PressEthic

There's a telling detail in a 2003 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about the state of objectivity in the modern press. The writer says about the pursuit of objectivity,

It exacerbates our tendency to rely on official sources, which is the easiest, quickest way to get both the "he said" and the "she said," and, thus, "balance." According to numbers from the media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from last September to February, all but thirty-four originated at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. So we end up with too much of the "official" truth.

More recently, a story in Editor & Publisher quotes a New York Times reporter, Dexter Filkins, as saying that "98% of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become 'off-limits' for Western journalists." Filkins says the New York Times employs about 70 Iraqi reporters to do the field work and any investigating out on the street.

American journalists, he said, spend their days piecing together scraps of information from the Iraqi reporters to construct a picture, albeit incomplete, of what life is like these days in the war-torn country. But he says that the work is slow and difficult, and it is hard in such an atmosphere for reporters to nail down specifics. "Five people doing a run-of-the-mill story takes forever," he said.

If the major networks did that little original reporting before the war, the violence, and the insurgency began, where is most news coming from now? There are inherent dangers in relying on government agencies such as the State Department and the Department of Defense for so much information.

A reporter I know who covered North Korea as a freelancer once told me that the hallmark of a press under a totalitarian regime is when the sources for all the page-one stories all come from the government. Even when other sources are used and different perspectives are provided, the fact that the stories originate from one source surely present a limited picture of what is going on. In light of the difficulty American journalists have in doing their job in Iraq today, the public is presented an even narrower scope.