I’m a fan of reporters. Of those dogged men and women who spend hours poring through documents, making phone calls, interviewing people, filing Freedom of Information Act requests. Who chase down numerous dead-ends until they find the right trail. Who shed light on what some want to keep secret, and who risk their lives and sometimes die on battlefields to help us understand foreign conflicts. I’m a fan of those people.
Last year, I remember watching a Rachel Maddow program in which she built this devastating case against the Trump administration regarding a foreign policy situation. She pulled together pieces of reporting from various credible news sources to paint a picture of Administration deception and corruption. It was very convincing.
A couple days later, I read a Washington Post article which dismantled her argument. She had taken many pieces of real information found by real reporters, and assembled it in a dishonest way to make the Trump administration look vile. The WaPo article set the record straight. It was good reporting.
I’m not a fan of talking-head pundits on TV and radio. Maddow, Hannity, Limbaugh, Carlson, O’Donnell, and Ingraham all do much the same thing–take the hard work of reporters, cherry-pick what they want, and slant it to fit their agenda. I don’t respect such persons, and I rarely listen to them.
Their’s is a lazy job. They don’t dig for news. You can bet they subscribe to the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other major news sources to learn what reporters have uncovered. Then they talk about it, twisting it to their liking and omitting what doesn’t fit their bias. If they are conservative pundits, they convince their listeners that none of these news sources–which they personally rely on every day–can be trusted.
As much as possible, I go to the source–the reporters who dug out the information and wrote it up. I was trained in their craft, I understand it, and I respect it. It’s a craft in which you inevitably make mistakes, and in which some people get sloppy and cut corners. But I much prefer them to the cannibalistic pundits.
