Adam WeinsteinIt’s time, as Hunter Thompson might say, for an agonizing reappraisal of the media scene. And brother, it’s especially agonizing this week. Read on for the biggest heartbreaks:
Brian Williams: Brian, Brian, Brian. What can one say? There’s the fog of war, and there’s making that little fish sound big, and then there’s stolen valor. The latter is what happens when you tell other people’s stories of danger and daring as your own, even for a good aim. It’s a devilish tendency in soldiers; it’s deadly in journalists, who are paid as much in trust as in money. And Williams cleaned out his trust reserves this week, when he admitted he’d embellished a highly detailed story of being on a helicopter in Iraq that was grounded after being hit by an RPG in 2003. And questions lingered over his mealy-mouthed apology, which colored the false anecdote as a “misremembering,” rather than a lie. (As a veteran of some interesting flights over Iraq, my sense is you tend not to forget big details, like whether you were shot at.)
But then, maybe NBC operates differently; as other media critics have pointed out, Williams didn’t travel alone, and somewhere there’s presumably a producer and a cameraman who could have prevented Williams from perfidiously egging his face over the past decade… but didn’t. Now, all journalists are suffering a little, because Williams and crew have enabled all the media-hating Chicken Littles to bandy their I-told-you-so’s especially loudly this month. And Williams’ other early work is justifiably going to get some serious scrutiny.
The Florida press corps’ brain drain: This isn’t about a particularly awful story; it’s about a particularly troubling trend. This week, investigative powerhouse Toluse Olorunnipa abandoned the sunshine state for Bloomberg News’ Washington bureau, because every once in a while, an innocent man is sent to the nation’s capital. He’s just the latest in a series of high-profile losses for astute Florida news readers lately: Michael Bender made a similar jump for Bloomberg awhile back. Bill Duryea and Michael Kruse left the Tampa Bay Times to spin beautiful stories for Politico Magazine. And there’s one-man rock band Marc Caputo, who’s still doing his thing in Miami, but left the Herald to be assimilated into Politico’s Beltway borg.
To be sure, there are still plenty of hard-nosed talents doing fantastic work around the state: Mary Ellen Klas, Tia Mitchell, Matt Dixon, and Jim Rosica immediately jump to mind–but their benefactors are cutting back, trying to keep up with the parsimonious Gannetts of the world. And it’s flabbergasting to see state and local coverage hemorrhaging so severely as both the economy and Florida’s population break new growth records. (We’re now number three in total population in America; say bye to New York in the rearview mirror.)
Can Beltway-based pundit factories and Manhattan megaliths fill the gap? For now, they’ll have to. But eventually, the local shrinking pool of deep-diving, muckraking, storytelling talent may evaporate altogether.
