The outside panel of Bill Hilliard,
John Seigenthaler and
Bill Kovach concluded in its final report to USA
Today publisher Craig Moon that it hoped some good
would evolve from the Kelley incident.
But I caution you against getting your hopes up that
journalism standards will be improving anytime soon.
I’m skeptical because during the seven weeks that Kelley
was under investigation, some of the worst reporting in
newspaper history was being churned out by the very same
major dailies that should have been on high alert.
The issue was the
Sierra Club and its
recent Board election. Among the candidates for the
five seats were three—Richard Lamm, Dave Pimental and
Frank Morris—who wanted the club to take a more
realistic stand on federal immigration policy especially
as it pertains to
population growth.
This is reasonable request. If you calculate that for
the last three decades, one million legal immigrants and
an additional one million illegal immigrants enter the
country annually that means 60 million people have been
added to the population through immigration alone. That
total does not include their
children.
And if the Sierra Club can be concerned about the
environmental impact of over-population in
Cambodia, as it claims it is, then it is logical to
assume that the club should have the same concerns about
the United States.
But unfortunately, the debate about immigration policy
never got off the ground. The reporters, instead of
insisting that their sources stay on topic, allowed
themselves to get drawn into a pointless—and
inaccurate—debate about whether the candidates are
motivated by racism.
No reporter made even the most elementary challenge to
Sierra Club president
Carl Pope’s repeated and
ugly charges of
racism.
For example, why not ask Pope how anyone can seriously
suggest that Lamm, the former three-term liberal
Democratic Governor from Colorado, is racist? Lamm’s
first job out of the University of California law school
was as a civil rights lawyer. And while at Berkeley,
Lamm helped establish a local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
Amazingly,
while reporters covering the Sierra Club election were
obsessed with the racism angle, they missed a huge story
that was staring them right in the face.
According
to I.R.S. records, the Sierra Club received over $100
million in
anonymous donations during 2000 and 2001. And it
spent $250,000 to
defeat the so-called “outsiders.” Pressing
Pope on the nature of those donations or the wisdom of
such excessive spending would be a real story.
If I were
a V.I.P. at one of those self-congratulatory journalism
organizations like the Committee for Concerned
Journalists (where Kovach is chairman), the
Society of Professional Journalists or the
American Society of Newspaper Editors, I would be
concerned about two things:
- No one in America
is surprised that Kelley, Blair and others have gotten
away with bold-faced lies for years. We expect very
little
professional reporting and little is what we get
- Such is the
disdain for
mainstream media coverage that many readers are
gleeful when bad reporters and editors are outed.
Look at
how few people read newspapers. In his 20,000-word
article titled
“My Times” in the May 2004 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly, Howell Raines, the former
New York Times executive editor fired for his
complicity in the Blair scandal, wrote that internal
marketing surveys taken at the Times indicate
that potential readership is 80 million. Yet the
circulation is only 1.2 million.
If the
Times expects to sell more papers, it should put out
a better product.
The
newspaper industry faces a long tough road to
rebuild
credibility. And it will take more commitment than
writing a string of platitudes in a summary report of
one of the darkest chapters in journalism history.
In the
meantime, more and more readers get their news from the
Internet.
By the
time print journalists get their act together, they may
have lost their audience for good.
JOENOTE #
1 to VDARE.COM readers:
I asked
our own Brenda Walker, who was vilified by the
mainstream media and the
Sierra Club why the media treated the Sierra
election the way it did.
Replied
Walker:
“Many reporters like their stereotypes to be uncomplicated and
seem to resent someone who doesn't fall easily into
their liberal good-evil categories. They become irked at
someone like Dick Lamm, who has an exemplary lifetime
record on civil rights and also recognizes the threat of
immigration run amok. It's so much simpler for reporters
to write easy condemnations of imaginary racists.”
JOENOTE
#2 to VDARE.COM readers:
USA Today
relied heavily on former New York Times
