Yeah, the so-called news media really sucks

Memo To Chuck Todd and NBC: Your Science Coverage Is Awful, Too

by Rich Trzupek

Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.

Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.

My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts.

Sounds entirely reasonable, but in practice there are experts and then there are experts. Those experts whose message dovetails nicely with the underlying media narrative of liberal heroes and conservative villains are given prominent placement in stories and an authoritative voice. Those experts whose messages are perceived to lend aid and comfort to corporate concerns usually tossed in near the back end of a story and they are generally made to sound defensive, rather than in command of their subject matter. For the MSM, environmental groups “say,” while industry guys like me “claim.”

It’s maddening, because there is absolutely no reason why any reporter, no matter how badly he or she failed every chemistry and physics class in college, could not find a scientist or other technical expert who could break the skeptical side of a technical issue like the global warming debate down into digestible, understandable bits. There are plenty of us around. Just off the top my head, there’s Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, Richard Lindzen, Steve Milloy and Steve McIntyre. The left wing narrative dismisses experts like these as either: a) propagandists in the employ of Exxon-Mobil, or b) irrelevant because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Neither argument stands up, but skeptics are, according to the liberal playbook, “denialists” unworthy of attention, which is a convenient way to avoid having to think about the other side of an issue that, in reality, does indeed have two sides...

See the original for the rest and links: http://bigjournalism.com/rtrzupek/2010/03/09/memo-to-chuck-todd-and-nbc-your-science-coverage-is-awful-too/