Communist Broadcasting Service
Okay, okay, that’s a severe exaggeration, but I do have more bad reporting, this time from CBS:
Four years after California’s disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard on audiotapes obtained by CBS News gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.
Now, I’m not going to argue that the dealings by certain well-known energy firms during the “California Energy Crisis” were wholly ethical; but it seems to me unfair to call a badly run, poorly planned attempt to undo decades of government market interference a “disasterous experiment.” The implication is that the market was at fault rather than a series of bad governmental decisions and some playing by naughty and slightly unscrupulous folks.
Then there’s this little teaser: Tonight’s Evening News will have more of the shocking Enron tapes, plus the outraged reaction from Capitol Hill. Tabloid journalism at its best, that. Take out the adjectives folks, or don’t they teach that in your precious Journalism schools anymore?
If the condemnation is so clear, why don’t I see it?
California’s experiment with deregulation: disastrous. Deregulation itself: no adjective applied.
Simply put: if this constitutes bad reporting, the media must be doing pretty damned well.
Where the blame falls, the way they’ve constructed the sentence, deregulation as an entity is clearly condemned. I’m specifically blaming the way in which California tried to undo its regulatory structure.
At the further risk of recapitulating the “Fisk Me” debate, I will now chime in with Olly. I think you’re grasping at straws here. You call the deregulation “badly run and poorly planned;” they call it a “disastrous experiment.” I’ve studied just enough science to know that badly run and poorly planned experiments are often disasters . . . so where’s the disagreement?
I can also figure out the “why this matters” on my own, and the “what it all means” so reporters should not think that they’re some sort of Truth Arbiters.
A) I’ll rework that in a more professional context if it pleases you: The implication made by the word-choice in this particular CBS news piece is that the market was to blame for problems that were caused by market manipulation and government policy.
B) Yes, I know the above is an opinion, but I’m not claiming that my blog posts are news.
C) This is different than the militant/terrorist thing, at least in my view. Symbols, as much as I hate to admit it, matter, and the word militant represents a different sort of entity and connotation than the word terrorist. In my view it downplays the severity of our problem to say “militant,” whereas “terrorist” is pretty obvious about what’s going on. I will say that I do, however, find this more annoying as its easy enough to mentally substitute back in “terrorist” without losing too much meaning of the original story. My problem with “shocking” and “outraged” is that those words are telling me how I should react to the news. They’re playing the Enron tapes, I should be shocked. Capitol Hill is saying something, they must be outraged! The reporters don’t know the internal feelings of others, they can’t nor can anyone else. Put in the damn quotes and stop telling me how I should react to this stuff, that’s not your job. The job of the reporter is pretty simple, tell me what happened. Who, what, when, where, how, the why I can figure out for myself.
hilarious!
Tim, at the risk of a complete recapitulation of the discussion following this post, I really don’t have a huge problem with words like “disaster”, “shocking” and “outrage” being used in this context. (As opposed to, say, “playing”, “naughty”, and “slightly unscrupulous”.)
If that CBS report is too gung-ho for you, I’m a little surprised that the “militant”/”terrorist” thing is such a big deal.