By Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R.
“WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Al Gore, the leading American voice on climate change . . .”
That’s not an opinion! That’s just a fact, according to this lede to an Associated Press story slobbering over Al Gore.
Of course, it’s ridiculous. By virtue of his political position, Gore may be one of the loudest voices on climate change, but leading? Gore didn’t perform any research on global warming. He’s a politician, not a scientist. All Gore can do is give you his interpretation of what scientists believe, which is hardly a position of leadership. Never mind, the AP has given him the title regardless.
That is one example of the degraded state of news reporting brought to you by Ron Fournier, who wants desperately to be more important than he is. The veteran AP staffer, now political editor, as The Politico says, thinks editorializing and opinionating in what are ostensibly straight news stories will make the old wire service more popular with today’s busy readers, who will happily let AP do their thinking for them.
Inserting opinions into supposedly straight news stories is just part of the corruption Fournier-think has brought to the Associated Press. It’s still flogging its annual, hysterical drugs-in-our-water story, filled with ominous innuendos about what trace amounts of drugs might be doing to us, but lacking in evidence of harm or context about the various environmental risks we face every day.
Just who is this guy? Someone who has let ambition far exceed his intelligence and education.
Ron Fournier spent most of his career as a worker bee political reporter. Then, as The Politico says, he became dissatisfied with his status and took one of those highfalutin Hahvahd fellowships.
But over recent years, Fournier pushed up against his own boundaries. He left the AP in 2004 to take a Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship that he he said let him look at the journalism world from “five miles off the ground,” rather than “five feet off the ground like you are as a wire reporter.”
Unwilling to return to earth, Fournier went on to more high-minded pursuits to show he was, indeed, A Player:
He then co-wrote the book “Applebee’s America” and went to work as editor in chief of the political social networking startup Hotsoup.com, which went under in March 2007 when he returned to the AP as online political editor with a new and decidedly un-AP-like philosophy.
Hotsoup, a miserable failure, was premised on the questionable notion that a third party was bound to emerge to challenge the elephants and donkeys. As a porcupine, I like the notion, but alas, have to separate my own hopes from the evidence. But Fournier seemed to think he could make it happen, just by his own fellowship-inspired hubris.
And so last year Fournier and his staff felt free to inform us, among other things, that Mitt Romney was a phony, Barack Obama was overconfident, and that an AP writer would miss Hillary. All in the service of what Fournier called “accountability journalism.”
One of the more revealing insights in is manifesto is how to take credit for the insights of sources:
Play to their vanity. Tell them how smart you think they are and you just want to “pick their brain.” Whether you quote them or not (in some cases: especially if you don’t quote them), sources will feed you insight that you can claim as your own.
And so the rotten fruit of this pompous and inflated role of journalism is all over the place, in the opinion-piece writing that Fournier passes off as news journalism.
Kudos to Testy Copy Editors, for pointing out the lede on the Goreacle story.
(DISCLAIMER: As with everything I write here, this is purely my own opinion, and not that of my employer, the North County Times.)
Well, Gore is a Nobel Prize winner so he must know what he is talking about. After all, he was an honors graduate of divinity school.
Oh, sorry.
Well, there’s law school.
Oh Sorry.
Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School where, according to Bill Turque, author of “Inventing Al Gore,” he received F’s in five of the eight classes he took over the course of three semesters. Not surprisingly, Gore did not receive a degree from the divinity school. Nor did Gore graduate from Vanderbilt Law School, where he enrolled for a brief time and received his fair share of C’s.
Oh ! Err…….