Tom Brokaw is a bad journalist

I'm sorry, I just can't take it any more.  I have seen two appearances by Tom Brokaw, first on the "Charlie Rose" show and then on "The Daily Show".  He is selling his new book "The Time of our Lives".  You are supposed to buy the book because he is supposed to know what he is talking about.  He is supposed to know what he is talking about because he is a "respected journalist".  I listened to him carefully and the conclusion is inescapable.  He is a bad journalist.  Why?

First, he missed the biggest political story in the last 20 years.  This story is so big it colors all political coverage today and has colored it now for many years.  Yet Mr. Brokaw missed it.  What is this story?  In about 1990 Newt Gingrich took control of the Republican party.  He did this by raising a ton of money (for those days) and distributing it around to candidates.  He also formulated an overall strategy for how the Republican party should operate.  This strategy can be summarized by the following phrases:  "take no prisoners", "slash and burn", "my way or the highway".  In general he took the party to the right, enforced crushing discipline, and adopted a "no negotiation - no compromise" approach to dealing with Democrats.  In the early days he recruited candidates to run against other Republicans if he thought the incumbent Republican was not sufficiently conservative or not sufficiently disciplined (e.g. they didn't do what Newt told them to do).  In several cases Republicans lost seats they didn't need to lose.  But with savvy political operatives and enough money Newt was able to win those seats back and more.  In 1994 the GOP took over the House of Representatives for the first time in living memory.

With leadership in hand, Newt proceeded to implement his plan dubbed "the Contract with America".  Things went down hill from there for Newt.  Newt engineered two government shutdowns and got himself involved in scandal.  So he lost his leadership position in the House and, until recently, retired from the pursuit of elected office.  But by then most elected Republicans at the Federal level had gotten comfortable with "the Newt way" so it lives on in the Republican party to this day.  The whole "no compromise" approach of the modern Republican party is just "the Newt way".

Now none of this is any kind of secret.  It's all old news.  But Mr. Brokaw hews to the "it's a DC problem" rather that the correct "it's a Republicans in DC problem" to describe the current level of gridlock at the Federal level.  And Democrats deserve some blame but not much.  For instance, Senate Republicans pioneered the aggressive use of the Filibuster and other parliamentary tactics to delay or derail legislation they didn't like.  And the Democrats have tried on occasion to adopt the same methods.  But when Senate Democrats tried to Filibuster to block Bush judicial appointments the "gang of 12", six Democrats and six Republicans, instantly appeared.  The gang succeeded in derailing the Democratic Filibuster effort and a "compromise" was reached that resulted in most Bush judicial appointments going through.  Since the Democrats have regained control the Republicans have successfully Filibustered everything and no Republicans have joined a "gang of 12" or any other kind of gang that could interfere with the Republican's ability to block legislation.

Or consider President Obama.  He is considered a wuss by Mr. Brokaw and nearly all other "journalists" in DC.  Why?  Because he has spent.nearly three years bending over backward trying to find some kind of formula to generate a compromise and break loose a few Republican votes.  A cornerstone of this strategy has been to include Republican ideas into all of his major proposals.  In spite of any number of efforts the Republicans have maintained discipline, thrown up roadblocks continuously, and voted strictly along party lines against almost all of his proposals.  Mr. Obama has been so aggressive in courting Republicans that he has alienated a large portion of his base including yours truly.  So the idea that Democrats have been effective in contributing to gridlock and made more than a token contribution to "the partisan divide" is patently ridiculous. Mr. Brokaw is ridiculous when he does not accurately describe the situation.

Then there is the biggest cultural story of the last 30 or more years.  There is a fundamental conflict going on in the country.  It is not, at least superficially, the divide between the left and the right, or between the rich and the poor, or between the coasts and the heartland, or any of the usual "divides" covered in the media.  It is the conflict between "truth" and "truthiness".  On the "truth" side you have people who work hard trying to figure out what is really going on.  There dedication to "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" sometimes forces them to believe in "inconvenient" truths.  On the "truthiness" side you have people who believe that "wanting it to be true" is enough to make it so.  And, unfortunately, the truthiness people are winning.  And, still more unfortunately, Mr. Brokaw and the vast majority of his colleges contribute to the success of the truthiness side.

Now you might think that based in the divides I have so far outlined that the only people who care about this are people who are interested in cultural issues, people like politicians and religious people.  But it turns out that business has been investing heavily in the truthiness side of the conflict.  And the reason is advertising.  What if you have a product that is inferior to the competition?  In this situation the truth is not your friend.  Now instead let's say that your product is not inferior.  It's just that you are competing in a product category where all products are essentially the same.  Well, you can go with the low price strategy.  But this leads to a spiral and pretty soon no one is making any money.  It is better to end up with only a part of the market if the price is high enough so you can make a profit.  So in this "tweedle dee tweedle dum" situation the truth is at best of only marginal use.  In both of these cases truthiness works much better.  My product makes you sexier or happier or is "new and improved".  If the formulation has been changed it is new and any change must be an improvement, right?

Rush Limbaugh listeners pride themselves on being "ditto heads".  They believe anything Rush says.  So if Rush says "buy product X" they will buy it.  This means you don't have to spend a lot of money coming up with a clever marketing campaign that may fail spectacularly.  You can just pay Rush a large fee to say nice things about your product.  Now, imagine another radio personality, someone who has the same demographics as Rush and the same sized audience but whose audience is filled with skeptics.  What do you do?  If the personality on this show says "buy product X" the skeptical audience will not just fall into line and buy the product.  You will be forced to spend money on making the product better, or coming up with a really clever marketing campaign, or maybe just settling for a smaller market share.

So businesses love ditto heads and hate skeptics.  It makes sound business sense for the tobacco industry to manufacture more ditto heads that will buy phony health claims about cigarettes.  And industries that do a lot of harm like the coal industry love truthiness people.  If they can come up with a claim that these people want to believe then they have succeeded.  And even if you are just an ordinary business that makes consumer products, if you can condition people to be more likely to be receptive to a clever marketing campaign (e.g. move them closer to the truthiness end of the scale) then you can make your business more successful.  So many businesses for sound business reasons have decided to contribute to the dumbing down of the public.

Now the news business is supposed to be biased in this conflict.  They are supposed to be pro truth and anti-truthiness.  But the modern news business in just another business.  It is supposed to make as big a profit as it can.  And that means attracting sponsors that will pay high prices for advertisements.  And that means the job of a modern "newsman" has changed.  As Robert Shaffer (Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2011) put it: "News reporters don’t want to get the facts.  They want to get ratings".  So people like Mr. Brokaw diligently cover "both sides" of stories that have some other number of sides.  They let pass without comment idiocy as long as it is spoken by "an authoritative source".  They cover unimportant but dramatic stories (if it bleeds, it leads) and ignore dull but important stories.  And they frequently use the excuse "it's too complicated - we just couldn't find a way to present the story so the public could understand it".  Then a TV show called "The West Wing" came along.  Aaron Sorkin managed to condense numerous "too hard" political arguments into short and accurate statements that could be easily understood by  viewers.  So the real problem was that people like Mr. Brokaw were too lazy or too incompetent to do what Mr. Sorkin did in episode after episode.

Now some may say that Mr. Brokaw is "among the best at what he does".  And there may be some truth to this position.  But that just means there are a lot of "journalists" out there who are not bad.  They are awful.  News should not be graded on the curve.  It is not enough for someone to be not as bad as the other guy.  He (or she) needs to be actually good.  It is too important to settle for anything less.  Decades of bad journalism have left us where we are now.  We have a dysfunctional government that is not going to be fixed unless people actually understand what the real problems is.  (Hint:  The Republicans did it).  Now I completely agree that there is plenty of room for improvement on the Democratic side.  But that's small beer compared to the Republican contribution to the current mess.  And one of the critical factors holding us back from doing anything about the Republicans is the current state of journalism as exemplified by Mr. Brokaw.  Why do you think that a large number of people, myself included, think the best journalist working today is Jon Stewart.  Stewart is not even a professional journalist.  The fact that he is a better journalist than the so called professionals, in spite of the fact that he sees himself as a comedian, says it all.