Before you accuse me...
For the purposes of this week’s column I wish I could assume the identity of one of my favorite authors, Chuck Klosterman (for many other reasons come to think of it) so I could grant myself permission to reprint the chapter from his essay collection “Sex, Drugs and CoCoa Puffs” entitled “All I Know Is What I Read In The Papers” in its entirety.
Besides the fact that readers are often assumed to be illiterate (“Every discussion I’ve ever had with an editor has stressed that people despise the process of reading.”) and that many sports writers actually hate sports as no one ever asks them their opinions about anything else, what puts him off is that people who are angry with the media are often completely misguided in what they should be upset about.
One of the things that hit home for me about this essay is the section where he covers reporter bias. This is the old standby of the newspaper haters of the world and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard about it in my life.
In early February I received a supposedly alarming e-mail that I think was accidentally sent to me from a local group announcing that “with the well appreciated exceptions of the Anderson Valley Advertiser and Mendocino Country Independent, ALL the following local newspapers are owned by the SAME company: MediaNews Group. A closely held (not publicly traded) corporation.” The e-mail went on to say that the Journal was one of the “arms of the octopus” of MediaNews Group, which it is, and that it also owns several other local news outlets, which it does.
The point of this was to imply that there was some hidden agenda being pushed by this corporation and everyone, from the top down was a part of it.
I promise you, from the bottom of my bleeding liberal heart this is so not true.
“Are media outlets controlled by massive, conservative corporations?” wrote Klosterman. “Well, of course they are. Massive conservative corporations own everything. Are most individual members of the media politically liberal? Absolutely. If talented writers honestly thought the world didn’t need to be changed, they’d take jobs in advertising that are half as difficult and three times as lucrative. So in theory all the long-standing conspiracies about media motives are true. But, in practice, they’re basically irrelevant, at least in the newspaper industry.”
Why just this week I was accused of being my editor “ KC's trained monkey” in an e-mail from a source. This really couldn’t be further from the truth. Once again, I promise you, I have had more freedom to cover what I want when I want at this job than I’ve had at pretty much every other place I’ve been employed, summer camp included, and I love this job for that.
“The single most important impact of any story is far less sinister: Mostly it all comes down to (a) who the journalist has called, and (b) which of those people happens to call back first,” he wrote.
Who I call and who calls me back first has a direct influence on not only what I write, but what questions I will ask the people who I talk to next. It’s just that simple. I simply don’t have the time, energy or desire to manipulate a story about, say, a local elementary school collecting something for a good cause for my own nefarious purposes.
“I worked in the Knight Ridder chain for four years, and I never got the impression that the CEO read anything, except maybe ‘Golf Digest’,” he wrote.
So, if you’re going to accuse this journalist of anything, please make it something reasonable like the fact that I am no where near as good at expressing myself as the writers I idolize. I will apologize for that.