Opinion : On the media: Being first vs. being the best

Twice in the past week, I was the only media guy in the room when someone said, "I don't like the media; I really don't like the media," or "The media is the problem."

Both times, everyone in the room knew that I was the only media guy in the room. Both times, everyone laughed.

That's OK, because both times, I agreed with the person who was making those comments.

The first person who made that comment was Col. Danny McKnight. He was the guy in charge of the mission in Somalia to arrest the terrorist who was starving the people. You know that incident as "Black Hawk Down." During his recital of the things that went wrong with that mission -- or more specifically, the stupid things that politicians did to screw up that mission -- Col. McKnight told a story about the media. The first thing he had to do when he arrived in Somalia was to give a press conference, where the U.N. basically announced that the Americans had arrived to capture the bad guy.

"You can be sure he knew we were coming," McKnight told the audience.

McKnight, who was speaking to a room full of law enforcement officers, also said he believed the media make their job harder, especially when there is a crowd of reporters surrounding them during a standoff or other violent situation.

He has a point.

The next comment came a few days later, during an informal gathering of some guys. One of them mentioned that he had heard a nuclear expert on the radio, saying that the media is making the nuclear reactor problem in Japan seem more like a worldwide crisis then the limited problem it actually was.

He had a point, too.

There are lots of ways that I have seen the media let us down. So many, in fact that I could write pageloads.

Today I will write about one of the problems Most people in the media are trying to be the first, not the best. But what America --and the world -- needs is a new focus on the best.

Being "first"

I could give you many examples of the silliness that results from the effort to be first. Here are three:

Example 1: There was a crisis in CBS in 1997. On Aug. 30, when Princess Diana died in the middle of the night on a weekend, CBS was a few minutes late getting someone on the air to tell the story. There was a crisis at CBS, and heads rolled.

Example 2: During the Martha Stewart trial, reporters were so intent on being first to relay the news of the verdict that they went into the courtroom with two differently-colored handkerchiefs. They agreed with a colleague that one color would mean "guilty," the other innocent. The media wrote two stories before the verdict was read, and as soon as the handkerchief was waved, knew which one to send out.

Example 3: Most media outlets have hundreds of obituaries ready, just in case someone famous dies. Once in a while, someone slips and sends out an obituary while that person is still, in a word, alive. In 1998, a member of Congress, reading from an Associated Press web site, mourned the death of Bob Hope, who died five years later. Bob Hope actually read his own obituary twice before he died.

In all of these cases, being first had nothing to do with being best. We need to demand from our sources of media that they focus on being best. We should expect them to give us the most accurate, thorough and meaningful news that actually affects us. If they don't we need to look for another source.