RIP, political journalism

by: Eric B.

Sat Oct 06, 2012 at 12:01:55 PM EDT

First off, something for those of you who've never worked in a newsroom ... good scandal stories rarely start as anything but a source with an axe to grind. It's either a political opponent, a disgruntled employee, or a business competitor who has a little inside scoop and an incentive to see harm done to the target. The best example I've seen directly was how deeply emmeshed was the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe in the Jack Abramoff scandal. It didn't start with a reporter conducting a fishing expedition, but a conversation between a journalist and a tribal dissident. A couple months later, everyone knew that Jack Abramoff had ripped off the Tribe and played the chief for a fool. But, it all started with a tip. That's just how things work.

It's been about three or four days now since Progress Michigan dropped a very significant tip into the laps of the state's political reporting community. They published documents that are readily available in various local government offices and that if true (they are, I'm told) call into question not just the character of the sitting House Speaker but also call into question whether the policy program he's pursued in the state House can be legitimately described as service for business constituents or something entirely self-serving. We have an election in a month, and this is pretty important stuff.

The near-silence we've heard since is an embarrassment to the entire profession. Michigan Radio did a terrible job reporting on it, almost immdiately seeking out a rebuttal comment before it appears the reporter assigned the story did any research. They had something else the other day, one of those roundup discussions that invariably are lots of heat but no light. For reasons that confound me, Michigan Radio plays this all off as Progress Michigan versus Jase Bolger.

It's not. Progress Michigan has nothing to do with this story. Progress Michigan made the documents public, and its role is more like the tipster who hands you a plain manilla envelope that has hard copies of damning documents inside.

No serious reporter on Earth under those circumstances would take the contents of a plain manilla envelope and immediately do a story, attributing the allegations to an unnamed source. A serious reporter would take the contents of the envelope, verify them, and if then report on it. And, yes, a House Speaker's history of ethical lapses in business is serious enough to warrant scrutiny. This would be true under any circumstances, but is especially so considering his role in the Roy Schmidt election rigging scandal. If you're a political reporter and need to have parallels drawn here, you should really consider another line of work.

So, what's happened? I have three working theories. The first is that most of the journalists in the state who have the sort of experience to pull this off have left the industry. They're either in public relations, or got bought out and started raising llamas. What you have left are a bunch of people who don't know how to do this sort of story, and they have no one left at the media companies to provide guidance, since no one edits anymore. The second is that no one has any time anymore. The people left working at media companies don't have time to do the necessary legwork, so when confronted by a real story they punt. Used to be that you might be given time to work an important story. Now, there are daily publish requirements most places because quantity has been given a higher priority than quality. You get drek about polling, but you're never told whether the guy running to represent you can be trusted not to stuff cash into his own pockets the first chance he gets.

The third is that media outlets want, above all else, to avoid the taint of bias. If you say something negative about one candidate but not the other, you get criticized and accused of bias. No one wants that, so if you've got two guys running, and find out that one of them is a former Nazi concentration camp guard who later worked for Pol Pot and Idi Amin, you ignore that so you don't have to field complaints. We saw this one, by the way, last decade when the New York Times made the conscious decision to hold off on stories critical of George Bush Jr. because they were afraid they might make people vote for John Kerry and no one wanted to listen to Republicans complain about it ... even if the stories all turned out to be entirely true.

By the way, how at this point do you write an entire column about this race and not even mention any of this? I weep for the profession.