Are you media-savvy? To find out, take this short quiz:
When the Alito story broke early this week, which of these outlets had it first?
A) Washingtonpost.com
B) National Public Radio
C) The political blog LucyLocket.net
D) To be honest, I don't care.
Before we get to the correct answer, I should note that some may quarrel with the choices. Fact is, early on the morning of the Alito announcement, an outlet that doesn't even appear on my list reported: "President Bush is nominating Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the Associated Press has learned."
In the higher journalistic circles, the phrase "has learned" is often code for "has learned before any of you other guys -- nyahh, nyahh, nyahh."
It's a tricky kind of code, however, because anyone who's heard a piece of news can say they "learned" it and be technically correct, even if the way they learned it is from some other news outlet.
But AP is an honorable outfit, and let's assume for the purposes of this exercise that it did beat the pack on Alito -- by an hour, a minute, or just nine seconds. Do you care? No, I didn't think so. And that is what makes you a healthy, well-adjusted media consumer. The correct answer is, in fact, D.
Wasn't that easy? I'm afraid it's not so easy for journalists. People in this business are obsessed with who gets to a story first, and they spend a great deal of time tracking the media horse race and embedding little hieroglyphs of the "has learned" variety into their work. It's their way of keeping score.
Of course, every profession has an arcane inside scoreboard that wouldn't make such sense to outsiders if they ever had to interpret it. But the media game is different because the scoreboard is the news itself, a product that we all must interpret every day, and that has a pervasive impact on our lives. To the extent that the news is shaped -- and distorted -- by internal forces that have nothing to do with what most news consumers really want (accuracy, truth, etc.), maybe we should stop for a second and wonder why the race to be first is such a dominant force in journalism.
There are several reasons. First, people who get into the news business are generally those who like to know things before others -- and to get credit for it. The true journalist loves nothing better than walking into a room with some hot tidbit and watching the jaws drop. The need is almost physiological, the sensation downright glandular. An old-timer at The Washington Post once told me that if he didn't have a byline roughly every other day, he'd get a knot in his stomach, and it wouldn't go away until he scored another story.
Second, news is, by definition, something new. A story somebody else has reported has already lost much of its inherent news value. On the most basic level, there is nothing newsier than a fresh scoop.
Finally, there is the practical angle. Breaking news draws attention to an outlet, attention increases audience, and, if all goes well, bigger audience means bigger profits. Be the first Web site with a hot White House story, and you'll almost certainly see a nice temporary uptick in traffic. Advertisers like upticks.
Fine. But all of these very traditional reasons to be first ignore something highly untraditional that is happening to the media business right now. News is no longer the relatively scarce commodity it was a few decades ago, when most people checked in once or twice a day. It's all around us, all the time.
News is cheap, and the big Washington stories that transfix the media pack are in many ways the cheapest of all because all of the major outlets are on them together. Keeping track of who got which story first would be a full-time job, and an absurd one. Besides, most of the scoops on this beat are tiny incremental things, scooplets that media folk tease out of White House and Hill sources, by hook or by crook. Since those sources are born operators with their own self-interested motives, the scoop business can get pretty treacherous.
So there's not a great popular call for it, and it's risky, yet journalists keep running around doing it, desperate above all to one-up the competition. When I think about the Plame case, I come back again and again to a line from an e-mail that New York Times reporter Judith Miller sent to the paper's public editor, Byron Calame, in which she bragged about "the publication of my exclusive story that debunked some of my own earlier exclusives on the Pentagon's claim that it had found mobile germ-production units in Iraq." Here is someone so stuck in the culture of firsts, she can, with a straight face, refer to her own incorrect stories as exclusives. And she was, for a long time, at the top of the heap.
The true exclusive isn't the story that beats the clock, or the pack. It's the one that the pack never cared about. The one that reported the news so well, you remembered it days later, wanted to read it again, marveled at how it changed your understanding of the world. It's the one that never had to call itself an exclusive, because that was obvious.
William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com.
