Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!… they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN… same clips. CBS… same clips. ABC… same clips. Parsing Sotomayor’s 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments! None bothered to say who had dug them up; none offered a smidgen of context. They all just accepted the apparent import of the clips, the substance of which was sure to trouble any fair-minded viewer. By the end of the day just about every American with a TV set had heard the “make policy” and “Latina woman” comments. By the end of the nightly news summaries, millions who had never heard of Sonia Sotomayor knew her not only as Obama’s pick, but as a judge who felt superior by reason of her gender and ethnicity, and as a liberal activist determined to “make policy” from the federal bench. And wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that all these great news organizations, functioning independently -- because this, after all, is the advantage of having multiple news-gathering sources in a democracy -- had come up with exactly the same material in advance?
Obviously not. What happened was that they got the clip from conservative activists -- along with an assurance that this would become a big story (a promise they were in the position to make good on, since they were planning to freak out over it and make it a big story) -- and the networks ran it.
This process -- political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts -- is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery...
The attack that political operatives fashioned from their work was neither unusual nor particularly effective. It succeeded in shaping the national debate over her nomination for weeks, but more serious assessments of her record would demolish the caricature soon enough, and besides, the Democrats have a large majority in the Senate; her nomination was approved by a vote of 68–31. The incident does, however, illustrate one consequence of the collapse of professional journalism. Work formerly done by reporters and producers is now routinely performed by political operatives and amateur ideologues of one stripe or another, whose goal is not to educate the public but to win. This is a trend not likely to change.
It's like I wrote earlier today; TV news may report, but they don't actually do any journalism. What they do is report what one side says, then report the response, and never actually bother to help you figure out who's telling the truth. What they report is technically factual, in that such-and-such a person actually did say something, but there's absolutely no effort to determine whether what they said was true. For that, they really on other political activists and PR firms on the other side of the political spectrum. As a result, you don't learn jack. What you get is the political game played out on your TV -- an absolutely factual, but just as absolutely fact-free, representation of the debate.
My advice? Use the TV for watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Family Guy. Don't use it to inform yourself, because (for the most part) that's just not going to work. For that, you're going to have to read a newspaper or magazine.
