Scott Walker and Me

I need to make one thing per­fectly clear here at the out­set: I am a party to this because I really am Dave Koch. I am not some unknown blog­ger from upstate New York pre­tend­ing to be me. I am the real Dave Koch. I am not some­one try­ing to make a par­ti­san polit­i­cal point, I am real. I do have a daugh­ter in bal­let… unfor­tu­nately, I am not a billionaire…

What am I? Who is Dave Koch? At one time, I was a jour­nal­ist. I cared about being accu­rate and hon­est. Ian Mur­phy can claim nei­ther qual­ity. There is no jus­ti­fy­ing the means with the ends in this instance because the ends are so trite and unim­por­tant. There was no earth-shattering facts revealed in Mr. Murphy’s faux phone call, noth­ing Mr. Walker said (or was deceived into say­ing) jus­tify Mr. Mur­phy lying and under­handed trick­ery used to gain this story. When you lis­ten to the phone call, there were no wild sur­prises, noth­ing out of char­ac­ter for the Gov­er­nor, noth­ing really worth pub­lish­ing much less low­er­ing your pro­fes­sional stan­dards to the level Mr. Mur­phy did. All he suc­ceeded in doing was cre­at­ing more dis­cord and dis­agree­ment between two par­ties that are at each other’s throats and dri­ving down the per­ceived level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the media in general.

There was a time jour­nal­ists took pride in what they did. We went to school, we worked hard, and we held our­selves to the high­est lev­els of per­sonal and pro­fes­sional hon­esty. Our word– our cred­i­bil­ity– was all we had, and our stock in trade had to be pro­tected at all costs and at all times. Mr. Mur­phy has built the whole of his 15 minute career on lying and decep­tion; is that what we now expect out of our jour­nal­ists? Is that accept­able at all in any job? Is that the sort of legacy one would be proud of?

In my days as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, we were very care­ful to take a hands-off approach to report­ing. We did not inter­fere with an event, we never made our­selves part of the story. We recorded what hap­pened in front of us, and then showed that, for good or ill. To be sure, just our being in a sit­u­a­tion changed how it unfolded; we all knew that and we did our best to min­i­mize that. But we never crossed the line and we never actively molded the events; we never lied to some­one out­right for an inter­view. We might hide in the shad­ows to get a shot, but we never passed our­selves off as some­thing we were not.

I can no longer watch the news. Too many reporters these days think they are the news. To my eye, it all started with enter­tain­ment reporters try­ing to build some sort of cult of per­son­al­ity around them­selves, to make them­selves big­ger than the Hol­ly­wood icons they inter­viewed. Soon, this spread to sports­cast­ers and ulti­mately to news reporters, and news took a bend to become more about enter­tain­ment than informing.

Now we have a bur­geon­ing blogroll of “new” jour­nal­ists. They have never been to j-school, do not have the expe­ri­ence to under­stand the mores of the job, have no edi­tors to teach them or restrain them and, most impor­tantly, no one to answer to. They view report­ing as a path to their own cult of per­son­al­ity, not a job that requires a level of com­mit­ment to the truth well beyond their com­pre­hen­sion. There is no rea­son for the “new jour­nal­ists” not to pre­tend to be some­one else, to lie to get their story because they have never been taught or taken the time to learn what real jour­nal­ism is. On their Inter­net, you just need to pay 20 bucks to reserve your domain name and you are a jour­nal­ist, and, unfor­tu­nately, the great mass of peo­ple do not stop to ques­tion their cre­den­tials or bona fides. Or their morals and motives. There is no rea­son to believe a word they post, ever, because they have not begun to show us any rea­son for trust.

By any reck­on­ing, jour­nal­ism has fallen from the once lofty ideals of Mur­row and Cronkite. Dan Rather was a sad case indeed when he, while admit­ting his doc­u­ments regard­ing Bush were forged, defended it by alleg­ing phoney evi­dence is okay if “the major thrust” of the story might be true. That is not a jour­nal­ists job, to tell us what might be true, or what he or she thinks to be true. A jour­nal­ist reports truth, period. You keep your­self out of the story, and your opin­ions, too. And you never lie. If you do all that, if you do a good and thor­ough and well sourced job, you will be respected in this pro­fes­sion. If you lie and deceive to get your story, you will ulti­mately be seen for who and what you are; a liar and deceiver.

Ear­lier today, I took a phone call from some­one pre­tend­ing to be Scott Walker. I knew it was not him. So I hit the phone with a base­ball bat.

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Adden­dum: It seems the Huff­in­g­ton Post has jumped all over this story, and in the process has linked to this blog in their “Around The Web” sec­tion about David Koch. In fact, it is the sec­ond link on the page, just after the Wikipedia entry for Mr. Koch. This just backs up my con­tention that there is no longer much jour­nal­ism left in what is passed out as News today. It would not have taken much fact-checking at all on the Huff­in­g­ton Post’s part to con­firm this blog as belong­ing to the cor­rect Dave Koch, but it would have been the pro­fes­sional thing to do. And yet the Link from the Huff­in­g­ton Post remains on their sight, and is an active tes­ta­ment to their thor­ough level of journalism.

I am not sure I would limit my cri­tique to Huff­in­g­ton Post; I think it is endemic to many more of the “new media” web­sites. Cer­tainly the afore­men­tioned Wike­pidia. To be polit­i­cally bal­anced, lets throw in any of Andrew Brietbart’s sites, and maybe even a dash of TMZ.com and Perez Hilton. I think it is proper to link these diverse sites together because they do share some com­mon traits. They are long on read­ers but show up short on respon­si­bil­ity scale. They are big on flash but short on reli­a­bil­ity. They pub­lish crass com­mer­cial­is­tic con­tent at the expense of their own cred­i­bil­ity. None are what I would con­sider trusted sources, but all are treated as if they were well-researched, well-written and well-edited. Just because they self-label them­selves as an author­ity in their respec­tive fields and gar­ner a large read­er­ship does not mean they adhere to the clas­sic con­straints we should expect and demand of news or ref­er­ence sources. Cred­i­bil­ity and Reli­a­bil­ity are rarely the first adjec­tives use to describe any of these new media sites, nor do those qual­i­ties seem to be major goals for the web prop­er­ties, so why do we turn around and use them as author­i­ties and sources? I shake my head.

Oh, and by the way, it is pro­nounced “Coach”, not “Coke”.…