Now this is an interview

I’ve had a big blog post floating around in the back of my mind about journalism (particularly print) today and the issues which have brought it to the rather unpleasant state in which it now finds itself. I worked for one of the newsweeklies for a couple of years and that's given me a first-hand look into the problem, and I still follow the issue closely. Maybe one day I’ll get around to to writing that post, but in the mean time: a small scene I found rather revealing:

Last night Rachel Maddow had U.S. ambassador to the U.N, Susan Rice, on the program (interview starts at 2:40 in):

The second part of the interview is available as well. It's a fascinating thing to watch on it's own, but what interested me most was how atypical it is.

Cable news is mostly an embarrassment. Watch CNN for a few hours and you'll just what I mean: it's an endlessly repeated loop of news nuggets. Important events end up in the mix, leavened with ample filler (up to the minute balloon or car-chase coverage, celebrity scandals and the like). All of this is jumbled together in a shallow, context-free, uninteresting blob. When they aren't filling airtime with that, the rest of the programming day is dedicated to shows featuring dueling partisan hacks refereed by people who haven't done anything resembling real reporting in years, if ever. But here you have a highly-informed host subjecting a guest to polite but tough questioning for a sustained period of time. Regardless of what you think of Maddow's political stance, this interview is good journalism: she knows the issue, she doesn't let evasions or rhetorical tricks fool her, and she isn't afraid of being forthright. Most cable news coverage (and print, for that matter) tends to fall into one of two categories: passive re-broadcasting of the talking points of sources, or naked hostility to them. In the first case, journalists abdicate their most important responsibility to their audience, which is to provide context and attempt to suss out what's true in a story and what's not. On the other hand, while there's no question the occasional on-air filleting of a deserving target is satisfying, but it always generates more heat than light. The reasons as to why good journalism is disappearing could fill...well, a long blog post. Consolidation, cost-cutting, the disappearance of reporters as subject matter experts and, in the case of cable news, a paradigm which is structurally hostile to reflection and in-depth analysis all get you part of the way to an explanation. At any rate, I guess that's why I find Maddow refreshing. She's not always as good as she was here, but she's head and shoulders above almost all of her colleagues in broadcast journalism.