Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘Too Fresh to Be True’ 131
appear in more traditional conservative publications. The story
achieves a level of acceptance at every stage. 6
The web has become part of a new media economy in which it not
only acts as a link in the chain but also accelerates the whole process
and detonates those stories in a global arena. The fact that news
providers report a story, even where it is offered as unconfirmed, in
itself gives it the credibility to merit repetition. The emphasis placed
on such reports, which often consist of half-truths or suppositions,
also has the effect of blurring the line between news and those media
spectacles constructed, sometimes spuriously, from conflict,
celebrity and catastrophe. These are churned up with stories such as
elections, train crashes, roller-coaster stock markets and legal trials
which are all given similar spin. Perhaps the distinction is merely
between tabloid news and traditional, so-called value-driven journalism.
Lasica suggests it is more and finds Larry Flynt’s 1998 list of
Republican party adulterers whom the publisher, in a kind of quid pro
quo for Starr, intended to flush into the limelight, redolent of
‘nothing so much as McCarthyism’. 7
The world’s news consumers’ fascination with the events putatively
exposed by Drudge and later, more formally (and also on the
web) by the Starr Report, should not be confused with the crucial
issues around the attempted impeachment of the President of the
United States. The spectacle of sex and abuse of power drew attention
away from the political process. Bob Woodward, one of the
Washington Post reporters who worked on the Watergate scandal,
sees the two events as very different; the Watergate affair saw the
media reporting and attempting to comprehend historical events in
the contingent world, Monica-, or Zippergate as it came to be
known, was largely fabricated by the media and its cohorts including
political lobbyists.
The big difference between the Monica Lewinsky scandal and
Watergate is that in Watergate, Carl [Carl Bernstein] and I went
out and talked to people whom the prosecutors were ignoring or
didn’t know about. Here the reporting is all about lawyers telling
reporters what to believe and write. 8