Time To Grow Up

Tonight, on NBC News…

Yesterday, the LA Times ran a very interesting story that says a lot about the old Mainstream Media.

Brian Williams, so the paper reports, reacted to a story in RadarOnline.com that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was stepping down.

Now, RadarOnline tends to run stories like “Eyebrow Guru Expands Her Empire” and “The True Story Behind Monique”.  The kind of stuff you would read in supermarket tabloids, if you read them.

What Brian Williams was doing reading RadarOnline is another story. This one is about how he reacted to it.

According to The LA Times,

“The anchor jumped out of his seat and ran through the station, eager to get to NBC’s Washington bureau. “I thought I was going to have to get on camera,” he said.

OK.

So we don’t have the brightest bulbs in the world as our nightly newsreaders. This is not exactly breaking news.

But the interesting thing here is the over-reaction (over reaction in my opinion at least) that the RadarOnline story was not true! (emphasis mine).

Well, there is a surprise.

Something online that is not true.

What is journalism coming to?

We have been living awash in a world of print journalism for,  give or take, a few hundred years.

Prior to the invention of the printing press, anything that was written was ‘true’. It had to be. Mostly it was the bible – the word of God.

When printing technology first percolated out to the average person, there were those unscrupulous people who would write and even print things that were not true. Shocking! So shocking in fact that laws were passed to vigorously punish the malefactors.  Not to mention writing something that the King would find offensive.

As years passed, however, we became conditioned to living in a world in which we were continually awash in crap.  We developed a fairly sophisticated filtering systems, so that when we walked into a supermarket and saw a tabloid ‘newspaper’ that said on the front page (!), Bat Child Found in Cave, our TV news anchors did not run through the station, eager to get on the air and break the news.  They knew, as all of us know, every day, that it is crap and so what.  We learn to ignore it.

In fact, we learn to ignore vast swaths of crap all the time. Just look at advertising.  Just because we read in a magazine that oil of Olay is going to make us look younger, do we immediately drop everything and go buy oil of Olay? Because we see an ad on TV that some drug (with considerable side effects like blindness and stroke) will stop Restless Leg Syndrome (whatever that is), do we immediately start taking the drug? Not a chance.

So now, just because something appears on the web, (a relatively new piece of technology in our media world), that does not make it true. In fact, much the opposite. Probably not.

Most likely not.

So we can drop all the hysteria over ‘lies online’.  This is nothing new. Nothing newer than Bat Boy Found in Cave.  And that is pretty old indeed.

On the other hand, I still cannot understand what a network anchor and journalist is doing reading RadarOnline.

That is more disturbing, really.

9:49 am: Reader Jonathan Wald makes a good point in a comment on Facebook on this.

That makes sense. But why criticize the anchor who wanted to make sure the story wasn’t true? Especially an anchor who knows more abou the Court than 99.9% of most Americans? Just seems like misplaced criticism. I’m all for the quality of brand names. But as we’ve seen from the Enquirer, which you mentioned, to quote the grateful dead, Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.