I definitely agree an admission of guilt after the fact can’t compare to actually getting it right the first time, or at least the next time. I do like to distinguish between hacks and earnest-if-flawed journalists, however. I’ve been fairly impressed with Peter Baker and Dan Balz at the Post, for example, and there are many genuinely great reporters out there (Charlie Savage, Murray Waas, Seymour Hersh, Dana Priest, many others), and you’re dead on about Knight-Ridder/McClatchy.

One of the huge hurdles I still see for the legitimate media is how they deal with lying. The media’s reluctant to call someone a “liar,” or more generally to flatly state that a public figure’s assertion is false. I suspect for “liar” it’s because it ascribes motive, and there may be a legal issue of libel as well. Skilled journalists can still raise the issue when it’s pertinent, but it seems even good reporters often sort of dance around the issue (I’m thinking of Peter Baker covering Bush’s parade of straw men last month, or Dana Milbank coming to the very brink of calling Bush a liar a couple years ago – perhaps the same article you’re thinking of). The easiest way to raise the issue when relevant would be with a direct quotation from a political opponent, but most politicians and pundits seem to avoid the word as well (meanwhile, the blogosphere can and will be more frank, but some bloggers may be a bit too quick to throw out the term). I’m sympathetic to the plight of straight journalists (versus op-ed writers, who have more leeway to sound off), but it seems the current principles of press conferences and talk shows allows liars to game the system, “win the half hour” as Dan Froomkin put it, and slip away relatively unscathed. The fact-checking, when it even occurs, is often buried deep in the paper or overlooked (other than perhaps by bloggers).

Anyway, thanks for a good post on an important subject.

I remember a couple of years ago when reporters were complaining about pointlessly anonymous briefings from “senior administration officials,” where the official would brief reporters on something completely innocuous that in no way warranted anonymity. I don’t remember now who it was, but one of the reporters tried to organize a boycott of that sort of briefing. His colleagues were in general agreement that that might be a good idea, so one day he stood up before one of those briefings began and walked out. And found himself standing in the hallway alone.

That’s what’s so irritating about the fear of losing sources. It’s not as though administration officials are going to clam up: they want to get their message out. They get annoyed with individual reporters and maybe stop gossiping off the record to them for a while — and reporters love gossip — but eventually officials have to start talking again because they want their spin on TV and in the Times or the Post and all of the chains. It isn’t isolation from the news that scares reporters at the top of the food chain: it’s social ostracism.

A good example is the recent flurry of “senior administration officials” leaking about possible changes in the administration’s Iraq strategy. That was an election-related effort, and those officials had to talk with reporters in order to get that story in the papers and on TV. They weren’t going to spite any of the big league reporters just because one or another had written something nasty about them or had been mean to Tony Snow in a briefing.

So what we have is, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the press about 1) what their jobs are and 2) where the actual balance of power between them and the administration — any administration — lies.