Jules and the CNN pix

[Doug Millison]

At 8:36 AM 6/12/97, Peter Giordano wrote:
 Doug's faith in broadcast news is admirable but I
>wonder
>if it's justified

Generalize as you wish -- and I don't have much faith in broadcast TV news,
nor in any other profession taken as a whole, medicine or law or academia
to name some other examples  -- there remain serious, professional
journalists in all media who work with sincerity and attention to detail,
even with conviction. Every metier has its slackers.

While I don't have the faith in broadcast news you attribute me (I firmly
believe that journalism -- print, broadcast, or online -- must be read as
much for what it leaves out as for what it includes, as in New Testament
scholarship), the procedure I've outlined is standard operating procedure
in any news operation. Even a tabloid operation will check sources and look
for corroboration, and then, of course, go ahead and broadcast or publish
junk. (There are exceptions:  the Weekly World News and other tabloids,
sometimes make "news" up out of whole cloth.)  Distinguish between the
process/practice and the product.

An instructive example -- and it fits the ongoing "conspiracy" thread more
or less -- is the "Dark Alliances" investigative journalism of Gary Webb,
originally published in the San Jose Mercury News (August 1996), and in the
Mercury Center Web site (http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/, the site is a
great example of how the Web can be used to articulate a complex
investigation, by the way). Webb is a serious, professional journalist,
currently dedicated to exposing CIA-Contra-crack cocaine interdependencies,
which have generally been denied or minimized by the Establishment press.

Webb's investigation was supported by the SJ Merc, one of the Knight-Ridder
newspapers, part of the U.S. newspaper establishment. In the grand
newspaper tradition, the Mercury supported Webb's work, investing
significant money and resources for travel to Central America, other
research, and construction of the Web site -- hardly a sign of an
establishment media outlet's reluctance to support serious journalism.
But, in the months that followed publication of the Dark Alliance series,
the series was criticized by one after another Establishment newspaper
(beginning with the Washington Post) - culminating recently in the
Mercury's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, making a humiliating withdrawal
of the paper's support for the series; Ceppos has since taken Webb off of
his ongoing follow-up investigation. On local (Berkeley) radio interviews,
Webb refused to speculate on the pressures that may have been brought to
bear on Ceppos and the Mercury, but more conspiracy-minded observers have
suggested that the pressure may have come from quite high up in CIA and
other U.S. national intelligence circles.

My point here is not to embark on another conspiracy discussion but rather
to add some detail and nuance to the discussion of journalism that's come
up around the Pynchon-CNN story. Within a braodcast and publishing
establishment that is often compromised by advertiser and corporate support
and sometimes crippled by the lack of professionalism or ethical lapses of
its practitioners, as in the case of Gary Webb (and many other fine
journalists whose work would be tarred by the brush some p-listers wield so
freely) good journalistic work gets done, and then is sometimes swallowed
up or twisted or actively erased by the powers that be.

This interplay of individual vs corporate ethics is not altogether foreign
to Pynchon's novels, of course.

Cordially,
Doug




<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
D O U G  M I L L I S O N<<<<<>>>>>millison at online-journalist.com