The value of Acess is large and negative.


Kevin Drum told me to get back on my butt. Actually for me personally to stay on my butt, since, so far in my brief blogging adventure I have risked a painful stress injury to my sacroiliac. He linked to Jonathan Chait who argued, fairly convincingly, that reporters should use lexis-nexis more an wear out their shoe leather less.

Chait notes that reporters believe that they should provide new information, in short news, and that it is cheating to quote things available on the web. I agree that this is unfortunate, since there are many important relevant facts known to lexis nexis or even google which the average person doesn't know, the average regular newspaper reader doesn't know and the average hard working shoe leather consuming reporter doesn't know. This leads to the strange pattern of Atrios and Bob Somerby regularly pointing out important errors in news stories *without quitting their day jobs*. Now, I'm sure that our outstanding press corps could find errors in Atrios' and Somberby's posts, but they would have to get on their butts and search a database to do so.

The worst feature of the need to get new facts is that they are typically the fact that an official claims something, which claim might be factual but often isn't. This means that reporters who want something new to report have to be diplomatic with their sources, typically by not getting rude in print or on screen when the sources lie to them. In short, the need for new news causes reporters to report new falsehoods which they know to be false and not new facts.

This struck me today, when I was reading the excellent AJR article praising Knight Ridder Washington reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay who cut through the administrations Iraqi WMD spin while (all?) other major news sources fell for it. Strobel explains their secret

Strobel says their conclusions came from a lot of extra digging and
source-building they were forced to do without the red-carpet access to
high-level officials that some of the nation's top media outlets enjoy.
"Knight Ridder is not, in some people's eyes, seen as playing in the same
ball field as the New York Times and some major networks,"

People at the Times were mainly talking to senior administration officials, who were mostly pushing the administration line. We were mostly talking to the lower-level people or dissidents, who didn't necessarily repeat the party line."
Those sources, Knight Ridder Washington Editor Clark Hoyt adds, were "closest to the information."

In short they got to the real facts, in part, because the top players game them limited access, so they had to go to the lower ranking non-political experts for quotes.

Now this example of excellent shoe leather journalism proves its enormous value (acknowledged by Chait by the way). However, once Knight-Ridder had broken the story, the higher status news sources could have quoted them no ? They could also have decided to follow Strobel and Landay's example by talking to people who have limited incentives to lie when they are off the record.

Un-named journalistic sources make it clear to people whose blogs I read that fear of being frozen out influences coverage of the Bush administration. This is absurd, but it is ten times absurd when it is made clear that the alternative to being frozen out is being fed lies.