I’m self-taught but I consider myself a professional journalist. I do try not to have a chip on my shoulder about being small, independent and self-taught. But, perhaps because of those things, I am particularly zealous about matters of professional quality, standards and ethics among journalists.
There’s another, less self-involved reason for my zeal: I love journalism. I have the highest esteem for the purpose and the principles of the Fourth Estate.
So, when I see a high-profile representative of our profession making the rest of us look bad, I have to ask …
At what point do associations of professional journalists like the SPJ or the ONA stand up and say that an individual does not meet the standards of our profession and, therefore, they are not a journalist?
I got to thinking about this when I came across this. This isn’t about a mistake or erroneous fact in a newscast. That happens sometimes, and there are professional practices and procedures in the field that we use to correct those factual errors.
But journalists don’t get to just make stuff up.
The flap over Korans down toilets, and Dan Rather’s National Guard-gate were discussed exhaustively, but I almost never hear anybody in the profession taking O’Reilly to task for his very sloppy (to put it generously) work.
Given the size of his audience, I think he is doing more to discredit the professional than almost any score of others making honest mistakes.
Why are we silent? Or are we? Maybe I’m traveling in the wrong crowds.
Maybe we’ve decided that, with the advent of “citizen journalism,” professional standards are no longer relevant.
Maybe journalism has been re-defined as something that doesn’t necessarily involve getting your facts straight, and I just hadn’t heard about it.
I don’t know. You tell me.
About Dawn Rivers Baker
I’m coming around to the idea that “journalism” is a more useful term than “journalist.” Not everything that a person labelled with the term “journalist” does is “journalism.” An example? No one would dispute that Carl Hiaasen is a journalist when he writes for the Miami Herald. But is “Skinny Dip” journalism? Nah, it’s a novel.
So I think we’d be better off focusing media criticism “what is journalism”, rather than “who is a journalist.” That said, there are some folks who are more than eager to trash O’Reilly, and everyone else at Fox, for journalistic lapses. (Even the LAT’s former boss, John Carroll, joined in at one point.) But the right wing in this country has an effective echo chamber to amplify attacks on media personalities it deems hostile to the right. Neither the left nor nonpartisan critics in this country have developed the same resource to help them keep the public’s attention and digust focused on their targets.
Well, I’m not advocating for personal attacks against anybody or anything, and I’m not coming at this from a partisan point of view. But remember when the Dan Rather thing happened, how much discussion and Monday morning quarterbacking went on among ourselves? Same thing happened with the Koran defiling story.
Unless I missed it, I don’t see those conversations taking place about what Fox News does.
I’m just curious about why that seems to be. Our professional discourse doesn’t have the same kind of partisan echo chamber as the public is gifted with, so it seems odd that that same Monday morning quarterbacking isn’t happening with respect to them.
Unless it happened some years ago, and I missed it … and at this point everybody is so used to them that they don’t talk about it anymore?