von Raivo Pommer

Der oberste Bankenfonds-Kontrolleur beschwert sich, dass die VW-Bank unter den Rettungsschirm darf. Die habe da nichts zu suchen.

Aus den Medien musste Albert Rupprecht (CSU) erfahren, dass jetzt offenbar auch Autobanken unter den Bankenrettungsschirm des Bundes schlüpfen dürfen. Man darf sagen: Einverstanden ist der Vorsitzende des parlamentarischen Kontrollgremiums für den 480 Milliarden Euro schweren Rettungsfonds Soffin damit nicht.

Die VW-Bank soll offenbar staatliche Garantien im Gegenwert von zwei Milliarden Euro erhalten. “Das war so nicht abgemacht”, beklagt sich Rupprecht in einem Schreiben an Soffin-Chef Hannes Rehm und den Vorsitzenden des entscheidenden Lenkungsausschusses der Bundesregierung, Finanz-Staatssekretär Jörg Asmussen.

Huh. My agency puts out press releases all the time, and they invariably state that “the political person in charge said ‘What the defendant did is very bad and we are determined to stamp it out, bla bla bla.” I always ask, “Did you hear her say that? So why are we saying she did?” As though the first thing the boss does every morning is pick up a sheet of paper with a list of high-minded sentences, and read each one to the empty air. Enunciating clearly and distinctly.

“Balance-seeking” drives journalists to call people until they get a counter-perspective for the story, and ‘would you agree that x ’ is the fastest way to get those. The problem with this is that it assumes clear dichotomies exist. There are many cases when there are more than one alternative position, and those are not necessarily compatible. Take the Obama “more troops to Afghanistan” stories. The counter-view is from leftist anti-war groups, but this ignores the rightist opponents of the Afghan war (e.g., Michael Scheuer types). To the thoughtful interviewees, the journalist is not asking their expert views, but asking them to express an almost-obvious point. They are not “spin[ning] the interpretation of the facts”; they are setting up an often simplistic dichotomy.

“Opinion laundering,” as Henry describes it, is different. If the journalist (be it blogger, columnist, reporter, or anchor) wants to disguise the origins of a position, he or she is not seeking balance but seeking a false “neutral” party. Rather than have, say, a PR flack from the AMA or the SEIU argue over whether a single-payer healthcare system is good or bad, two academic healthcare “experts” are brought into the fray, each expected to advocate his or her line to the hilt.

The real problem is the lack of an arbitrator. The reader, listener, or viewer is presented with expert saying “x” and another saying “not-x” and is expected to just decide. The value of interviewing academics ought to be that we can say evaluate the pros and cons, and suggest what the trade-offs are.

You seem to be falling into the same trap as the main piece – what I sometimes call the lure of the false comparator.

The choice (we) journalists have is not between the perfect, objective quote from an untouchable, authoritative source, but between many different imperfect options.

How about stories with no quotes? Just bare lists of facts and journalists’ presumptions?

How about stories with lots of conflicting quotes and views? How long would people continue reading them?

To an extent ‘sock puppetry’ is just bad journalism, but having actual quotes from actual people in real time is what makes journalism different from blogging.

There’s a world of difference between thinking something and writing something chatty about it, and trying to find stories, cajole people to go on the record, get certain views said out loud (rather than in private, amongst themselves). One has consequences, the other likely not.

Wasn’t the point of discussion above that they do, in fact, tell us their views, they just route them through a source first. If that’s all that is going on (and I don’t believe it is universally) then surely it’s not a good convention—- more what the interweb would call “sock puppetry”.

And for opinion shopping, again surely it is better that you find someone with a name and a title, because then others can draw their own conclusions about whether that source of opinion is valid or not. It might not be perfect, but again the alternative is worse.

The worst crime in this sense is to use loaded phrases like “the leading academic in the field” rather than statements of fact. See Malcolm Gladwell for repeated errors in this regard.

Calls for cossack rampages belong in another thread.

Are US newspapers better? Who knows? Does anybody – except the likes of us – bother to read them?

I don’t know if there’s a happy medium, still less a happy medium that is economically viable. On the one hand, parts of the American press have been hitting the reductio ad absurdum of he-said, she-said for quite some time now. If The Onion hasn’t had a piece with the headline “Shape of Earth: Opinions Differ”, it’s not for lack of recent opportunity. On the other hand, reporters for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, for example, regularly insert opinions into news articles in ways that I think would rightly be a firing offense at a US paper. I don’t have an example immediately to hand, but the basic sin is substituting an opinion for reporting in such a way that the overall article misleads readers.

On the American side, it would be good for reporters to come to a conclusion from time to time, and to do that in plain English, not some code only available to people reading as closely as Sovietologists once parsed Pravda. On the European side, it would be good for reporters to back up their assertions, particularly at papers like the FAZ that have a news hole US journalists can only dream about.