Big Media: Good for Nothing; Not-So-Big Media: Pretty Competent

From GORDON TROWBRIDGE, Washington bureau, Detroit News: Let's please try to stomp out a particularly silly notion before it calcifies into conventional wisdom. In his Monday chat on washingtonpost.com, Howard Kurtz tells a questioner: "I do think in the wake of the Minneapolis collapse that there has been a lot of reporting on how many bridges are deemed structurally deficient and how much money is spent on maintenance, especially in local newspapers and on local stations. But where were these stories before?"

This is a leading contender for "Most Inane Media Criticism, 2007." Stories on deteriorating bridges are a staple of investigative and computer-assisted reporting, as even a cursory glance of resources such as the Investigative Reporters & Editors website or a stroll through Nexis reveal. Since 2001, the Boston Globe, Kansas City Star, WFLA-TV in Tampa, Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oakland Tribune and Oregonian of Portland have all published major investigations based on analysis of the National Bridge Inventory, the federal database that was the source for all those stories listing "structurally deficient" bridges in the wake of the Minnesota tragedy. Nexis shows nearly 100 stories from papers such as the Salt Lake Tribune, and as recently as this June in the Honolulu Advertiser. The national media have been on the case too, and for a long time: The New York Times published a piece in 1989, and USA Today a major investigative project in 1994. The list is almost certainly longer than what my 10 minutes of searching turned up.

The story here is not, repeat not, one of a clueless media failing to pay attention to a serious problem because it was unsexy. In fact, the various publishers associations and journalism advocacy groups ought to be advertising the fact that the media were onto this long before it became the cause of the day. Any public official with two functioning brain cells, and any voter with the wit to pay attention, knew of the problem of crumbling infrastructure long before the I-35W disaster. And they knew because hundreds of journalists and scores of media outlets had told them, in big, bold, Technicolor detail. That government and the public failed to pay attention just demonstrates that on this, as on so many other issues, the ability to point out a problem is not the same as the power to solve it.

Link.