So earlier today, on a board for air traffic controller wannabes (it’s mostly college students in the ATC field), I was part of a little exchange. The first posters in this thread were talking about a news story that was terrific in laying the blame for the FAA’s problems on outgoing Administrator Marion Blakey, but which did an absolutely terrible job of describing how airplanes fly today:

Indeed, the system is based on decades-old technology and relies on radar beacons and squawking flight controllers. Pilots fly FAA-determined routes that are based largely on where bonfires and electric beacons were built in the early days of aviation, the better to guide the air mail pilots of the 1920s as they crisscrossed the country, navigating by sight.

Written by morons.

In regards to the media, I chimed in with this:

On the contrary, it’s written by lazy people. Whether they’re morons or not is unknown.

But they ARE lazy, because they blindly accepted the ATA/FAA line on what ails the National Airspace System these days. Whatever the FAA’s spokesflacks tell them, they “report”, without critically examining or interviewing anyone who could explain to them from a true user’s perspective.

Stupid? The jury is out. Lazy, or just too short-handed and economically pressured to do any actual news reporting? Absolutely.

It’s ironic that both the farther-right-wingers and farther-left-wingers scorn the “MSM” (mainsteam media). The righties hate the MSM because they think that the MSM is lefty-biased. The lefties hate the MSM because they know that if the MSM actually reported the truth, their causes would be further advanced.

The real truth is that the MSM is just lazy. They’re not biased and they’re not hiding the truth; they’re just lazy.

I believe this. I have a friend who used to cover business news for the Seattle Times. Her articles appeared regularly and she was even a columnist for them for a while; now she just took a job down in California, so I don’t get to read her stuff locally anymore. And she’s far from stupid- and when we talked about how the media covers news stories, she said that the big problem is that they just don’t get the time to put into really learning about an issue.

The editors can’t afford to have a reporter spending several days doing research on something; the emphasis is in getting something to crank out and boom, on to something else. They don’t have enough staff because staff costs money.

The competition among the varoius types of media exacerbate the problem. TV and radio hit things in tiny little soundbites; it’s rare to see a TV news story that’s longer than a minute or maybe 90 seconds these days. Newspapers think that they have to try and compete, so we get the USA Today version all too often.

My own belief is that people will stick with newspapers if they do what they can do BEST, which is to really do the research and cover something in far more detail than a 40 second soundbite on a TV station, but then again I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, so I’m kind of hypocritical in that regard. And they’re not going to listen to a non-subscriber!

But I do believe that the media owes the public a shot at actually investigating an issue. My union’s fight with the FAA is a perfect example; all too often the media simply reports “there’s a controversy and ongoing strife between the union and FAA” before reporting something like a staffing shortage where they’ll say “the union says there’s not enough controllers, the FAA says there’s plenty” and that’s it.

A REAL media, one that cares, would actually do the research. Often times one side or the other in a given debate can actually prove what they’re saying with facts, figures, researchable and verifiable assertions.

My union does this the vast majority of the time. The FAA, on the other hand, stalls and lies all the time; on the rare occasion when the media asks them for hard facts and figures and things they can research, the FAA can’t back up what they’re saying.

There’s all kinds of spots where this is the case. Tonight, during dinner, I was reminded of this exact problem yet again when reading this article in one of Seattle’s two big “alternative” weekly newspapers (you know, the kind that have all the club listings and such), The Stranger. (The Stranger is the younger, hipper of the two- it’s also the “gay” newspaper because it caters more to a gay crowd and has more gay staff- not to mention their most excellent editor, Dan Savage.)

Okay, a little background. (This is turning into a longish post.) In Seattle, we’ve had a recent controversy over whether or not the nightclub scene is out of control. The mayor is wanting to crack down on clubs; the clubs say that they are just doing their thing and that the so-called problems are overblown.

I tend to side with the clubs, even though someone got shot outside of a joint about a block away from my place about six months ago.

Anyway, the Seattle Police did a big “sting” the other day, and gosh- they just HAPPENED to time the sting and arrests of several bartenders and bouncers right before some legislation regulating nightclubs is coming before the Seattle City Council.

The local media played right into the SPD’s and mayor’s plan, blindly reporting the story as though there were all kinds of guns being smuggled into clubs, underaged people getting in all the time, and so forth.

The Stranger, though, actually REPORTS the news. For example, one of the biggest charges was that an undercover cop was able to get a gun into one of the clubs. The club personnel, though, RECOGNIZED the guy as a cop and actually joked about it with him…

Their stories called Nickels’s most stunning political victory—coverage that flaunted the “fact” doormen had knowingly let guns into Tommy’s and Tabella—into question.

For example, workers at Tommy’s say they recognized the undercover officer (from security trainings) who was trying to get a gun into the club after another undercover officer had offered the doorman—not a Tommy’s employee, but a temp—a $100 bribe.

“Tell him all he has to do is show you his badge, and we’ll let him bring the gun in,” Tommy’s manager reportedly, and sarcastically, instructed the temp doorman.

According to folks at Tommy’s, the undercover cop with the gun left the scene at that point.

Despite claims in the media that a gun made it into Tommy’s that Friday night, August 17, the police report confirms the workers’ accounts of that night. The otherwise detailed report does not include a weapons charge and never says a gun made it into the club, stating only that the doorman “told [the undercover officer] he would let him in if he had a permit.”

So by actually going out and talking with some of the club owners and workers, and then actually going and reading the police report of the incident, the Stranger’s reporter was able to discover that- gasp- no gun got into the club, that they knew the guy was a cop, and that the MSM (Mainstream media) did a crappy job of reporting the story in the first place.

Because what did we see on all of the local TV stations and in the two big daily newspapers? Crap that the mayor’s office and cops wanted us to see, like this:

In two cases, undercover officers posing as patrons were able to bring guns into a club, police said. At Tommy’s, 4425 University Way, the bouncer allegedly took a $100 bribe from an officer. And at Tabella Restaurant & Lounge, 2333 Western Ave., the bouncer allegedly noted a gun as he patted the officer down but let him walk inside anyway, police say.

Or like this:

In the midst of a debate on tougher regulation of Seattle nightclubs and bars, police have issued arrest warrants for employees at 14 clubs after an investigation showed they admitted and served alcohol to minors and twice allowed an undercover vice officer to enter with a concealed pistol.

The BS story about the gun even made it into a later editorial by the P-I.

Where am I going with all of this? Just to serve as a precautionary measure. We rely upon the media to tell us a lot of stuff, but the fact is that all too often the media is probably missing a lot of the story. We can and should use media coverage of things to back up our political opinions, but we must always take what they’re peddling with a grain of salt.