Pete The Elder

« Hypocisy Thy Name is Moore | Main | Climate of Fear Part 13 »

January 20, 2005

Ball Four

I started reading Ball Four by Jim Bouton last night and was impressed by the relevance of something written in the introduction. The media has not changed much over the past few decades. When Bouton published this book in 1970 it outraged the press because he told truths about baseball that the press did not think we the public needed to know. Today the mainstream media is mad about the rise of institutions like talk radio, Fox News, and the blogosphere that allow people to publish truths that the mainstream media do not want us to know.

Here is relevant excerpt quoting David Halberstam on page ix of Ball Four: "As the book is deeply in the American vein, so is the reaction against it. The sportswriters are not judging the accuracy of the book, but Bouton's right to tell (that is, your right to read), which is, again, as American as apple pie or the White House press corps. A reporter covers an institution, becomes associated with it, protective of it, and, most important, the arbiter of what is right to tell. He knows what's good for you to hear, what should remain at the press club bar. When someone goes beyond that, stakes out a new dimension of what is proper and significant, then it is the sportswriters and the Washington bureau chiefs who yell the loudest, because having played the game, having been tamed, when someone outflanks them, they must of necessity attack his intentions, his accuracy. Thus Bouton has become a social leper to many sportswriters and thus Sy Hersh, when he broke the My Lai story, became a 'peddler' to some of Washington's most famous journalists."

Thus when someone points out that Dan Rather is using fraudulent documents, the important thing isn't that Dan Rather misled the public, but that people who do not work for CBS or CNN or the New York Times do not have the right to question or to publish truth. They are to be dismissed as right wing partisans or guys in pajamas no matter how accurate their criticism.

Posted by Pete at January 20, 2005 01:41 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.petetheelder.com/mt-tb.cgi/279

Comments

Posted by: chris at January 21, 2005 12:01 PM