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November 19, 2004
Media perspectives on authority
The current edition of Editor and Publisher links to a Slate piece on how many citations of anonymous sources can be found in a New York Times story, notwithstanding that publication's efforts to increase its credibility. The Jack Shafer story in Slate also links back to a Public Editor piece in the NYT last June:
In his June column about anonymice, Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent asks why reporters quote anonymous sources at all. "Do their words take on more credibility because they're flanked with quotation marks?" he writes.
And my answer is, "Of course." The 1966 Practical Rhetoric, a textbook by O.B. Hardison, Jr., explains, "Quotation is one of the most effective forms of evidence." And if the very intelligent, well-educated students in my Writing 109 are any indication, a great many people believe that major commercial media sources do not tell lies, except for the occasional Stephen Glass/Jayson Blair renegade. (Which would, I suppose, relegate a source such as Media Matters to the lunatic fringe?) So all those anonymice really do work for the story's credibility. Readers associate the content of the quotation with the revered Fact, and because of the corporate ethos of an establishment such as the NYT, they believe that these quotations are indeed fact and not fiction. So anonymice proliferate in an era of breakneck journalism, when there's little time for verification--unless, of course, one reads MSM and blogs voraciously.
For those of you without library database access to the full text of Jack Rosenthal's insightful analysis of what I'm calling "breakneck journalism" (with which, of course, both MSM and blogs are afflicted), here's an excerpt:
Our generation is witnessing a relentless rise in the number of news outlets, the frequency of news reports and the media's clamor for every scrap of new information, consequential or not. In this all-news all-the-time environment, society is immersed first in a flood of facts and then in a rush of opinion. Inescapably, the public's interest is soon saturated. Too soon.
Posted by senioritis at November 19, 2004 08:53 AM