I was watching CP24 this morning — well, listening to it as it played on a screen above my head in my local breakfast place — and heard Ann Rohmer declare Super Tuesday to be a big win for Romney. As it happened, I was reading through my morning electropapers as the same time (it’s what I’ve started calling my online newsletters and subscriptions. You like it? I think it makes it sound as fancy as reams of information about every corner of the earth delivered instantly and costlessly directly to me whenever I want it actually is). Salon‘s top headline was “Mitt Romney’s worst night yet.”
It’s a pretty good example of the difference between a bad news organization and a good one.
Spoiler alert: CP24’s the bad one.
I’m guessing CP24 looked at the wire copy that came in (or watched CNN last night), and saw that, out of 10 primaries that were decided last night, Romney won 6 of them. That’s the majority. A big win. They left it at that and moved on to the Tori Stafford trial or some other non news.
Salon‘s Joan Walsh, who has actually been following the primaries and the various issues they’ve thrown up, looked at the numbers, and wrote that only two of those Romney wins were decisive: Massachusetts, where he often lives and used to be governor, and Idaho, which has a big Mormon population. Her take? Super Tuesday proved that Romney’s “able to win states with a lot of Mormons and states that he’s claimed as home, and not much else.”
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Romney is generally electable. Santorum is a whack job. The fact that Romney lost three states to him, and only scraped past him in four others, is not a good thing. It’s certainly not a big win.
There’s a depth to investigative reporting that cannot be achieved without spending very large sums of money and being willing to let staff chase things for weeks or months, often to the exclusion of all else, that may not turn into stories at all. And then there’s beat reporting, the product of one person following one area of the news for years, building up contacts and context and generally becoming an expert. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Walsh was writing on the fly (“As I write, NBC is calling Ohio for Mitt Romney,”) working only with massively available information and data and a context anyone who watched even one news broadcast a week, or read one or two stories on the subject in the past month would have. This is not to say Walsh doesn’t know more than the average woman on the street about these campaigns, or that she’s not a very skilled journalist. It’s just to say she didn’t have to bring either of those things to bear on this story. All she had to do was give a damn and take a modicum of pride in her work, and have a dash of respect for her audience.
You could say I’m not comparing like with like. CP24 is broadcast, Salon is print (or whatever). Salon prides itself on its content, CP24 prides itself on showing up. (That old CityTV slogan: CityTV: everywhere, sums it up rather well.) But once again, we’re talking on a level far beneath that. Both are journalism organizations, both purport to report the news, but only one actually does. The other purveys, and often deliberately distorts, information.
Did you see their reporting on the Ontario Power Generation building collapse? They called it a building collapse. Their reporter in the newsroom, talking to their person on the scene, said she couldn’t believe the pictures she was seeing. If this were radio, I’d have believed something horrible, something newsworthy, was happening. But since it was TV, anyone watching could see that all that had happened was some drywalling and light framing brackets had come loose from the bottom of an elevated floor. It didn’t look dramatic, and it was not dramatic, but CP24 decided drama was better than no drama and, in spite of the very images they were showing us, tried to drum up some drama.
But back to the question of apples and oranges. Once, there were people who got most of their news from the nightly broadcasts. They’d usually have a favourite and stick to it. And there were people who got most of their news from the papers, and also usually had their favourite (or favourites) and would stick to them. Some people read the papers in the morning and watched the evening news to get updated on whatever had happened during the day. But that’s no longer how we get news. We get it from everywhere: TV, papers, those free digest thingies on the subway, but a great many of us get most of what we know about what’s happening in the world and on our streets online, that great indiscriminate blender of filters fine and coarse, lenses true and skewed. It all of a piece now, and there’s no reason in the world to bother with crap like CP24, giving you news you cannot trust, information they’ve barely glanced at before hurling it over to you on their way to hoisting the next load. Unless you happen to be sitting under a screen, wishing you’d ordered scrambled instead of over easy.
*We regret the error: Toronto Standard mistakenly wrote that “…CityTV decided drama was better than no drama….” instead of the intended “…CP24 decided….”
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Bert Archer writes about media and real estate for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter @bertarcher.
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