Useless Idiots

I have long warned friends and coworkers about the dangers of being interviewed by the media. Am I in a sensitive government position? A politically-charged think thank? No. I make cartoons, for gosh sakes. And yet my warning is always, “What journalists don’t get wrong due to bias they get wrong due to incompetence.” While there have been a few exceptions (whom I always go out of my way to thank), most are just clueless. If those who can’t do, teach then those who can’t teach go to journalism school.

I was interviewed a little over a decade ago by Millimeter in what was supposed to be just a simple fluff piece about the movie we were making. Here’s how I was “quoted”:

“It’s like a highly developed style, jam-packed with story. Our pacing will end up being like ‘The Wizard of Oz’, with a cohesive sound score by the whimsical Randy Newman that propels the story, but more like ‘The Graduate’ in that no one breaks out in song.”

Huh?

While I may have found that annoying, at least when a movie rag muffs a story people don’t die.

Not so the case in the World War where incompetence aids the enemy.

What I realized, from watching [NBC’s Ann Curry] and other journalists like her, was that contrary to popular belief, most of these journalists are neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel. In fact, they are not exactly journalists at all, at least not in the sense that we have been taught to believe. They do not seem interested in reporting what is traditionally understood as news — that is, information that attempts to convey as complete and realistic an accounting of events as possible.

They can be more accurately described as entertainers, who stimulate their audiences with that which is factual and passing. The most striking thing about the producers and on-air reporters who show up in Israel is how deeply ignorant they are of the conflict and its history. This is not exactly their fault: It is the product of their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. The skills required of them are technical and theatrical, not historic or intellectual, and thus they do not approach their task with much in the way of rigor; they are looking for interesting personal stories and manufactured mini-dramas, whose correlation to reality is only occasionally discernable.