Journalism has been called the “first draft of history.” That is to say, no one should treat the initial reporting of any event or trend as an exhaustive and flawless treatment. News coverage is often done on deadline, with limited access to sources, with little chance for reflection, with key elements of a story undetermined or unknown.
Generally speaking, this notion of journalism as first draft is reasonable. Unfortunately, its lessons aren’t widely grasped or applied.
For one thing, to say something is a “first draft” is to imply that there will be additional drafts before the final version is printed and presented. If you’re writing a term paper and your first draft presents obvious problems, either in research or in reasoning, you can prepare a second draft yourself with the clear mission of fixing the problems. But in journalism, the second or subsequent drafts of the story aren’t always or even often written by the same people. There is a strong incentive on the part of a competitor to “take apart” a story filed first by another, sometimes to the point of exaggerating minor mistakes into major ones or playing devil’s advocate to an absurd degree.
Secondly, from the standpoint of those originating the first report, subsequent drafts by other news organizations that challenge your reporting can provoke a perfectly natural, if perverse, tendency towards defensiveness and explaining away real errors. No one wants to be exposed as having produced a slapdash, inaccurate, or biased story.
Finally, and most significantly, the concept of the “first draft of history” implies that subsequent drafts will actually be produced, or that readers and future historians will actually be aware of these subsequent correctives. Even in this age of hyperactive hyperlinking and extensive online archives, plenty of news items simply got lost in the shuffle. Our problem isn’t a scarcity of information. It’s information overload. One result is that first drafts of history get stuck in your mind, despite their evident flaws later to those paying attention. Another is that readers tend to gravitate towards media sources whose biases they prefer but who do not always offer the subsequent correctives to their own initial reports, leaving readers with mistaken impressions — and little in the way of a shared frame of reference with others in their society.
Sorry for the long exposition, but I find this topic interesting and have been compiling a list of examples that needed a set-up but perhaps now will illustrate my point a little better:
• Christmas retail. If you were paying close attention to economic reporting during the last quarter of 2003, you might have seen this series of evolving items about retailers and the Christmas season. Before Thanksgiving, the media expectation was that given other signs of strong growth in the U.S. economy, the Christmas season would be a major boon to the retail sector. Then during much of December, the news reports gravitated in a different direction, towards the idea that many retailers weren’t meeting expectations and were disappointed by consumers’ willingness to spend, particularly on big-ticket items and on full-priced toys (Wal-Mart having reportedly started a price war that other toy retailers felt compelled to participate it). Finally, however, as post-Christmas stories have started trickling in about the shopping season, it emerges that most retailers did have a very good year. A Wall Street Journal article reported Dec. 29 that according to credit-card data, holiday spending was up 6.5 percent vs. a year ago, compared with tepid gains of only 2 percent to 3 percent in 2002 and 2001.
• Iraqi antiquities. The first draft of the Iraqi museum reporting back during the military campaign in the spring was, as you may remember, that indifference by the coalition had allowed looters to steal or destroy tens of thousands of valuable and irreplaceable Mesopotamian artifacts at Iraqi museums and sites. Then, revisionism set in. It turned out that early reports were wildly mistaken, that Iraqi museum officials had carefully stored many of the archaeological treasures in vaults or taken them home before the war, in some cases leaving empty museums that were wrongly reported to have been extensively looted. Both the Left (remembering the first draft) and the Right (remembering the second one) probably don’t know the best version of this story at the present time, which is that the reports of looting in Baghdad were exaggerated but that there were real problems with looting or destruction in the country as a whole.
• Federal budget. If you remember the first draft of the Bush-tax-cuts-are-eating-the-federal-budget story, you would know that the federal budget deficit is burgeoning out of control because of reckless tax reductions by the administration. If you remember the second draft, you would know that the original forecasts of the post-tax-cut deficits have proven to be too pessimistic, in part due to the fact that there is a supply-side dynamic to taxes — the government doesn’t see its revenues go down dollar-for-dollar with tax cuts that assume no resulting change in the economy. Rapid growth in the third and probably fourth quarters of 2003, which almost no one could argue is unrelated to the tax cuts, has replaced some of the anticipated revenue losses. The third draft of this story isn’t yet written, however, because we don’t know whether the 2003 growth spurt will be temporary or sustained and we don’t know to what degree the Bush administration will lose even more of its grip on spending restraint (I frankly fear the worst).
The lesson here, I think, is that a dutiful reader needs to stick with a story past its initial airing, use a diverse set of news sources so as to minimize the effects of media bias and defensiveness, and always be open to new reporting with new information on what appears to be an old story.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.