Why American Journalism is So Awful

I'm trapped inside due to the Great Blizzard of 2005. They'll probably label this the "storm of the century" as well. Last night my wife and I were reading about the snowstorm when she discovered this article in the New York Times. It is an amazing display of poor writing, with its overwrought language and hackneyed phrases. But it is also a wonderful example of everything that is wrong with contemporary American journalism.

Journalists are all frustrated novelists and movie actors. This is why we have become so obsessed with "narrative" and "framing," with how to tell a "story." I doubt there are many print journalists who would not rather be writing books (which they do at the slightest opportunity) or T.V. journalists who wouldn't jump at the chance to do some acting.

The problem is that the news shoud not be about storytelling, but about fact. Try as you might to destroy the existence of reality, it is still there. For some reason we have decided that people who report the news require the skills to craft language more than they need the ability to understand their subject. News anchors know about camera angles and makeup but nothing about elections and less about economics. Most of them believe pretty much anything they read.

Ideally, we would find experts (or at least people who are informed) in a relevant field to report on it. The key should be logic, not storytelling. Rigorous analysis is far more important for an educated public discourse than sound bytes and pretty pictures. And I would contend that it is far easier to teach an economist or political scientist to write than it is a journalist to understand Duverger's Law or the principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility.

Sure many (but not all) of today's journalists would be out of work. But then they'd have an opportunity to pursue what it really is they desire anyway. They could stop slumming it and leave the news to someone who knows something about it. And who knows, maybe some of them could write bestsellers.

Nah.