The headline in the Virginian Pilot (dead tree edition) was an editorial. It read:
Hamas rockets prompt fierce reply.
"Fierce?" Beware of adjectives; they reflect the writer’s attitude.
The article continued:
“The Waves of Israeli airstrikes rained more than 100 tons of bombs on security installations in Hamas-ruled Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire. The attack killed at least 230 – the highest one-day toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades.”
"Rained" "100 tons" "crushing" "highest one-day toll" are all editorial comments that are intended to elicit the appropriate response. We are supposed to consider the Israelis as a steamroller destroying their hapless victims.
After that beginning we would expect to see pictures of destroyed security installations (that being the stated target), but we are painfully aware that this will not be the case because that’s not really the theme of the story.
The theme is in the picture that accompanies the story.
The caption read: “A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli missile strike…”
This picture reminded me of the propaganda photo shoots that accompanied the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006.
We can expect to see "Green Helmet Guy" all over again, or perhaps another fake photo like the one by Tyler Hicks. And who can forget the infamous photo of the ambulance with a hole dead-center in its roof - supposed to be proof of Israeli atrocities but actually the place where the rooftop flashing light was removed. Trust me, that scam was so successful that it will be run again.
We are informed “What started it.”
“A cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed a week ago, leading to rocket attacks in large numbers against Israel and isolated Israeli operations.”
A cease fire collapsed? A man can collapse and a wall can collapse, but a cease fire can’t collapse all by itself. Some act of aggression must take place before a cease-fire is known to have collapsed. But we are led to understand that the mysterious collapse of a cease-fire was the act “leading to rocket attacks.”
This was not a news story. It was an editorial and a human interest story with the war as the hook. The byline was by Tagreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner, and was reprinted from the NY Times.
Have I mentioned that the Times is selling off assets to stay afloat a while longer? Why yes, I did. And this is one reason why.
Which leads me to the swan song of the Virginian Pilot’s “Public Editor” Joyce Hoffman. She has been “right sized,” but as her farewell she sings the praises of her bosses at the paper and the billionaire Batten family that owns the paper (and has tried to sell it, so far with no success).
The terminal decline of the newspaper business is due in large part to two concurring trends. Both of them are the results of the Internet.
The first is the proliferation of news sources that are more current than daily newspapers: radio, 24/7 news channels as well as the Internet.
The second is that newspapers have not understood their unique strengths, which is the gathering of information. This, as numerous observers have pointed out, is expensive but hard to replace. Instead, newspapers have cut back on fact gathering in favor of opinion writing. In newspaper speak “interpreting the news.” The problem is, that is something virtually anyone can do. Opinions are like belly buttons, everyone has one. I don’t need a newspaper “reporter” telling me what to think about an issue.
Glenn Reynolds has it right when he says that as money gets tighter, newspapers will try to cut the high priced talent in favor of the cheap opinion writer.
The problem is that most big organizations have cut back on newsgathering, treating news as a commodity product to be obtained from wire services while eliminating foreign and regional bureaus. Instead, Big Media organizations decided some years ago that they would focus on “news analysis” and punditry. That’s, well, because you can opine without leaving your computer, while reporting hard news is hard work. (And expensive).
Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked out very well. The move to analysis and punditry was driven, in no small part, by corporate pressures to cut costs, pressures that accompanied the consolidation and corporatization of the news media. . . . But actual information about what’s happening is still mostly the province of professional journalism, and that’s less likely to change.
That was written in 2002. Since then we have seen more and more independent reporting including (but certainly not limited to) JD Johannes.
Joyce Hoffman missed the forest for the trees. As Public Editor she focused on things like errors in grammar, the paper's format and the mix-ups that happen in any news report. But that’s not the terminal disease that has the Virginian Pilot in its grip. It’s the fact that its pages are filled with opinions; and poorly written opinions at that. Written with an arrogance and condescension that has the effect of pissing off more than half of its potential customers.
But I suspect that Ms. Hoffman was not chosen to guide that policy. As someone famously said, that’s above her pay grade.
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