The Outstater
James Briggs: The New Journalism
WE DON’T ENJOY discouraging a fellow journalist. First of all, nobody cares. It is “inside baseball,” as an editor of mine liked to say. Our members have more important things to do.
Still, any job has standards and after some decades in the business (note that I didn’t say “profession”) I have a right to express my understanding of them — standards that James Briggs of the Indianapolis Star fails to meet.
I start with what the late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal taught us was the core value of any market-based information system — prescience. Nobody will pay to be told what to think.
Bartley pictured neolithic men sitting around a campfire planning the day’s hunt. There would be one in the circle who had a better memory of the game trails. That was the journalist. He would receive an extra bite of gazelle leg or whatever.
Translated to modern media systems, it would be a newsroom trying mightily to manage facts and opinions in a way that helps readers/viewers anticipate the coming day, the coming week, or, if it is really good, the month ahead. Will it rain, will the team win, what does this new law portend?
It is not easy, and all of us fall short, especially those on the political beat. The line must be drawn, however, between those who are trying and those who are not. James Briggs is not.
The first thing that you see in Briggs’ bio is that in 2020, the year that American journalism hit bottom with a dead-cat bounce, he decided to get a masters in journalism — a masters, mind you, in a craft that Mark Twain said could be learned in two weeks on a good weekly. That tells you he is either stupid, which he doesn’t appear to be, or that he had too much time on his hands.
Please know that there is nothing particularly evil about the man. He is a hard-working guy trying to support his family on his available skills sets. I certainly would not like to see him fired or even demoted. I would like to see him transferred somewhere he can do less damage to the public discussion — the obit desk, perhaps, where he can learn respect for his readers and his subject matter.
As it is, Briggs has fashioned a career out of little else than inflammatory descriptions of the powerful — calling people names essentially. The President of the United States is “despicable” and “craven.” The Indiana governor is a “loser.” Our United States Senator is “deserving of retribution.”
Does he suggest these people should somehow be done away with, is he a part of the dehumanization movement in activist politics, that is, would he demean you because you are a Fascist or does he call you a Fascist so he can demean you? Well, as a regular reader of his column (it’s part of my job), I am sorry to say that he seems ambivalent about that. Indeed, he seems to play to it.
I know from experience, though, that when you build your journalism on a morality play, with the “good” guys always winning and the “bad” guys” always losing, regardless of facts or events, all the while assigning motives to fit your analysis, reality eventually smacks you in the face.
And so it was that Briggs sent this out to his readers on election eve under the unfortunate headline, “Trump’s Day of Reckoning Is Here”:
“The overhyped rallies and social media theatrics will be over. Braun, Banks and the entire Indiana Republican Party will have to wake up and figure out what just happened. Much like the Senate redistricting vote, Trump’s wrath is looking shaky. Reporting from Politico and CNN projects a bad night for the Trump-endorsed primary challenges.”
Did I mention that the value of journalism is prescience? — tcl
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