Political tone reflects journalistic decline

Don’t blame the Tea Party movement for the sour tone of politics today.
Blame instead the shrinking of journalism, its standards and its ability to fairly inform Americans about their government.
The Tea Party folks, their anger and their angst, are symptoms of the political polarization that combines with a media meltdown to damage political campaigns and coverage of government.
The downward tone of the na-tion’s politics mirrors a decline in journalistic standards and sinking media coverage.
The nation’s privately owned engines of journalism are sputtering — the bigger the corporate engine, the louder the sputter.
There is less coverage of gov-rnment, less checking of facts and more tabloid-style hype about naughty celebrities, making people like former Sen. John Edwards the poster boys for politicians.
The news business today offers coverage that is more ideological, louder, shorter, much more polarized and more entertainment-oriented than the news of a decade or two ago.
Reporters sometimes thrust themselves into the news instead of avoiding the spotlight. It’s show biz with less show and more fizz.
Journalism once had a line not to be crossed more than once between hard news reporting and flacking. That line has disappeared along with all the lines separating political news and the entertainment business.
The next star journalist could come from the Tea Party movement and would fit into many an edgy format.
Worse than the trend of former politicos crossing lines into journalism is the growing tendency of news outlets to allow governments at all levels to simply write their own news.
That may be fine if a city or a governor is announcing a pot-hole patching plan, but the trend is for governments to spin the news in releases that media outlets swallow and spit out whole.
Who checks facts any longer?
Who puts in context?
Who questions?
The art of the spin in government offices is fast replacing the editorial judgment of journalists, who are a dying breed.
As newsrooms die or wither, well-paid “flack checkers” oversee empires in which British Petroleum, or the federal government charged with keeping a regulatory eye on BP, estimate the amounts of oil they say are leaking into the public domain.
We are left with fewer people who trust BP, fewer who trust the government and fewer who trust the reporters who mouth the growing estimates.
Just as no one seems to know how to plug a big oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, journalism seems less than capable of resisting the pressure of polarized politics in which the extremes blast each others’ motives and run roughshod over anyone trying to meet in the middle.
Our political system has blown a leak, is fouling the public domain with a gooey tar of emotional drivel and has fewer journalists trained and able to clean up the mess with the tar-removing truth.
What is at stake is no less than the clean beachheads of democracy, the trust that allows voters to understand competing views and the ability of government to solve problems as believable servants of people.
Journalism can help restore trust by cleaning its own house, finding new business plans that work with new technologies and by remembering and applying the standards of fairness that investigate and question power to keep it clean.

Bob Gibson is executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institute.