If you haven’t watched The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart interview CNBC’s Jim Cramer, please do so now. Stewart is getting wide-ranging praise for his prickly but non-yelling dressing down of Cramer and more generally CNBC. Arianna Huffington has gone so far as to wonder why CNN’s John King couldn’t have taken a similar approach with his softball interview with Dick Cheney this past weekend.
Fans of Stewart are familiar with his take-no-bull interviewing style. He’s done this to many a previous “guest”. And while he’s certainly freely opinionated himself, the refreshing aspect of his interviews is often simply that he forces people to confront facts (and often their own words) which contradict their public statements. As Kim has remarked on numerous occasions, “Why is Jon Stewart the only one who seems to have a TiVo?”
It is a sad state of affairs when a comedy fake news show is the source of some of the most pointed reporting on the air. In fairness, there are others on the air who seem to run in this same vein, feeling free to expose hypocrisy. Keith Olberman, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reillyand others will often have similar in-your-face confrontations (presented with varying degrees of rage). But in all those cases, as in Stewart’s, the “reporter” is more a paid commentator. These are not objective news reports adhering to journalistic standards. These are televised op-ed pieces.
What happened to the Edward R. Murrows of the world? Where are the Woodward and Bernsteins of modern journalism? Who champions the fair but truthful take-no-prisoners quest for truth? Let’s face it, if David Frost had approached Richard Nixon the way John King handled Dick Cheney, no one ever would have made a movie about it.
Huffington opines that reporters like King are too worried about future access. If King confronted Cheney, then he might not get future interviews with other Republicans, and that will make it hard to do his job. She’s likely right about that. Katie Couric is still taking flack for being tough on Sarah Palin. She was accused of partisanship and “gotcha journalism” because she wanted to reconcile Palin’s words with the facts. But isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do?
It seems that current reality is that public figures now know how to manipulate the press, and do so freely. Cramer speaks of this in his Stewart interview. He talks about getting reporters to write what he wanted to drive stock prices. The federal government has been accused of releasing pre-digested “news articles” for direct publication that amounted to little more than propaganda. And I’m sure Cheney had some pre-nup with CNN where John King could only ask certain questions and couldn’t play “gotcha” with him. CNN is well aware, that if they wouldn’t agree to the terms, some other network would.
The result is that mainstream journalism has lost its teeth. It competes for advertising dollars on brand and entertainment value, but the content it reports is little distinguished from any other news source. To that end, the loss of most of our country’s newspapers, or even news department/networks would be little missed. There are too many alternative low-cost ways to circulate the public information. The old business model for objective investigative reporting has failed. And I do hope another one emerges to take its place. In the meantime, we are left with listening to highly slanted investigative reporting from the likes of Olberman, Hannity, Dobbs, and even Stewart. However, this reporting clearly requires some post publication cognitive processing. It needs to be interpreted through corrective lenses which slant the news more into a centered orientation. The trouble is, many in the audience seem unaware they need glasses to watch this stuff.