Xblog

I guess what bugs me are all the articles I’ve seen talking about how Stewart demonstrated “great journalism”. I’m sorry, but journalism isn’t talking about mom & apple pie to an audience hungry for both. Journalism is getting the facts and getting answers. It isn’t doing an interview by monopolizing the discussion and hardly giving your subject a place to speak, let alone present a cogent discussion (sure, calling them on the BS should be done, but you have to give them a chance to make their case before you do so). If showing clips from an old interview that had been circulating online for months and getting answers like “I can change” qualifies as top notch journalism, we’re all going to remain screwed well after this economic mess is over.

The market is full of lies, misdirection, and outright deception. If somehow someone walked in to it thinking that it was all daisies and free love, P.T. Barnum and John Bridges have some quotes that apply quite well to them. Enron is not exactly a story so old that no one can remember it. That pointing this out and suggesting that it is a horror is somehow considered high quality journalism… Some would say it speaks to how far journalism has fallen, but I’d argue that it is more a statement about how far our ability to distinguish quality journalism (which is out there, and has been out there in droves on this particular topic) has fallen, and Mad Money is the just desserts for such a crime.

We’re so #@$@!ing desperate for scape goats that we pile on and cheer whenever the next one is thrown in front of us. It very much is a “Kangaroo Court” (I must admit I was kind of flabbergasted that Cramer somehow suggested such courts are a good thing), and so long as we continue to call it “journalism”, we end up distracting from some real truths, including an understanding of the larger forces which drove this problem, as well as understanding our own mistakes.

In other words: treating proceedings like this as journalism (and despite the Daily Show’s protestations that they advertise that they totally are not journalists, clearly people are not getting the point) is no worse than treating Mad Money as journalism, and it leads to the same place: lessons not learned, and more damage being done.

Honestly, I’m of two minds on this. I kind of think the recording industry (I’ll be damned if I’m going to call them the music industry) deserves what will come their way if this bill doesn’t pass. On the other hand, I really like and support what the Pandora guys have done. I’d feel better if I could actually find the text. Could someone less lazy than me find a pointer?