A Modest Proposal for the Media

One of my favorite media critics/scholars is Jay Rosen who has a proposal for fixing the mess that is the Sunday talk shows:

I propose this modest little fix, first floated on Twitter in a post I sent out to Betsy Fischer, Executive Producer of Meet the Press, who never replies to anything I say. “Sadly, you’re a one-way medium,” I said to Fischer, “but here’s an idea for ya: Fact check what your guests say on Sunday and run it online Wednesday.”

Now I don’t contend this would solve the problem of the Sunday shows, which is structural. But it might change the dynamic a little bit. Whoever was bullshitting us more could expect to hear about it from Meet the Press staff on Wednesday. The midweek fact check (in the spirit of Politifact.com, which could even be hired for the job) might, over time, exert some influence on the speakers on Sunday. At the very least, it would guide the producers in their decisions about whom to invite back.

The midweek fact check would also give David Gregory a way out of his puppy game of gotcha. Instead of telling David Axelrod that his boss promised to change the tone in Washington so why aren’t there any Republican votes for health care? … which he thinks is getting “tough” with a Meet the Press guest, Gregory’s job would simply be to ask the sort of questions, the answers to which could be fact checked later in the week. Easy, right?

The problem with this is that three days is an eternity in media time — and way more than enough time for the lies and bullshit to become the new common wisdom. Besides once the media have moved away from a story it is difficult to get them to go back and acknowledge disruptions in the common wisdom — think the death panels here — because they are off to the next story. Jameson Foser at Media Matters makes this point at some length
, but reminds us of this:

But that’s the problem: the media simply doesn’t care that much. And there’s certainly no reason to think that if they did start fact-checking guests “it would guide the producers in their decisions about whom to invite back.” When was the last time the media shunned a politician who regularly misinforms?

Or, for that matter, any of the usual pundits or so-called “experts” that are apparently on every Rolodex. And for some of the usual suspects, it is pretty well known that they’ll just say anything. But having some content is apparently better than making sure that readers or viewers are actually informed of anything.