Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

This is—indisputably and in arguably—the biggest misconception people make about the media. Everybody seems to be concerned that journalists are constantly trying to slip their own political and philosophical beliefs into what they cover. This virtually never happens. And I am not being naive when I say this; it really doesn’t happen.[68] There are thousands of things that affect the accuracy of news stories, but the feelings of the actual reporter is almost never one of them. The single most important impact of any story is far less sinister: Mostly, it all comes down to (a) who the journalist has called, and (b) which of those people happens to call back first.

Are media outlets controlled by massive, conservative corporations? Well, of course they are. Massive conservative corporations own everything. Are most individual members of the media politically liberal? Absolutely. If talented writers honestly thought the world didn’t need to be changed, they’d take jobs in advertising that are half as difficult and three times as lucrative. So—in theory—all the long-standing conspiracies about media motives are true. But—in practice—they’re basically irrelevant, at least in the newspaper industry. There is no way the espoused Aryan masterminds who run the world can affect the content of any daily story; they usually have no idea what the hell is going on with anything in the world, and certainly not with what anyone’s writing about. I worked in the Knight Ridder chain for four years, and I never got the impression that the CEO read anything, except maybe Golf Digest.

The media machine is too bloated to “manufacture consent.” What filters down from the queen bee is nominal; there is no successful macro agenda. Meanwhile, individual reporters—the drones who do all the heavy lifting—tend to be insane. Being a news reporter forces you to adopt a peculiar personality: You spend every moment of your life trying to eradicate emotion. Reporters overcompensate for every nonobjective feeling they’ve ever experienced; I once got into a serious discussion over whether or not the theft of a live fetus from the womb of a kidnapped pregnant woman could be publicly classified as a “tragedy.” What civilians in the conventional world need to realize is that journalists are not like you. They have higher ethics and less common sense. For example: Let’s say somebody was trying to pass a resolution that created stricter pedophilia laws. Most normal people would think to themselves, “Well, I’m against kids being molested and so is everybody I’ve ever met, so—obviously—if I was asked to write a story about this resolution, I’d make sure people understood it was a positive thing.” Reporters never think like this. A reporter would spend the next three hours trying to find an activist who’d give them a quote implying it was unconstitutional to stop people from performing oral sex on five-year-old boys. Journalists aren’t trying to tell you their version of what’s right and what’s wrong, because anyone who’s been a reporter for five years forgets how to tell the difference.

That’s why the biggest influence on the content of most news stories is simply who calls back first. Most of the time, that’s the catalyst for everything else that evolves into a news story. Since breaking the news is a competition-based industry, almost everything is done on deadline—and since journalism is founded on the premise that reality can only be shown through other people’s statements, reporters are constantly placing phone calls to multiple sources with the hope that all of them (or at least one of them) will give the obligatory quotes the writer can turn into a narrative. That’s why the first person who happens to return a reporter’s phone message dictates whatever becomes the “final truth” of any story. Very often, the twenty-four-second-shot clock simply runs out before anyone else can be reached; consequently, that one returned phone call is all the information the journalist can use. And even when everyone else does calls back before deadline, the template has already been set by whoever got there first; from now on, every question the reporter asks will be colored by whatever was learned from the initial source. Is this bad? Yes. Does it sometimes lead to a twisted version of what really happened? Yes. But it’s not an agenda. It’s timing.

Don’t obsess over the notion of insidious politics creeping into your newspaper. Leftist crackpots and faceless corporate hacks rarely affect the news. High school volleyball games affect the news—or at least they do if a reporter’s kid happens to be one of the players. You see, high school volleyball games often start at 6:30 P.M., so that reporter is not going to wait at his desk past six o’clock to see if his phone rings. His wife will kill him if he does. Or maybe he does wait for that call; maybe he skips his daughter’s game because he really needs the mayor to return his phone call in order to technically say “no comment” about an issue that the reporter already knows the mayor won’t comment upon. Maybe our steadfast reporter waits and waits and waits, and at 7:20 he decides to get a Dr Pepper. This requires him to walk across the newsroom to wherever they keep the vending machines, and—while he pops his quarters into the pop machine—his phone rings. It’s the mayor. But maybe the mayor hates using voice mail, and maybe the mayor inexplicably assumes this reporter is actually a bleeding-heart socialist, so he hangs up without leaving a message. Two hours later, our metro reporter still doesn’t have his obligatory “no comment,” so the newspaper’s metro editor tells him that the story needs to be held for at least one day so that they can get a response from the mayor. But twenty- four hours later, a hospital catches on fire, and that fire becomes the day’s major news event. Meanwhile, the story about the mayor is suddenly old news, and—because of the fire—it’s no longer on the front page; now it’s buried on page B3. Most readers won’t even notice it. But a handful of people who hate the mayor will notice it, and they’ll assume the newspaper buried this story on purpose, either because (a) the reader is liberal, so he or she thinks the paper’s aging Caucasian owner is in cahoots with the mayor, or because (b) the reader is conservative, so he or she thinks the liberal media is trying to raise taxes and mandate abortions and keep the tax-happy, baby-killing mayor in power. And all of this has nothing to do with politics, and it has nothing to do with agendas. It has to do with some guy wanting Dr Pepper. And shit like this happens all the time.

Distrust the Proper People.

Uber-idiotic people tend to think of the entire newspaper as one organism; they think that stories, columns, editorials, and advertisements are all exactly the same. Mildly intelligent people understand that there’s a difference between what’s on the front page and what’s on the OpEd page. However, only a select few are aware that most of what’s in a newspaper is either fact-plus-fiction or truth-minus-fact, which evens out to be just about the same thing.

Here’s what I mean: People get nervous when they read stories in newspapers, because they always think they’re being lied to or manipulated (this goes back to the aforementioned “agenda” presumption). They always think they’re not getting the whole story. Actually, they’re getting more than the whole story; they’re getting the whole story, plus a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

Remember our thirsty reporter who was waiting for the mayor to call him back? Well, let’s say he finally leaves the office and swings by Stop-N-Go (maybe he wants another Dr Pepper). While walking toward the counter with his beverage in hand, a crazed loner walks into the store and shoots the convenience store employee in the face, killing him instantly. The reporter watches this shooting happen. The crazed loner then begins screaming like a maniac, and two cops rush in and apprehend him. Now, remember—the reporter sees all of this firsthand. And as a consequence, he calls up his editor on a cell phone and volunteers to write a story about the event. And he probably writes something like this…

RANDOM CITY, USA—The owner of a local Stop-N-Go was killed tonight in a brutal act of seemingly random violence. The alleged perpetrator was immediately taken into custody but firmly denies his involvement in the crime. “I never shot nobody,” said the alleged gunmen, who is also wanted for murder in seventeen other states.

Actually, I’m sort of exaggerating: I’m sure a copy editor would undoubtedly feel obligated to remove the word brutal. But by and large, this would be seen as a reasonable accounting of the events. This is why all reporters eventually go insane: Even if you see a guy shoot someone—in fact, even if a guy shoots you in the face, and you watch the bullet come out of the chamber of the .38 he’s holding—the event needs to be described as an “alleged” crime, and that alleged criminal needs to allege that he had no part in anything that allegedly happened.

Now, I realize this is essential to journalism, and I certainly don’t disagree with the principle behind that journalistic tradition. But these “essential” rules do create one rather embarrassing contradiction: Most serious news stories are peppered with information that is laughably false, and reporters are always fully aware of how false that information is. Newspapers are constantly quoting people who are openly lying, and almost every sound bite you hear in the broadcast media is partially false. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s not that the truth is being ignored; it’s just that the truth is inevitably combined with a bunch of crap that’s supposed to make