How Our Press Fails Us
Posted by
Kevin
Matthew Yglesias, speaking about the the death of four girls in DC, says this:
Thus, I might note that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty seemed completely justified in his decision to fire these six social workers whose screwups contributed to the murder of four girls. That other civil servants are pissed off about that accountability moment is understandable, but it’s simply vital that this city demand a higher quality of public services.
That is a hard sentiment to argue with in the abstract, and maybe since Matthew is a resident he is hearing more details about this story than I am, but the two articles Matt links to are completely and utterly useless for anyone who wants to know what the hell is actually going on. In the first, the basic facts of the firing are well covered: the Mayor, under pressure after a terrible failure that lead to four children dying, fired six workers he blamed for the failure and offered up a phone call that he said supported the firings. The second article discussed the firings as one example of the Mayor having more difficulty than usual in moving his agenda and dealing with critics. In neither case did the articles provide me with much, if anything, in the way of evidence to support the Mayor’s claim that the six deserved to be fired or the critics claims that the six were being made scapegoats. It is infuriating and a sign that the rot in our news media is truly out of control.
In cases like these, athere are three main possibilities: either the people had the authority to do more and did not, the system is broken, in that it either does not allow the agents tot take the required steps or it does not train agents well enough to inform them of the proper steps, or the system is underfunded and the agents were unfairly buried in cases. It could be any of the items, some of which justify the firings, some of which do not, or it could be a combination of the three. My point is not to choose one or the other, my point is that the articles spend no time examining any of these possibilities. There is no attempt to find out what did happen, what could have happened, and how the budget, the systme polices, and the behavior of the agents interacted and lead to to the tragedy. We have a simple recitiation of non-contested facts and “he said, he said” arguing for the rest.
That cannot be acceptable journalism. The Washington Post is allegedly one of the greatest newspapers in the world, but when it is confronted with an issue vitally important to the well being of its home city, it responded with journalism that would make a high school editor fire reporters. It apparently made no attempt to work out what the actual policies are, what effect the budget had on the implementation of those polices, and, what, precisely, were the agents empowered and expected to do. Something is broken in the family services department of DC. It would have been nice if DC’s home town paper would have bothered to try and find out what.
