{"id":13560,"date":"2016-08-07T23:14:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T05:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13560"},"modified":"2016-08-09T07:33:06","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T13:33:06","slug":"schweitzer-in-new-media-world-easy-to-be-cruel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/08\/schweitzer-in-new-media-world-easy-to-be-cruel\/","title":{"rendered":"Schweitzer in new media world: easy to be cruel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Brian Schweitzer<\/p><\/div>\n

New York magazine has an infernally long but rewarding story<\/a> about everything wrong with the media today. Based on interviews with more than 40 journalists, the article gives 53 reasons, with examples, of how the media screw up.<\/p>\n

If you are insufficiently depressed, it\u2019s worth a look. Even if you aren\u2019t, you might take a moment to skip down to No. 29, under the heading \u201cWhoever the subject, the press can be cruel.\u201d Marin Cogan describes traveling to Montana to interview former Gov. Brian Schweitzer, then a bit of a national media darling with possible presidential aspirations.<\/p>\n

But in the course of interviews with Cogan, Schweitzer dropped a couple of unfortunate expressions. In a discussion of National Security Agency surveillance, he described U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as \u201cstanding under the streetlight with her dress pulled all the way up over her knees, and now she says, \u2018I\u2019m a nun,\u2019 when it comes to this spying!\u2019\u201d Describing Eric Cantor, former House majority leader, Schweitzer said his \u201cgaydar was 60 to 70 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schweitzer almost immediately backed off both gaffes but, Cogan writes, \u201cI included both quotes in my\u00a0otherwise positive profile<\/a>\u00a0because they were splashy, funny, impolitic, and a little bit offensive.\u201d She also knew they would attract wide attention, which they did, and Schweitzer quietly backed away from the national scene.<\/p>\n

This leads Cogan to speculate about a journalistic quandary: When a source says something that both journalist and source immediately recognize as stupid, do you print it? The answer\u2019s easy enough when the subject is Schweitzer, who is a big boy and should have known better\u2014he walked an awfully thin line for quite a few years\u2014but it\u2019s much tougher when the source is someone unfamiliar with and unguarded about journalistic conventions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is sometimes extremely difficult,\u201d Cogan concludes, \u201cto be a good journalist and also a good person.\u201d<\/p>\n

But given how tame Schweitzer\u2019s remarks sound given the current state of the presidential election, it might be more rewarding to speculate about what would have happened if Schweitzer had just said, \u201cGaffes be damned\u201d and charged on ahead. Would it have worked?<\/p>\n

Probably not, but it\u2019s fun to think about a Schweitzer vs. Trump campaign, two politically incorrect behemoths pounding away at each other from now until November. Schweitzer would be the happier warrior, for sure, with some actual useful experience and better information about the Middle East. But perhaps he could not match Trump insult for insult, with Trump\u2019s weirdly thick-skinned self-aggrandizing demeanor.<\/p>\n

Maybe the ultimate lesson of this election is that the occasional dumb mistake will no longer be automatically disqualifying. That might even make this a bit better world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York magazine has an infernally long but rewarding story about everything wrong with the media today. Based on interviews with more than 40 journalists, the article gives 53 reasons, with examples, of how the media screw up. If you are insufficiently depressed, it\u2019s worth a look. Even if you aren\u2019t, you might take a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[146,4801,2853,4802],"class_list":["post-13560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-brian-schweitzer","tag-dianne-feinstein","tag-donald-trump","tag-eric-cantor","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}