The Press Role in Legitimacy

Continuing thoughts on the local news and what it's doing to us rather than for us. Updating my post from yesterday, one of the things that annoys me is that the standard for an "investigative" report is to uncover a fact or two, construct an argument around them, and apparently not bother to even ask, much less answer, any of the fairly obvious relevant questions about them. In the legal field, we learn to ask lots of questions. One thing I learned early on is that it is often profitable to ask even apparently irrelevant questions, because they turn up answers concerning what Rumsfeld called unknown unknowns: things that you didn't even consider even though you were trying to exhaustively go through every potentially relevant thing.

The media needs to attack the government for being venal and stupid when it is venal and stupid, but it also needs to shore up the legitimacy of our institutions when they serve the common good and come under attack from venal and stupid arguments. The test should not be pro- or anti- government, but pro-smart, pro-wise, pro-moral. Not that their brand of wisdom or morality should be imposed, but questions can be raised, and they should be raised in a manner that allows for some even-handed discussion and not loading towards a predetermined answer.

Legal reporting tends to be bad. A lot of reporting is simplistic, shallow, and confused. Some policy reporting is the same way. Is it bad law that foreigners held in Guantanamo are ruled to lack the rights of "the People" under the Constitution while corporations are persons? Maybe, but let's hear the rationale for those rulings. There is almost always some good reason for the quirky things the Courts do (but not always). The reasons need to be explicated because most of the time that will shut up critics quickly, and on the other occasions, it will expose the existence of rules that fundamentally lack a reasonable purpose. Why is there a residency requirement for local schoolteachers? I can speculate as to what some of the reasons might be. I have not heard any of them during the recent reporting on the issue. I suspect someone more knowledgeable about the topic could tell me if those reasons were valid or not. They might have some horror stories about past problems involving nonresidents. It's true that housing patterns have changed and that residency requires something that was once more common than it is now, after so many people have fled the city. I can see the city wanting to keep this population. I can see it wanting teachers who are connected to the students and parents through residence in a shared community. I can see it being used as a back door to introduce more minority role models without a racial quota (and this would be a portentially more accurate mechanism because the line would not be purely race but rather shared community). But I'm not an expert. I just know that when I give a second's skeptical thought to the reporting I see, I instantly generate questions about potential explanations that are not even asked.

I guess I should be glad that the local news is reporting on local elected officials and local policy choices. I just wish the focus were not on internet usage in one case and just so complacently uninquisitive about the real issues in boh cases.