'No Time to Think': When Faster Equals Disaster

From the partisan shout-fests on cable news to the thinly-sourced celebrity take-downs on TMZ, a lot of what passes for news these days is garbage. Quite a lot of this garbage is produced by, and consumed by, perfectly intelligent people. What's going on here?

Howard Rosenberg and Charles S. Feldman think it has to do with speed. In their new book No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Rosenberg, a media columnist and former critic for the Los Angeles Times, and Feldman, an investigative reporter, make the case that each incremental increase in the rate of news-cycle turnover has yielded a corresponding rise in the level of inaccuracy, blather and humbug in the newsosphere. I recently spoke with them about the dangers of blog journalism, the need for "nutritional labeling" in news, and the problem with Keith Olbermann.

MIXED MEDIA: Your book is about the ways newer forms of media, from talk radio to 24-hour cable news and on down to blogs, have brought about a steady acceleration of the news cycle, something you see as antithetical to solid journalism. As a blogger who sometimes covers the news in real time, should I start this interview by apologizing?

HOWARD ROSENBERG: I don't think we intended in any way to make a blanket indictment of bloggers. It's the irresponsible ones we worry about.

CHARLES S. FELDMAN: I'm a blogger myself and actually I started doing my own blog before we did the book. I'm certainly not unfamiliar with the ins and outs of blogging world. The problem I have with it is that in the days before blogs, if you were a writer, whether it's for a newspaper, magazine, TV, whatever it is, the notion was you wanted to do your best to get facts as straight as you could first before you put them into print or onto the air.

That's almost antithetical to the nature of blogging. The notion is you put it out there as fast as you possibly can, and if something is wrong either you'll go back and correct it or you hope somebody else will link to you and correct it for you. That seems to me to be not only a recipe for disaster but a recipe for laziness.

Most things, if they're wrong, they're wrong and it's not going to harm anybody. But every now and then comes along something where it's really critical that it be right right from the start. For instance, there was that Chicago Tribune article that got out on the internet that triggered a sell-off of United stock. It might've only lasted 10 minutes but it was disastrous.

MM: That's a fair point, but there are counterexamples. Look at how Talking Points Memo was able to break the story of U.S. attorneys being forced out for political reasons by putting limited, provisional information online and asking readers to chime in.

CF: No one is arguing that there's never an example of something that works out well. In medicine, occasionally even placebos cure people. But it doesn't mean you want to rely on them if you're really ill. Sometimes you just need a good dose of actual medicine. Are there going to be examples where the outcome is beneficial? Of course. But you have to look at it in in aggregate. For every one of those examples, how many can you come up with that are negative, or much more pernicious than that?

HR: The book isn't just about blogs but also about the dangers of excessive live television. As a print reporter, there were layers of editors who would look at everything I wrote to make sure I didn't make mistakes, and I still made mistakes. But if you're live, you say it and it goes out. And, increasingly, more and more of TV is live, and that's a danger because there is no safety net.

MM: In the very first chapter, you quote a TV producer who says that speed is to blame for every mistake in journalism. Do you believe that?

HR: I would never say speed responsible for everything that's wrong. All that we argue is that it's an important factor. There's lots of evidence, empirical and even just common sense, that tells you the faster you go the more likely you are to make a mistake.

CF: I got into the 24/7 racket fairly early on, close to beginning of CNN. Prior to that I had some background in what I like to call conventional newscasting, which was a show that was on once a night in New York and you spent the entire day building up to it. I can tell you from my own experience there was a marked change in how to do stories. It was coming from a day where you'd come in at nine in the morning and you'd have all of that time until it hit air at 10 pm. to call people and hone facts -- and even then we didn't have enough time to do justice to really complex stories. I still remember the very first day I was at CNN, I was asked to do three different stories in the same day, on three different topics. And this was all because they needed to feed this never-ending machine. It always reminded me of that I Love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory with the conveyor belt that never stopped. That's exactly how I felt. The inability to even catch your breath between stories -- it has to have, sooner or later, a negative impact.

MM: That sounds logical. Still, I wonder if this new world is really as different as it seems. Hasn't there always been a premium on being first in journalism? Don't people and organizations always feel stretched to the limit?

HR: Speed has always been a component of news going back to the genesis of news, but now the stakes are so much greater because the speed is so much greater. And maybe it will even be greater 20 years from now.

But it's more than just speed. Another problem is we're seeing a redefinition of what news is. Now the definition is it can be anything. That includes opinion, speculation, rumor and innuendo, and it gets all homogenized in the same hopper to the point that it's increasingly difficult for the news consumer to distinguish one from another, or to distinguish one news source from another. "Did I hear that on the Tonight Show, or on MSNBC?"

CF: This is an issue that has just come up in the past couple weeks at NBC News with Keith Olbermann. What was happening was what should've been two separate products, MSNBC and NBC, with NBC being the more traditional of the two, they were starting to meld to the degree that people were finding it very difficult to know which was behind the advocacy journalism they heard, which led to a bit of a shakeup there.

I know a lot of people who actually don't make the distinction at all. They fail to make the distinction between someone who is an advocate anchor -- an Olbermann, a Bill O'Reilly -- and someone who is a news anchor. And that's dangerous. If you listen very closely to Olbermann, he does something that's very like a traditional newscast. The only difference is he slips in little pejoratives.

MM: So there we've diagnosed some of the problem. What's the solution?

HR: The media are not going to slow down. No one is going to dial back. The only possible solution is media literacy -- educating people, not when they're 25, not when they're 13, but when they're really young, almost like toddler level, for them to really understand the composition of media, the motivations of media, the impacts of media -- both the positive impact and the potential negative impact.

CF: There's an analogy to what's happened with nutritional labeling requirements on food packaging. The same kind of crappy food that was avail 20 years ago is still available, but now you can look at that label and a get a breakdown of the nutritional value or non-value. Then it's ultimately up to you.

And that's the same argument we're making with news consumption. If the audience, if the viewer has a better sense of how the product is put together, what it's made of, where the biases are, what the hidden agendas are likely to be, they're still free to participate in it, but at least they have a fighting chance of understanding what they're looking at.

MM: Your analogy doesn't point to a promising conclusion. Even with all the nutritional information at our fingertips, Americans are fatter than ever.

CF: I think you have an obligation to do whatever you can. And in the end, sure, there's self-responsibility. We're not advocating for government control or even some kind of industry-wide standards. At the end of the day it's going to be up to the individual, and if the individual wants to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein personally hired the pilots that rammed into the World Trade Center, well...

HR: You can always find needles in the haystack, but today the haystack has grown enormously, and it makes it harder to find the needles. Look at my own part time-employer now, the Los Angeles Times. Can you still find good stories in the L.A. Times? Absolutely. Can you find as many good stories as you once could? Absolutely not. Is print journalism in general as good as it used to be in this country? Absolutely not. And I'm not at all sure it helps that more resources across the country are being transferred to the internet.

MM: What's your take on what's been happening at the L.A. Times since Sam Zell took it over?

HR: I think what's happening to the paper is almost criminal. It's very depressing. And at least a good part of it has to do with Zell trying to reduce his debt. He has certainly exacerbated the problem. If you chip away enough, pretty soon you have nothing left but a cadaver.