Meet Dave “Outraged By The Outrage” Zeeck

This story from Editor and Publisher’s Joe Strupp notes that the outgoing president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Dave Zeeck, reacted strongly to claims from bloggers and others from either side of the ideological spectrum in this country that newspapers “are biased, lazy and out to bring down the country,” as Strupp puts it.

Here is how Zeeck responded…

“For a generation or more, we’ve let others define us. Spiro Agnew comes to mind. Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio, both right and left,” he said. “Bloggers who assail us as the MSM, the mainstream media, as if that is a badge that should shame us. You know what they say; we’re the liberal media. We’re elitists. We’re only interested in bad news. We tear people down just to sell newspapers. We have a political agenda. We’re unpatriotic.”

He then added, “How can I put this delicately? If you’ll pardon a literary aside. I’ll just mention the subject of a recent bestseller: Bullshit!”

Oooh, what a potty mouth! As Atrios would say, it sounds like time for another blogger ethics panel.

Zeeck continues as follows…

“We may know that such criticism is untrue, but what is our public response? Mostly silence,” he said. “We are uncomfortable about advocating for ourselves. We are losing our case in the court of public opinion. The gas bags are winning.”

One way for editors to fire back, he said, is to use their best weapon, great reporting. “We’re still the source of most news in this country and it is an advantage we will have for a long time,” Zeeck stressed. “Who is the Yahoo reporter at my city hall? Where is that Google reporter risking his life in Iraq?”

On the one hand, I think Zeeck is engaging in one big “pity party” here and he ought to confine his remarks to particular episodes of which he speaks and try to address root causes. On the other hand, it’s good to see that he has a pulse and cares enough about his craft to defend it.

Right wingers criticize “mainstream” corporate media to create a distraction in an effort to make sure their voice is heard above all others. Period. They don’t care about dissenting points of view, much like their president, and they never will. And newspapers and other media outlets suck up to those people in an effort to get them to pay for what they’re selling, and in the process, their quality plummets (and the readership is smart enough to figure this out without having people like your humble narrator pointing it out for them).

And speaking of people like me, as I see it, our job first and foremost is to call the wingers on their nonsense. Yes, I try to do other stuff that I think is interesting and people may or may not care about (such as the car texting thing I got into earlier), but the fact of the matter is that if newspapers like the Inquirer would police themselves so that, for example, people like Kevin Ferris wouldn’t be allowed to have his column published unless he could prove that protestors of the Iraq war had spray painted graffiti on the Capitol steps instead of merely quoting some speculative hearsay that may be nothing more than this week’s RNC talking point, then people like me would shut up about it.

The bottom line is that if reporters, writers and editors were policing themselves properly, trying to ascertain real factual stories and provide context the way they were once trained to do, and not worrying about how successful a “cost center” they’ve become, then the only people shouting would be the freepers. And they will never stop shouting anyway; there is absolutely no way to please them other than to give them every single, stinking thing they want regardless of the consequences.

And all of Dave Zeeck’s cursing will never change that.