Marty Kaplan comments [1] on a report by Glenn Greenwald from the National Press Club this week. One panelist, Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe responded to criticism by bloggers that journalists are not doing their job:
Our role is to ask questions and get information. It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender… It’s not a political exercise, it’s a journalistic exercise. And I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates more than journalistic ones.
Greenwald’s response is that journalism is not stenography:
The reality, of course, is that most media-criticizing bloggers do not want journalists to be “political advocates.” They want them to do what journalists are supposed to do — which is not, contrary to Wolffe’s belief, sit around with their good, trustworthy, nice-guy friends in the White House and simply “ask questions” and “get information,” but instead to scrutinize that information, treat it with doubt, investigate it before passing it along to determine whether it’s true. And the reason bloggers want them to do that, the reason that bloggers demand more of journalists like Wolffe, is not because bloggers are enraged, confused, unreasonable partisans. It’s because bloggers are American citizens who are deeply concerned about what has happened to their country over the last six years and criticize the press and demand more of it because Wolffe’s overly-friendly relationships with Bush officials like Tony Snow, and Wolffe’s simplistic and lazy conception of what a reporter does, produces extremely destructive and shoddy “journalism.”
Mary Kaplan is the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as well as the founder and director of the Norman Lear Center [2]. Kaplan has focused his research on the content and regulation of local television news. I previously wrote about Kaplan here. [3]
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