Published: November 04, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Misleading the Media: Truth and Consequences
By Greg Dobbs 
There's a reason why these days, a hoax--- Bubble Boy in Colorado, the faux Chamber of Commerce climate change news conference in Washington DC--- is more likely than ever before to work. The reason is not that with all the cutbacks in newsrooms countrywide, there is less focus on checking out the facts before going public with a story. Even in my 23 years with a major news organization like ABC News, fact-checking was only as good as the commitment of whoever was in charge. Not everyone was committed.
No, the answer has more to do with the rush to air or the rush to press, which puts competition before content. It doesn't really matter who or what you blame: 24-hour news cycles, maybe the unfiltered internet. Too many newsrooms these days, including some with nationwide reach, don't want to be the last to jump on a hot story, or the first to leave it behind.
This is no great revelation, but it is a sad commentary on the decline of news organizations large and small. If someone is determined to pull a fast one on us, there's a 50/50 chance they will succeed. Maybe it's not so important when it's a relatively inconsequential prank…although it's intriguing to wonder how the climate change hoax would have turned out if the real Chamber people hadn't shown up. But "prank" is far too mild for something like the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the Bush administration pretty obviously cherry-picked its facts and pulled a fast one on us, which also meant on the American public. Most in the media were negligent for failing to check those "facts" and report that indeed there were other "facts" that contradicted them. In retrospect anyway, we know there were.
In the book I just wrote about the adventures and misadventures of journalists, Life in the Wrong Lane, I talk about the propensity of public officials in other lands, other cultures, to mislead the media. Sometimes innocently, sometimes maliciously, sometimes just habitually. But in such places--- the Soviet Union, Third World Africa, the Middle East--- we knew that when we walked in the door. Naively, we expect more here at home. Given the driving force behind so many newsmakers these days, namely, to influence public opinion, we should know better. No one can make us more reliable except our own collective conscience.
But that raises another problem which affects every American. We don't cover the world any more. I'm not exactly bursting with pride to say that in my heyday at ABC, we had fourteen news bureaus around the world. I'm not bursting because not a single one was in Latin America, and the only reason we had a bureau in Africa was to cover Cairo, which happens to be in the northeast corner of the continent. But at least we could count our bureaus in the double-digits, and we had people in many important parts of the world who actually knew a thing or two about the regions they covered. Today? Aside from war zones, you could count the number of bureaus for any of the legacy television networks on one hand, with a finger or two left over.
A former executive producer of CNN's Larry King Live, Tom Farmer, wrote a nice online review of my book, but said it would make the reader "happy but wistful." He wrote, "Sending guys like Dobbs to faraway places used to guarantee the provenance of the reporting. It's cheaper not to, and the American public doesn't seem to mind, but that doesn't make it right." Nor do I see anyone stepping forward to change it.
Greg Dobbs, who has just written Life in the Wrong Lane, was a correspondent for 23 years with ABC News, and now reports for HDNet Television's World Report.
* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
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