EARLIER THIS WEEK on PoliticsDaily.com, veteran journalist Walter Shapiro had a column in which he called for a “slow news movement.”
“We have lost sight of so many significant aspects of our age because they cannot be boiled down to bite-sized news nuggets,” he wrote. “The problem is not the new technology of the news, but rather how quickly we have been enslaved by it.”
Specifically, Shapiro is miffed about how conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart set off the Shirley Sherrod firestorm.
On his website, Breitbart posted a couple of short videos of a speech by Sherrod – a regional official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture – cherry-picking several of her statements and presenting them out of context, thus making Sherrod appear racist.
The resulting brouhaha led to her being forced to resign her position at the USDA. She was later vindicated and offered another job in government. Sherrod has said she now plans on suing Breitbart.
Breitbart‘s explanation of why he rushed to publish the materials without seeing the full video first – “I couldn’t wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out” – has left Shapiro seething about what he calls a “publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking.” On a larger level, he bemoans the “slippery ethics of the blogosphere” in an age when “being first trumps being accurate.”
“Deprived of context, facts do not speak for themselves,” Shapiro said. “Analysis and interpretation of the news are needed to spur comprehension – and not just as an excuse for ideological rants and as a way to rack up cheap political points.
“The news of government, politics and the world is too important to be instantly consumed like a shopaholic racing through a mall. Our democracy simply cannot survive if we fail to see the forest for the tweets.”
Shapiro thinks that slowing things down is part of the solution. “With the news media in the midst of a wrenching transition, there have to be protected spaces somewhere – whether on the Internet or on cable TV – for millions of citizens to savor and contemplate the news.”
I can appreciate what Shapiro is saying. I’ve often thought it would be nice to return to a time when things were less crazed in the news business, if only for a little while. And he’s right that blogging creates a host of ethics concerns, given that the majority of bloggers aren’t necessarily duty-bound to adhere to standards of fairness and accuracy.
But to seriously believe that a “slow news movement” could take hold today is absurd. The ship has sailed and there’s no going back. Even Shapiro (pictured left) acknowledges this: “Maybe it is folly to dream that in the quest to be well-informed, Americans will voluntarily drop out of the ever-pulsating media culture that brings out the worst in all of us.”
Both those who produce news and those who consume it have grown accustomed to the new way of doing things. Slowing the machine down now — even if it might ensure more accuracy in reporting and blogging – is simply impossible. People expect their news delivered pronto these days, and those who gather and produce it are willing to do all they can to stay in business at a time of industry upheaval.
Like it or not, fast is the new slow.
