"Reporting" and Credentialism

Sigh.  I really need to get away from all this media navelgazing, but this is a very smart post by Kagro X on the constraints facing traditional journalists.  There is a decidedly odd absence of self-consciousness on the part of many journalists about the limitations of their profession's approach to information gathering, and the way in which they really can be bested by both experts and amateurs engaged in sustained study of an issue.  But that's to be a bit too kind: It's half a lack of self-consciousness, and half a projected arrogance born of status anxiety.

When Brian Williams says that "[a]ll of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work" -- and what field of work would that be, by the way? -- "and now I'm up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn't left the efficiency apartment in two years," what he's saying isn't that his years as a reporter better equip him to cover traffic patterns than a guy who's spent years in a cramped space studying urban planning.  He's a generalist whose reputation for "reporting" gives him the credibility to range widely over subjects he can't possibly have studied in-depth. He's saying that those credentials make him better than some nobody in a basement somewhere.  But if someone else has better credentials -- a tenured professorship, say, or published books to his name -- the quiet study approach is perfectly accepted by mainstream journalists.  For instance: The punditocracy has enormous respect for Paul Berman, who looms large in George Packer's history of the Iraq War, The Assassin's Gate.  Packer admiringly describes Berman's spartan, life-of-the-mind existence: “Berman lived alone in a walk-up apartment that was strewn with back issues of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review and volumes of French literature and philosophy in the original,” and writes that, "I listened, occasionally asking a skeptical question, admiring the dedication of his project (who else was really trying to figure this stuff out?)."

Brian Williams, of course, would never demean Berman as "some guy named Paul who lives by himself in a walk-up and hasn't shaved in three months."  Berman is credentialed and respected.  And that's what separates him from Vinny, and protects him from the same dismissal.  Reporting has a talismanic quality in this town, to be sure, and for good reason: There's no substitute for real reporting.  But too often, picking up the phone and calling three people does not magically grant omniscience, and nor does studying issues in a half-hearted and generalist way.  Too often, reporting is really just a word that paid writers use to separate themselves from the unwashed, typing masses.  Indeed, it's telling that Sy Hersch is usually upset about the lack of reporting among self-described reporters, rather than among bloggers.