I’ve been surprised that so much of the coverage about North Korean nukes has been so empty of thoughtful analysis. Much of the mainstream media coverage has focused on what they seem, increasingly, to do best - reduce issues to personalities and focus on the ’soapy’ drama of an event. So, the issue of North Korean nukes has become another way to ask who screwed up more, Democrats (because of Clinton’s ‘failed’ policies) or Republicans (Bush’s), and the breathless story of the day has become what Kim Jong-il will do next. That, or his hair. Not all of it, certainly, but far too much of it. From the October 13 On the Media podcast:

BOB GARFIELD: Such was the fallout this week on America’s airwaves as the political class locked horns not only over the best course for the future, but also over how we got to where we are now. And, with a few exceptions, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times and The Baltimore Sun among them, the media have done little to clarify the picture for people who haven’t been paying close attention until now. One person who has been paying attention is Dan Sneider, a Korea expert at Stanford’s Shorenstein Center, who covered East Asia for The Christian Science Monitor in the ’80s. He says journalists would be more useful if they behaved less like stenographers.

DAN SNEIDER: So when John McCain says during the Clinton administration the North Koreans shut down the international inspection, withdrew from the NPT, started reprocessing their plutonium, it would be useful if someone pointed out that actually, factually, that’s simply not true. The President, the other day, made the statement he’s made many times: direct negotiations with North Koreans do not work. I see that reported all the time, but what’s the basis for saying that? What’s the evidence for that? I never see that explored.

BOB GARFIELD: There seems to be one particularly salient fact that has been utterly absent from all the reporting, and that is nuclear weapons are not — the North Koreans have always, at least for the last 30 years, been one lanyard pull away from sending thousands of megatons of conventional missiles to destroy Seoul in a minute’s time. The basic security status quo seems to not be part of the discussion.

DAN SNEIDER: No, I’ve seen almost no discussion of that. I mean, if you look at the Chinese media and the South Korean media, you’ll see that the fear of war is very [LAUGHS] very much at the top of their minds. I mean, here’s a question somewhat along the lines you raised. What’s the status of U.S. forces in South Korea, for example? How prepared are we, the United States, to respond to an outbreak of war in the Korean Peninsula, given the commitments in Iraq? I haven’t seen a single article discussing that. What’s the sort of state of play on the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea? Over the weekend, just before the explosion of the nuclear device, there was an exchange of fire — South Korean troops firing on North Koreans who had crossed over the DMZ. That’s the first time that’s happened in a long time. It got no coverage that I’m aware of. You know, always at moments like this, we sort of get very myopic. It’s all about us. And not only that, it’s all about our politics, and, you know, we don’t seem to think about, well, what does this actually mean to not only ourselves, but how about the people right close by, South Koreans, Japanese, Chinese?

Why has the mainstream media lost its will to go deep?

I have to think that a good part of the reason is the reduction in the general level of discourse and inquiry we’ve seen over the last few years in the MSM as it struggles for financial viability and an audience. In print, newspapers are retrenching. On TV, news is becoming even Broadcast News-ier. Certainly much of the reason for this is the increasing concentration of media ownership in the U.S. But at least some of it is because of the fierce competition for information attention that has broken out between mainstream media and online sources of information - a competition that in the case of print seems to be leading, depending on who’s talking, to the gradual obliteration of the newspaper business or at least its profound restructuring and revisioning.

Gannett has stirred this pot recently by moving quite purposefully toward integrating social media into the newsroom. My friend Mathew has the background, but suffice it to say that the idea is to collect news from non-journalists as well. The larger concept includes creating community around the work product. The better to generate advertising revenue from page views discussion, apparently.

It’s a fascinating development, necessary and now inevitable, but one that strikes me as problematic in some ways. To be fair, the mainstream media needs to find a new mission and developments like this are important steps in the natural selection process as old evolves into new. But I can’t help but wonder, if this is the direction that the mainstream takes, where the hard reporting is going to come from when the news really matters.

North Korea is a perfect example. One reason the reporting has been so shallow is the absence of reporter boots on the ground. Again, from the On The Media podcast:

BOB GARFIELD: Of course, it would be easier for U.S. news organizations to report what was happening on the ground in South Korea if we had anybody on the ground in South Korea. But -

DAN SNEIDER: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: - retrenchment, especially at the major networks, has really had an effect on how far-flung they are in terms of foreign bureaus.

DAN SNEIDER: Right. There were only two major American newspapers that I know of that had bureaus in Seoul. One was The Wall Street Journal and the other, The Los Angeles Times. And [LAUGHS] The L.A. Times just closed their bureau, so now it’s down to one.

BOB GARFIELD: If the networks and the major newspapers were heavily invested in the Pacific Rim, what stories would we be seeing now that we simply aren’t seeing at all?

DAN SNEIDER: I think what you would see much more of is how is this rippling out into these populations of people that sit right next door to North Korea? I still haven’t seen a good story, for example, on what this has meant to South Korean public opinion. I go and read the South Korean media, and this has triggered a huge debate, a rip-roaring debate in South Korea. There’s a lot of coverage that says, oh, China, how China responds is pretty crucial. Now, are the Chinese going to crack down on the North Koreans? Are they not? What are they doing at the U.N.? You get that, but again, not a whole lot of sense of how does this ripple out in China? It’s pretty important for us to understand, you know, how these governments are going to react based upon the pressures that are on them from their own people.

Reasonable people can disagree about what is ‘important’ - news about developments in city council, or news about developments in nuclear politics on the other side of the planet. My money’s on the latter, though increasingly the audience seems to be moving to the former. But it strikes me as troubling that the media are meeting the challenge from online competition, at least in part, by cutting resources, outsourcing reporting and focusing on conversation. It’s certainly true that there is much to learn from non-journalists on important news - even distant stories - the 2004 Tsumani and reports from Iraqi bloggers are good examples. What I want, though, in an age of increasingly secretive governments, the suspension of habeas corpus, the spread of foreign wars and the proliferation of nukes in distant corners of the planet, is Seymour Hersh, Sydney Schanberg, David Halberstam and John F. Burns on the story. When it matters, I don’t want pajamas media. I want someone with a Pulitzer (well, with the exception of Judith Miller, in any event) - or someone with a desperate hunger to win one - and all of the resources of a professional news organization behind them - on the story.