturing, just like everything else on the shop floor, can be automated. Machines can sinter — the term for 3D printing — through the night with only artificial intelligence supervision.

There’s a new existential worry in every large enterprise in the United States, from banking to manufacturing, from electricity generation to hospital management and from building crane operation to pharmaceutical design: cyber-vulnerability.

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in cyber-war, but cyber-war is interested in you.

I’ve interviewed widely on the subject, from top academics to some of the most successful cyber-security entrepreneurs, to National Security Agency sources. The story is the same everywhere: Nothing connected to computers is entirely safe; and if it’s safe today, will it be tomorrow? That plague, like the plagues of old, will, I’m assured, be with us for decades, if not centuries to come.

Cyber-defenders build, cyber-hackers build around. It’s a version of what one secretary of defense, Harold Brown, said about the Soviet threat in the Cold War: “We build, they build.”

The changes are all around the home: Everything has changed since the day of the black AT&T phone, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Your packages may be delivered by drone, your phone service will be entirely mobile, and your life will be dictated by electronic secretarial aids. Alexa is just the beginning. With artificial intelligence, these robots will talk back to us and maybe argue, shudder the thought.

I pity the dogs. We had a dog that would be very upset if she heard my wife, a talk show regular, on the television when she was also elsewhere in the house. Dogs are sensitive to these things.

What if man’s best friend, eternal unquestioning companion, develops a strong affection for the electronic assistant and changes loyalties, especially if the gadget is feeding the dog? Will it be as Julius Caesar might have said, “Et tu, Fido?”

Photo: Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

How the Ghost of Watergate Haunts This Election

May 8, 2016 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

There is a line of reasoning in political circles which says that Barack Obama created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I aver that Donald Trump is a creation of the post-Watergate media. Collectively we have made running for office so absolutely awful, so fraught for families and careers that only two types of office seekers have the fortitude for public life: the grotesques, who are outside of the norms of the political culture, and the shopworn.

Both are on display as we trudge toward November wondering how in a country of so much talent so little of it has been on the ballot in this primary season.

The rot, I submit, began with Watergate when publishers and editors came to believe that the mission of the media was not only to scrutinize the policy views of elected officials but also to rip down the bedroom door, peer into the piggy bank and examine every word in print or on tape that a candidate has uttered since high school, whether in jest or earnest.

We confused personal rectitude — or rectitude according to the norms of public morality of the day — with sagacity, statesmanship and talent to lead. In the days before Watergate, Jack Kennedy could do with impunity what got Bill Clinton impeached.

Now that Watergate is 44 years behind us, its legacies are many, but two stand out. The first is that journalists in large numbers were suddenly attracted to covering politics in a way that fewer had been previously. The late Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered 18 wars, noted disapprovingly that young journalists nowadays aspire to cover politics when they used to aspire to be foreign correspondents.

Even in these days of restrained budgets, Capitol Hill, and to a lesser extent the White House, is flooded with journalists, from the national media to the smallest newsletter. Politics is big news and that is good for business. As the incredibly successful Politico editors like to say, “flood the zone.”

But Congress is a deliberative body and moves slowly, so the news maw is fed with gossip. When the secrets of the budget are not clear or hard to get at, there is always the personal conduct of those working on the budget. If a member of Congress goes out to lunch with someone, anyone, a family member, it will be reported somewhere.

Being in public life is now like being on trial day in and day out without knowing what evidence the prosecution has or when it will bring it forward. In fact, being in public life has become God awful and no talented person ought to want to do it.

No wonder no one holding public office wants to stray from the talking points. A few stray words can bring you down, unless you are so outlandish that you have nothing say but stray words in lieu of coherent ones, like Donald Trump.

Watergate washed away unwritten rules under which what political figures did after hours was not fair game. I once saved a cabinet member from a situation with two “ladies” who did not have his best interests at stake. Everyone knew why a certain congressman liked to travel to Mexico — and it was not for tacos. Publicly, it was debated whether the statesman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan drank too much and no less a person than that public scold, George Will, defended the New York senator by concluding that the great man drank just enough.

Olin “Tiger” Teague, a revered chairman of the House Science Committee, served drinks to his guests at 11 a.m. — and if you wanted an audience, you enjoyed a glass of bourbon with the Texas congressman. Today, you are lucky to get a plastic bottle of water during a Capitol Hill visit.

A Capitol Hill secretary of my acquaintance was proud of the number of congressmen she had bedded, including some in leadership.

The post-Watergate, unwritten rules of scrutiny, which imply that in private conduct there are clues to public greatness, rather than bringing a new morality to politics, only frightened off the talented, the effective and the patriotic and created a space for the outrageous and the shopworn. Look to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and wonder no longer how we got that unappetizing choice to lead the nation. — For InsideSources Photo Credit: Pete Sousa

The Loud Silence from Islam

January 10, 2015 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

A dark shadow passed over Paris, the City of Light, on Wednesday, January 7.. Well-organized, well-trained killers murdered 13 people in the name of Allah. As Shakespeare said 500 years earlier, about the heinous murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”

Indeed, recent horrors in the name of Allah have been so gruesome it is impossible to conceive the mutilated reason, the perverted concept of God’s will, and the unvarnished rage that has subverted the once admired religion.

The killers are ruthless and depraved, but those who inspire them are evil and those who tolerate them are guilty.

In 2005, when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed and riots were stirred up against the publishers, a meeting was arranged at a community room in the basement of The Washington Times. It was not organized by the newspaper but, as I recall, by an interfaith group. There were several fringe “let’s be nice” speakers before the main event.

The main event was the Danish ambassador and, to a lesser extent, myself. The ambassador spoke about life in Denmark and what the Danish government would do to understand and listen to the concerns of the Muslim community. My role was to defend and explain the Western concept of freedom of speech and the place satire. The overflow audience, which by dress and appearance was dominated by emigrants from Pakistan, was implacable.

I have spoken to some hostile audiences in my time, but this one was special: No compromise, no quarter. Nor interest in cultures other than their own. Ugly and insatiable rage came out in their questions.

They did not want to know about the values of the country that had given their brethren sanctuary, education, healthcare and a decent life. My audience only wanted to know why the blasphemers in Denmark and Norway (the cartoons were reprinted there) were not being punished. For good measure, they wanted to know why the American media was so committed to heresy against Islam. No thought that they had moved voluntarily to the United States and were enjoying three of its great freedoms: freedom to assemble, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

They wanted absolute subjection of all Western values to the dictates of Islam. They had been fired up and they were angry, self-righteous and obdurate.

In 2009, I was invited to a conference of world religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. There were maybe 100 religions present, but at a featured session the conference degenerated into an Islamic diatribe against sexuality and the treatment of women (mostly in advertising) in the West. No dialogue. No discussion. Absolute certainty.

I mention this because of the reaction to the barbarity in Paris, and to a string of other barbarous murders across the world, from Muslims has been so muted.

“Je Suis Charlie” said millions of people in dozens of countries in sympathy with the murdered journalists and with their fight for press freedom. From Muslim leaders in the West, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the United States, there were statements of condemnation but no sense of outrage. From the bulk of the followers of Islam there was nothing. There never is. Not when innocent children are shot in their schools, or when aid workers are beheaded, or when or when satirical journalists are executed. The Muslim multitudes have acquiesced to evil.

When will those who believe deeply in Islam take to the streets to denounce the excesses of the few? After the horror in Paris, British Muslims took to the BBC to mildly criticize the murders, but more to vigorously demand a better deal for Muslims in Britain.

The medieval certainty of the leadership of Islam is endorsed by the silence of its congregants. The silence of the millions gives a kind of absolution to the extremists, intoxicated with fervor and hate. It will all go on until the good Muslims stand up and are heard. The guilt of silence hangs over Islam. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Where Are the Dog Days of Yesteryear?

July 30, 2010 by White House Chronicle 4 Comments

The Greeks started the whole thing by calling sultry summer weather “Dog Days,” blaming it on the brightest star in the sky besides the Sun, Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. But it was the Romans who really took it seriously: They sacrificed brown dogs to appease the rage of Sirius and ameliorate the weather.

Now, could it be that the Dog Days in Washington are a thing of the past?

The weather has been foul enough, but where is the cessation of news? Where are the soft, feature articles masquerading as news that marked the metaphorical Dog Days? Where are the lesser politicians trying to get noticed for bills they have introduced that will died in committee?

It used to be at this time of year, when Congress was preparing for its long summer recess, things just slowed down, practically flat-lined. Washington emptied; the traffic thinned; no reservations were needed in restaurants; and clubs, like the Metropolitan and the Cosmos, opened their doors to non-members.

While there has been some summer flight, the journalistic and political intensity continues apace. Not only is this an election year, but the whole structure of political reporting has been revolutionized.

In a time of journalistic agony in most publications, political reporting is booming, fed by new technologies and cable news. Well, that is on the surface; out of sight, the furnace is fed by money, lobbying money.

If you want Congress to pass legislation favorable to your interests, or not to pass something unfavorable, then you hire a slew of lobbyists. They, in turn, place “advocacy” ads and the political media are off to the races. These ads appear on air, on line, on paper and on our doorsteps. Some media outlets charge hefty subscription fees, like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, others are given away. But all seek and promise to lift the veil of secrecy in Washington.

The reporters—for Roll Call, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and hundreds of blogs clustered around publications and television channels, mainstream newspapers and wire services–slice, dice, puree, chop, blend, mix, pound, julienne, mince, whip and, sometimes, flavor the news. But mostly they feed the rapacious, 24-hour news cycle by blowing the slightest slip of the tongue, the smallest infraction of decorum, the inadvertent utterance into national events.

The remarkable new entry in the field is Politico, which exploded on the scene with the considerable fortune of Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive officer of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and elsewhere. As an example of innovative multi-platform publishing, it is an exemplar.

The impact in the surge in political reporting across the board is questionable: too many peas of news in mattresses of words. There is no time to investigate, and none to ponder. Better to be first and wrong than second and right.

One result of the swelling ranks of political reporter is politicians have clammed up. It is unwise for them to say anything that has not been vetted by their staffs. Hence, their infatuation with social media.

Here in high summer, one realizes that the glorious lazy, hazy Dog Days are a thing of the past; a time to do that interview you had put off, to try to be little more creative with your writing, to talk the bureau chief or editor into an off-beat story. No, instead, hundreds of political reporters are looking for something, anything, to fill today’s void. Was a congressman seen with a pretty woman (Damn, it is his daughter!)? Did a senator misspell something on her Facebook page?

It is this frenzy for faux news that brought us stories like Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and the endless sightings of President Obama with known socialists? Whew!

Bring back the ancient Dog Days, but spare the brown dogs.

Alas, by Their Gaffes We Will Know Them

May 11, 2008 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Just a month ago, the Washington press corps was still enthralled with this presidential election year. It was packed with firsts: For example, it is the first time since the 1952 election that neither an incumbent president nor an incumbent vice president is a candidate in the general election; the first time a woman is running for president; and the first credible African-American candidate is on the stump.

Now, the joy has gone out of the thing. Rather than covering great events, most reporters I know feel that they are on a kind of gaffe watch. Gaffes are important in presidential politics, and a single misstatement can change the odds dramatically. John McCain may yet rue that he seems to be confused by the Sunnis and the Shiites, and Iraq and Iran. Barack Obama must wish that he had never diagnosed the white working-class male as “bitter.”And Hillary Clinton, a lady with an eye for her place in history, must loathe the fact that she was the first to play the race card.

Because of the shallowness of this phase of the presidential race, trivia dominates.

Reporters hate, but they are also partly responsible for, the mid-election doldrums. They are sanctioned by tradition to question the company a candidate keeps, but they are not sanctioned to press that candidate on how he or she would staff their administration. So we know all we want to–and more–about their preachers, their spouses, their finances and their pastimes.

But to a much lesser extent, we know the policies that the candidates are predisposed to pursue. McCain, for example, favors a comprehensive health care system built around private insurance. Clinton leans towards a government-mandated system. And Obama, who has yet to clearly define his plan, seems to lean towards government mandates. But we do not know whether they could get their plans through Congress, or who would be the health care czar. In fact, we only have a hint of the direction in health care that the new president would like to go.

We really do not know how any of the candidates would pursue peace in the Middle East, or react to an increasingly bellicose Russia and an aggressive China. The candidates dare not tell us what they feel, for fear it will become a contentious part of the election.

The system demands that the candidates tell us what good people they are, not how they will govern. A soupcon of an idea, like suspending the gas tax, becomes a surrogate for a real energy policy.

Hundreds of very good reporters now feel frustrated. They feel they must write about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., when they know he will have no bearing on the way that a President Obama would govern. Likewise, they must dutifully cover Clinton riding in a pickup truck to prove her bona fides as a representative of the working class, when they know perfectly well that she has been riding in limos for decades and living the elite life, even if she is not an elitist.

Then there is McCain—the candidate that more reporters know personally than the other two–who is doing the Republican rounds, right hand extended, left hand clutching the talking points. The Straight Talk Express has become the Schmooze Local.

If reporters and commentators seem to want to show Clinton the door, it is no wonder. They do not dislike her personally, but they are desperate to get on with the main event. While they are on gaffe watch, they know that big issues are in abeyance, and that the Democratic contest has become a distraction and a bore.