It broke at a bad time, certainly: late Friday afternoon is the worst. But this is Tuesday night, and it's as if it never happened.
One reference I did see was that it didn't say anything new. But of course it did, and I outlined many of those elements in my post. It clarified as never before the two separate challenges of the climate crisis--dealing with the effects and dealing with the causes, simultaneously. It quantified the crisis in terms of expected temperatures and time frames. It rejected the notion that some parts of the country or some parts of the world would not feel effects. And above all, it said outright that the crisis was already happening. It said all this with the highest authority so far.
And it's true that there were other important news events and stories. But there always are, and they are usually the kinds of events and stories that everybody is familiar with. Yes, the debt ceiling, gun violence, wars, etc. should all be prominently covered. But there is still room for more. And that room is typically crowded out by non-stories that the media does for no better reason than...the rest of the media is doing it.
The prime example in this time frame--since the Climate Assessment was made public--is the "controversy" over whether the second term Obama administration is "diverse" enough. How this story developed reminded me of a book I had already recalled when Jonathan Bernstein at his blog asked for titles of great books on politics and government. The book I named--and the book I thought of this weekend--was The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse.
Tim Crouse was the other guy that Rolling Stone sent to cover the 1972 presidential campaign, principally the McGovern campaign. Their prime guy was Hunter S. Thompson, but Thompson was so, well, quixotic that they wanted to have a, let us say sober assessment available as well, and that was Crouse.
But he used his time on the press bus to study the press and so he came up with The Boys on the Bus. It's a lively book, with portraits of media personalities of the time. I was briefly on that bus in 1972, after I'd read one of his Rolling Stone stories and chatted with Tim himself--I recall running into him in Harvard Yard at some point later on--and so I could see those folks through his eyes as well as mine. (And you couldn't believe how beautiful Connie Chung was in 1972. Television never did her justice.)
But the book also had a premise: pack journalism. Crouse described how everybody watched what the wire service reporters and the New York Times made the lead story, and that became everybody's lead story of the day. They were the lead wolves and the pack followed.
Maybe the reason that this book is still in print 40 years later is that the phenomenon is not an historical oddity. The media has changed immensely since then, but the basic practice of pack journalism has only gotten worse.
Now maybe the pack follows the hot YouTube video that everybody is tweeting about, or what outrage starts on the Drudge Report or whatever. But often enough, it's exactly the same--the New York Times has a lead story in the morning (which these days means posted in the middle of the night) and everybody follows.
That's exactly what happened with the Obama administration diversity story. Hours after it appeared in the New York Times it was a prime topic on every cable news show I saw (including simultaneous blather about it on CNN and MSNBC), as well as every political site and blog. And then well into the weekend. And then a question at the Obama news conference on Monday. While there were no questions on the Climate Assessment.
Now diversity may be an issue, but what else accounts for everybody discovering it on the same day? Pack journalism and nothing else. As it turns out, there isn't really very much substantive to say on the matter since, as the President pointed out, he's hardly even started appointing people to his cabinet and White House staff. But of course, debunking the story itself became a story, as in this one titled "The First Pointless Controversy of Obama's 2nd Term."
So let's review: chunks of finite print space, air time and attention span were devoted to speculation on a matter of some importance that was so incomplete that it clearly could not be proven either way, instead of a matter of transcendent importance that was in the act of being proven to be very highly consequential now and into the foreseeable and unimaginable future.
Pack journalism is not the only reason. But it is one that was clearly operating this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment