A little over a week ago there was a minor event in the blogosphere that didn’t get a lot of attention among the enviro sites, but probably should have. I’m as guilty as anyone of not raising its profile, as I didn’t mention it at the time. Time to fix that.

Jay Rosen has an excellent post on his blog, PressThink, So whaddaya think: should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?, in which he talks about Arthur Brisbane’s, the Public Editor at the New York Times, asking if reporters have an obligation to call out sources for their false statements. The reader reaction to Brisbane’s comment was, as one might expect, a swift, loud, and indignant, “Hell yes!!!”, which seemed to surprise Brisbane. I very highly recommend Rosen’s post and the 120+ comments in the ensuing discussion, as well as Joe Romm’s take.

I think what we have here is an interesting dynamic that might not be obvious at first blush. Certain parts of the media complex have become increasingly distant from the sort of doggedly aggressive journalism that once made some people, including me, see Journalists as underpaid, under appreciated, overworked heroes, the champions who devoted their lives to exposing lies and fraud, all for the betterment of society.[1] To say that many of today’s “journalists” have devolved into mere stenographers who parrot virtually any inanity uttered by a “newsmaker”, as the common charge goes, is to state the painfully obvious. And as for many of the rest — the ones at Fox News leap to mind — who don’t even belong in the same category, the less said, the better. But how did we get here? How did we go from Woodward and Bernstein to rampant stenography?

I think that over a period of decades journalists became far too easy a target for disgruntled politicians and other public figures. The practice of true journalism came to be seen by the public as nothing more than cynical self-interest run amok, and its practitioners as merely another special interest group. (I certainly don’t mean to imply that journalists were faultless; they made plenty of mistakes and even committed a few cases of outright fraud.) This created a feedback loop: Politicians beat up journalists; public opinion of journalists dropped, making it ever easier for politicians to blame everything on journalists, which only lowered their standing with the public even further, etc. After decades of this browbeating, we saw a cultural shift in journalism. The pursuit and maintenance of an aura of “impartiality” became much more important than calling out lies for what they are, as Rosen pointedly points out. This kind of shift can very easily become deeply entrenched — not least of all because the group it benefits the most, politicians, is exceedingly good at locking in a huge advantage with public sentiment — and that’s what’s happened now. It’s become so bad that we have the Public Editor of the New York Times asking head exploding questions about the appropriateness of calling a lie a lie.

Of course, when we move from merely political to science-based topics, the issue becomes far thornier. Can we really expect the average journalist to keep things like gigatons of carbon vs CO2, and greenhouse gas emissions vs. just CO2, or kilowatts vs. kilowatt hours straight? And when we get to higher levels of abstraction, we see rampant errors. One group that never fails to push my buttons includes the reports that implicitly or explicitly assume that the US generates a sizable share of its electricity with oil. That was true around the time of the original oil embargo, in the early 1970s, but now we use oil to generate only about 1% of our electricity. And as for the bright, shiny, clean future of natural gas powered everything — don’t get me started.[2]

One of the objections of working journalists will be that it’s virtually impossible to rebut the same lie in every single article about a Romney stump speech in which he falsely accuses President Obama of “apologizing for America”; it would make the stories tedious and unreadable. There’s a simple solution to that, in the age of the Internet. Instead of rebutting the lie fully in the article itself, simply say: “This assertion by Mitt Romney has been investigated and found to be false. See our [url] on our web site for the full explanation.” Then any newspaper or magazine can build up a library of their fact checking results and refer to them as needed, without forcing their readers to slog through the same boiler plate prose for the Nth time, while still making it available for newcomers or anyone else who wants to see it. News outlets could even pool resources and build a common, shared library, which would lend even more credibility to it. And for those in the Traditional Media who want to look like one of the cool kids, they can enlist readers in the process. Let them suggest new additions to the library or help with the investigations. In the areas like politics and climate change there would be no end of readers (some paid corporate shills, to be sure) eager to contribute to such an effort. As long as the material was vetted by real journalists who have the appropriate domain knowledge before being used in the ultimate explanation, the chances of the effort being yet another tool for public manipulation would be very low.

What does all this matter? Isn’t this so much “inside baseball” for journalism junkies? No, it isn’t, for a reason that I’ve been talking about on this blog for nearly nine years: We’re in a lot of trouble on multiple fronts, thanks to peak oil and climate change and their hideous interactions and knock-on effects, and we need everyone pulling in the same direction, especially voters, who will increasingly be called upon to ignore the lies pushed by fossil fuel companies and other special interests and act to promote our collective well being. It’s bad enough that in an age of Citizens United we’re horribly outgunned by the liars, but if the last line of defense, journalists — our seawall against the quickly rising tide of misinformation, if you like — are so humbled that they’re openly asking if they should fulfill their most basic duty, then we’re in far more trouble than I thought.

[1] To younger readers this might sound like a bad joke, but when I went to college it was common for students to apologize for having a TV in their dorm room and add, “I only have that so I can watch 60 Minutes“. Indeed, the classic mental image of two-fisted journalism was Mike Wallace and a cameraman kicking down the door to some executive’s office, shoving a mic in his face and demanding to know how long the company was selling toxic sludge to school cafeterias packaged as pudding cups.

[2] For just one example of why a full embrace of natural gas is a very bad idea, see CNG vehicles: A cheap, shiny new bridge to nowhere.