Felix Salmon: Why you can’t trust journalism
In media, there are people doing original journalism, and then there are lots of other people who are curating and contextualizing and aggregating and linking and rewriting and explaining and generally doing stuff which is parasitical on the original journalism. Both are important, although some people think that there are too many of the latter genus of journalists, compared to not enough of the former.
.. Shortly after I started working at Condé Nast Portfolio, they sent me on a media-training course, and the main thing I learned at that course was what not to say. If I was being interviewed about a story we had published at Portfolio, a story which, presumably, I would have written, then my answers could only reiterate the facts in the piece. Anything which had been taken out of the piece, anything I had learned along the way but which had not actually been published – anything which might make the story even the tiniest bit more complicated than the final edited article – about all of that I was to be careful to say absolutely nothing at all. (This is why, if you read an article and then you see the journalist interviewed on TV, you’ll almost never learn anything new.)
.. And while at some level, in principle, those people are interested in telling the truth about the world, in practice, they are much more interested in making sure that any given statement is factually and legally watertight. Beyond that, they want something big, something punchy, something powerful. They want a narrative, with good guys and bad guys. And, of course, they want their story to be shared, and to elicit government investigations, and to win awards.
.. And then there’s journalism, where reporters come out with shocking and surprising stories every day, and no one ever gets to reanalyze the underlying reporting. Think of all the people who end up not being quoted at all, or who are only quoted anonymously, and remember that in journalism, what you leave out can be much more important than what you put in.
.. Journalists know full well how deeply wrong journalism can be and often is, but we try to put that out of our minds. There’s even a name for that self-deception: the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.