Get it first, but first get it

 While following up on one of Anne’s links in the string that runs from Cana to Covington, my eye was caught by a comment in high dudgeon because the author of the article was unaware that there is a video rebuttal showing that President Trump “did not make fun of someone with disabilities."

  What do you know? A gen-u-wine video showing what didn’t happen. Who am I to believe – the video or my own, lying eyes? Trump’s performance – a bit of Jerry Lewis shtick that Lewis eventually dropped because of its offensiveness -- didn’t have much to do with the original article, by the way. The comment was just a cry of “Squirrel!”

  The various media are now crossing out and taking down because of a different video, or set of videos, on an all-star performance of American hot buttons assembled in the same space at the same time. Genuine controversy! Let’s argue about what happened maybe!

 This is a problem that has arisen often before, but it is still coming and still growing. A social service organization, ACORN, was de-funded by Congress over a video of less-than-full candor, and that was without the mainstream media paying much attention. But if you watch the NBC news on the network in the evening, you will note that about halfway through it becomes film from somebody other than  NBC. And if you watch cable news, which I can’t, you don’t see many reporters talking about what they saw; you see a lot of people talking about what was in the New York Times or Washington Post, and it’s a big day when they can “confirm” what they read there.

 Actually covering a story – going to the scene, talking to the participants – is so Twentieth Century. The media now wait for the story to come to them so they can comment on it. That means most of the honest reporting is being done by a handful of quality newspapers, half of them in financial trouble, leaving a huge gap to be filled…

  … by, why not?,  genuine videos.

  And all else is commentary.

  This is dangerous, as the Russian messing in 2016 should have taught us.

  Used to be (as I often say), a reporter would go and get the story. Then he or she would write it, and older and wiser eyes would edit it. Only after that would editorial writers and letter-writing readers and columnists get to say what they thought about it. The Covington Clipper arrived with all the commentary in the bow wave; reporting didn’t start coming in until two days after the story, whatever it was, achieved virality.

  Used to be, the editors would have stopped a bow wave until the story was confirmed. Now hardly anyone takes time for that. Even the quality press feels the pressure of a million "views" in two hours. So whom are you supposed to believe – reporters overseen by editors (fake news, as the president says) or genuine videos?

  The folks in the modern news media haven’t learned to deal with that fact of their existence.

  Nor have they figured out what to do about a president who does not talk about fully fleshed-out ideas but simply tweets his brainstorms and expects, or pretends to expect, Action This Day. There has never been a presidency like this one, but, for openers, not even the president believes everything he tweets. The Wall would never have become big enough to cause the government to shut down if the media had insisted on seeing the engineering studies, the anticipated maintenance costs and expected outlays for taking land by eminent domain. The president never thought about those things (the Senate Republicans are frantically trying to fill in the details on the idea that shuttered the government), so  the media shouldn’t have taken him seriously until the president produced explanations.

  When I was a reporter, there was a complicated highway project in the mayor’s eye. It required money from the feds, the state, the county and the city to put it all together. One fine evening – on the opposition paper’s time—the mayor announced he had put the money together. It was a big story in the morning paper, and we had to trail along behind in the afternoon.

 I resignedly called the mayor, and he detailed for me who was paying how much for what. My copy pencil flying, I added up his numbers and said, “Mayor, you are a million and a half dollars short.” “Am not,” he said. “Are, too,” said I, “Let’s add them together.” We did it three times, and all three times he claimed it came to a million and a half dollars more than it did. I told the city editor what happened, and he looked at the mayor's numbers and said, “Forget it.” My paper simply never reported the mayor’s great news. And his news was never heard of again.

 More than one editor I worked for would claim he did more for the public by keeping non-news out of the paper than he did by putting news in. But it was rarely the case, in those days, that everybody was already talking about the non-news before he saw it. Still, it would Make America Better Again if someone would impose the kind of standards that used to be.