One of the things they teach in journalism school, or used to, is never to discount the obvious. Every so often that which is apparent masks a hidden, horrible truth. Good reporters have a sixth sense for those situations and find that truth. But more often than not, things are what they seem to be, messy complexities and all.
Not that the obvious isn’t worth our attention. On the contrary, the stories worth doing most are about things that smack us daily in the face. The trick is to grasp the cause and effect, to avoid confusing the two and to explain both in an engaging way.
Why, for instance, do the poor and non-white live in certain parts of our metropolitan area but not others? Why is the CTA cutting service in the city while the state is paving new expressways across Lake and Will Counties? Why does Illinois have the most regressive tax system in the nation?
Upon close examination, it turns out the forces which shape our everyday world are not the result of conspiracies, or cover-ups or anybody’s deep and dark secret. They are economics and technology, politics and policy, competence and incompetence, good luck and bad. That’s just a partial list. We are surrounded by a world so complex that it’s all a good journalist can do to comprehend and explain.
Trouble is, too many hotshots in our business no longer see it that way. Somewhere between Watergate and Iran-Contra, the would-be exposers got the upper hand over the workaday explainers. Theascendant attitude in many newsrooms today is that nothing is as it seems, that behind every major story roils some nefarious tale of greed, deceit and–if we dig long enough–illegality.
Television news has pushed it to the limit. Pulse-raising investigations have become the staple of tabloid TV. Where once there was Bill Moyers explaining the problems created by 3 million people moving onto the central Arizona desert, we now have hidden cameras showing grocery clerks repackaging bad meat. That’s entertainment.
Every so often, though, journalism’s conspiracy-hunters are forced to pause for a reality check. One hopes the public takes notice.
Last week, the editors of the San Jose Mercury-News admitted something that any streetwise cop or newsman had suspected all along–that last year’s “Dark Alliance” series about CIA responsibility for the nation’s crack cocaine epidemic was, well, based on “conflicting evidence.” (Grizzled reporters have another one-word expression for this type of story, but that’s why a lot of them are still just reporters.)
Sure, it turned out some Nicaraguan Contras had received CIA support and that some had turned around and sold crack to drug dealers in L.A. But that’s a stretch from blaming the CIA for the crack epidemic, or from such Mercury-News headlines as ” ’80s effort to assist guerrillas left legacy of drugs, gangs in black L.A.”
(If you thought the crack scourge had more to do with the desperation of poverty or the nation’s lack of an effective anti-drug strategy, you might not cut it in some of America’s more aggressive newsrooms.)
Unfortunately, the damage done by some of these breathless, baseless exposes is not so easily retracted. African-American conspiracy theorists, who are not in short supply, now have ink-on-paper confirmation that their peoples’ problems have been foisted upon them by willful white folks. They can file the San Jose clips alongside last summer’s screamers about the racist conspiracy to burn black churches across the South. Whatever happened to the federal investigation of that supposed outrage?
And so it goes. The conspiracy press has armed feminists with scrapbooks on the Tailhook “cover-up” and now, the persecution of a female B-52 pilot. Gun nuts and white supremacists have been fortified by highly-critical press rehashes of the way federal agents handled the Ruby Ridge and Waco holdouts. Clinton-haters treasure each and every Whitewater expose just as Democrats yearn for more sensations about Newt Gingrich’s tax problems. Are these the real concerns of our Republic?
You had to feel sorry last week for the inspector general of the U.S. Justice Department, Michael Bromwich. The poor man tried to tell a congressional committee that the now-infamous FBI crime laboratory is actually “a good lab” and will get better as it implements the common-sense recommendations he made recently in his critical report.
Common sense? Someone needs to tell Bromwich that the game isn’t played that way anymore. If the Justice Department wanted to fix problems inside the FBI lab, it should have done so quietly, without dangling a self-critical report like red meat before the media’s “gotcha gang.”
After the Washington hunt club was done mingling Bromwich’s mild criticisms with the largely unsubstantiated charges of a disgruntled lab employee, the average citizen probably thinks the FBI couldn’t tell the difference between a bullet hole and a bee sting.
Now convicts from Maine to California are eyeing appeals and lawyers for the accused Oklahoma City bomber(s) can’t wait for the prosecution to rest so they can have at those lab results. If their strategy succeeds, will the exposers have more explaining to do? Or will they just move on to their next scandal?
