Rarely are New Year’s resolutions kept past Jan. 2. New gym memberships go unused. Bad habits resurface. Time management goes out the window.
But that never stopped anyone from making them anyway. So, here, the Washington Examiner Media Desk proposes sevenresolutions for the news media heading into 2015.
1. MSNBC should resolve to demote Al Sharpton to contributor status. Sharpton has done more to erase the line between journalism and activism than anyone working in media. It’s one thing for a cable news host to stake out a position on a controversial issue. It’s a whole other blueberry pie to hold protests against legal decisions and advise the president on picking Cabinet members, as Sharpton has done. After a New York grand jury declined to indict the police officers accused of killing Eric Garner, Sharpton hosted Garner’s widow on his TV show. Then he held a press conference on the grand jury’s decision. A few days later he appeared with the widow on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Sharpton was effectively making news and then covering the news he created. MSNBC can fix the problem by simply demoting Sharpton from news show host to contracted contributor.
2. Charles Johnson should resolve to disappear from the media landscape. The troubled blogger is often labeled a conservative by mainstream and liberal media even though he doesn’t claim that label and conservative journalists won’t claim him as one of their own. He has, however, written for numerous conservative publications. Johnson now edits his own website where he posted photos of “Jackie,” the alleged rape victim in Rolling Stone magazine’s infamously flawed campus rape story. Even after admitting that one of the photos was not actually “Jackie,” Johnson kept the photo up. He regularly threatens to sue other journalists who write about him and posts their contact information without permission to his Twitter account for his some 19,000 followers to see. The only way to clear this up is for Johnson to find a new profession.
3. The Associated Press should resolve never to abandon its style guide for the sake of emotionalizing an already sensational story. After 18-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., was killed by a police officer, AP repeatedly described Brown as a “teen.” This violated AP’s own rule that if a male subject is 18 he should be referred to as a man or his age should simply be omitted. AP never explained why it did this, but retroactively corrected its reports to fall in line with its style guide. Next time, AP should retain its professionalism instead of getting caught up in a breathtaking story.
4. The news media, as a whole, should resolve to learn the difference between racial and racist. For far too long the news media dub anything that acknowledges the existence of race as “racist.” When hacked emails showed one Sony Corp. executive making thoughtless jokes about how President Obama might have felt about the year’s black-centric movies, she was speaking in racial terms, not in racist ones. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly repeatedly referred to the emails as “racist.” But to refer to different cultural experiences of different races, even in ill-conceived jokes, is not to speak in racist terms — meaning words that suggest one race is inherently superior to another. It is to speak in terms of race: racial. When the media learn the difference, the debate on race relations in the United States will be more constructive and less contentious.
5. NBC should resolve to make “Meet the Press” great again. This year, David Gregory was brutally ousted as host of the legendary Sunday current affairs program. With the smallest of goodbyes from the network, Gregory was replaced by Chuck Todd, a political junkie’s junky with encyclopedic knowledge of Washington almost unmatched by anyone in TV news. But while Todd is an excellent reporter and a decent interviewer, his TV presence is lacking. He wiggles side to side when on camera. He’s largely unable to book big-name guests exclusively. It’s too soon to shove Todd out of the chair, but “Meet the Press” still has some prestige to recover. NBC needs to figure out how.
6. Rolling Stone should resolve to reinstate its critical thinking. The culture magazine is an easy target for producing the single biggest media screw-up of 2014 and perhaps the past decade. It is difficult to imagine a greater journalistic offense than publishing a 9,000-word, flimsily reported article about an alleged gang rape on a college campus — a crime that mounting evidence suggests may not have occurred. The magazine did not even request comment from the accused men, who stand to lose everything. Rolling Stone has distanced itself from the story and asked the Columbia Journalism Review to examine the editorial process behind it. In 2015, Rolling Stone hopefully will reacquaint itself with the most fundamental trait of a professional news organization: skepticism.
7. CNN should resolve to figure out when, exactly, are good times for Don Lemon to speak. At his best, Lemon is a strong advocate for reason, such as when he calmly predicted that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted, and he is brave enough to voice controversial opinions, such as when he criticized black communities that foster dysfunctional families. At other times, Lemon’s mouth is a fire hose of oddities, as when he asked whether missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 possibly was swallowed by a black hole. Or when he asked a woman accusing Bill Cosby of rape why she didn’t use her teeth to stop the assault. Lemon has a lot of thought-provoking things to say. But CNN needs a system for limiting his commentary to only those things.
Here’s to a New Year and new beginning for the news media.
