Missing the Story Behind the Story

There's a staple stage card trick where the magician asks his victim to pick a card, stick it back in the deck, and then find it as he deals the cards back out. The person sits there, intently focused on the cards being dealt, while the magician has glued the card to his forehead, or if he's good, right on the mark's forehead.

I thought of this while reading Mark Bowden's October headliner in the Atlantic. It's putatively a typical hand-wringer on how objective journalism is being replaced by agitprop, but reading it, I just saw Bowden sitting there, staring at the cards while the real story was pasted right there above his eyes.

While "the media" as a whole gets a trust rating only marginally above Congress, and the Right thinks it's in large part a liberal interest group, everybody fears the loss of deep investigative journalism beyond the 24-hour news cycle that the changing media landscape seems to imply. Bowden's story, far from showing me how professional spinmeisters are further perverting and stupefying coverage, instead gave me hope.

The story Bowden tells, of how Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" speech was dug up by a proverbial blogger in his pajamas, is one that could not have happened twenty or even ten years ago. Big Journalism has in the past derived no small part of its power by the simple fact that major news outlets had vast libraries full of information that very few other people had access to in a pre-Internet, pre-Google era.

Investigative reporting consists of many things, and some of them, like the cultivation of sources, are not easily reducible to things one can do alone in the attic after the kids go to bed. But a lot of it is also the dull tabulation and analysis of data, the gathering of facts that are out there and the search for numbers that don't add up. This is more a matter of forensic accounting than hanging around dark bars frequented by cops or longshoremen, and it's also something we probably could use vastly more of.

A year or so ago, when the Boston City Council was playing its usual game of dodging both the letter and the spirit of the Open Meeting Law, one of the councilors made a remark along the lines of, 'what, do they expect us to have a camera going in every room?' And I thought to myself, "well, why not?" I don't mean that we should eliminate the ability of officials to have private meetings, but in principle there is relatively little government does that isn't supposed to be public record. Put it out there, and let the citizens of the town, city, and world search and stream it all at their leisure.

Bowden laments that the wise, trained, professional reporter of old who looked above the fray for the truth is being replaced by a smashmouth partisan looking to discredit his enemies. But there's a much larger system taking shape here, and Bowden's story shows how it works, even if he draws most the wrong conclusions from it. White blood cells' understanding of medicine can be reduced pretty much to "Mmm gobble gobble," but they are in most cases the superior of any physician.