Manufacturing the news

Certainly it is just a coincidence that the Bangor jury in the Dateline NBC case and this week’s Economist magazine arrived simultaneously at the same conclusion.

The Dateline jury found that the news organization had promised Maine truckers Peter Kennedy and Ray Veilleux a positive show on trucking issues. They got anything but. The program depicted Mr. Kennedy breaking trucking laws and falsifying his logbook, among other misdeeds. They sued and, Wednesday, won.

Now consider a paragraph in the current issue of the Economist: “The news business used to be a craft, but now it has turned into a manufacturing operation. Look at the quantity of NBC’s output: over the past two years, it has gone up from three hours of television news a day to 27 hours a day , plus a constantly updated website. And that is with only a few extra reporters. Like the next factory owner, NBC has thought hard about how to screw more output from its workers.”

It isn’t such a long leap from that hard thinking to the trucker case. Charging a news organization with manufacturing news is extremely serious business, but given recent events of fabrication or pure carelessness at the Boston Globe, The New Republic, CNN and Time, the conclusion could be justified.

As if the public needed another example of media mendacity, Peter Arnett, CNN’s reporter for its famously bungled story on the use of nerve gas in Laos, had the least-comforting explanation of the foulup. When asked why he did not more strongly question a story in which he would be making formidable accusations against the U.S. government, he said, “I had no real reason to doubt it. I didn’t do the research. I didn’t know whether it was true or not.”

Can anyone really be surprised by the decision in the Dateline case?