Go Forth, Fourth Estate

The modern glut of information, combined with the erosion of the mainstream media's cultural authority, is directly related to the increasing difficulty we now face in figuring out what's true and what's not. There are many factors involved in this, but one of them has certainly been the established media's slowness in adapting to a quickly changing political and technological climate.  

Let's look at some of the ways in which the major news organizations can improve their news reporting operations, and in the process reclaim some of their cultural status. The aim is not to celebrate corporate journalism at the expense of the many independent outlets that have sprung up in recent years. Indeed, these alternative sources of news have done much to empower both writers and readers by expanding the available range of perspectives and multiplying the opportunities for informational cross-checking. Nonetheless, in an age when everybody with a laptop can claim to be a journalist, and every website can offer itself as a news outlet, the institutional media still play a vital role in separating the wheat from the chaff. Our democracy relies on our having access to solid information, and the whole point of professional journalism is to identify what that solid information is, and to deliver it to the greatest number of people.  

There is no doubt that the major print and broadcast media are going to have to adapt to changing circumstances - to demands for greater speed and variety, to more active and assertive readerships, to the competition posed by nontraditional media, to technological advance, and to a globalized information marketplace. The question is not whether they will adapt, but how they will adapt, and therein lies all the risk and all the potential.  

One side of journalism's response to the new environment will involve business and financial decisions: advertising rates, subscription rates, market segmentation, content ratios, corporate consolidation, and so forth. Then there is the editorial side, dependent on the business side but ultimately representing the whole point of the journalistic enterprise, and it is here that the fundamental adaptations will have to take place. The solution to the "crisis" in American journalism will come not primarily from the money managers but from the newsrooms. The threat is in "adapting" too far - jettisoning traditional functions and abandoning the essential role of journalism in a democracy. The solution lies in reasserting the core values of journalism in a manner that wins public respect and support. For this to happen, owners and publishers will need to put more money into newsrooms, to invest in the journalistic endeavor as something other than infotainment.  

The greatest challenge to journalism-as-usual comes from that army of independent online writers known as bloggers (from "web-log"), and the virtual universe of knowledge they have created, known as the blogosphere. Journalistic and political circles vibrate with excitement, and trepidation, about the implications of blogging for the institutional news business. The consensus that seems to have emerged is that professional (i.e., credentialed, experienced, and paid) journalists can gain a great deal from their non-professional counterparts, if they have the willingness to listen and to collaborate.  

The great boon of blogging is that it can provide facts, opinions, and perspectives from places where most journalists can't or won't go, be it Tehran or Timbuktu. It thus seems to represent a more authentic, ground-level form of public knowledge than the product turned out by the major newsrooms. Indeed, for this reason the blogosphere has begun to influence the agenda of the national conversation about policy and current events - which is a good thing, considering that that conversation is at present too limited by corporate and ideological self-interest.  

The problem, however, is that in the radically egalitarian, fragmented world of the blogosphere, we find a proliferation of informational or perspectival bits, with too little sense of how it all fits together, and with too little guidance as to what information is important and what is reliable. Considered skeptically, the blogosphere can resemble anarchy, or the Tower of Babel, with many contending voices and minimal authority. Certain standards of authority and credibility must remain in the information business, not simply for philosophical but for practical reasons. When people have a limited amount of time and inclination to sort through the modern whirlwind of fact and fiction, there is value in having designated representatives advise them as to what the critical issues are. Lest this sound overly hierarchical, we should question whether non-professional journalism is necessarily more democratic. In one sense it is, but does it serve democracy as effectively as the major players? Independence is indispensable, of course, but size and quality matter, too.  

The goal, it seems, is to merge the strengths of both worlds, to achieve a synergy between the vibrancy and immediacy of the blogosphere and the standards-oriented practices of the professional newsroom. This is what Dan Gillmor, in his book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O'Reilly, 2004), describes as "a balance that simultaneously preserves the best of today's system and encourages tomorrow's emergent, self-assembling journalism." Gillmor goes on: "We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we'll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations-and to provide context-will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them."  

For journalists, that means listening carefully to the blogosphere, getting ideas and sources there, checking facts, and synthesizing the available knowledge into a coherent and authoritative account of reality. This is hard work, of course, but it holds of the promise of dramatically revitalizing the news business. In a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review titled "Emerging Alternatives: Terms of Authority," Jay Rosen suggests that "the age of global interactivity that is now descending changes the terms of the [journalistic] transaction not only by upgrading what publics can do for themselves, but also by granting new powers of invention to journalists." Rosen maintains that this will enable journalism to "ground its authority interactively." "The terms of the transaction," he writes, "imply a new kind of public, where every reader can be a writer and people do not so much consume the news as they 'use' it in active search for what's going on, sometimes in collaboration with each other, or in support of the pros." In essence, the paradoxical challenge for professional journalists will be to retain their authority and their influence by relinquishing a measure of their traditional grip on the news.

But that does not mean relinquishing their news judgment, their independence from corporate and ideological interests, or their commitment to socially responsible reporting. In fact, the current turbulent environment obliges journalists to recommit themselves to the essential principles of their profession.  

They require institutional support from their higher-ups to do so, but what they may find, contrary to the example set by Fox News, is that good journalism actually makes for good business. This is the thesis of a new book titled The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril, by Robert G. Kaiser and Leonard Downie Jr., Associate Editor and Executive Editor, respectively, at the Washington Post. Kaiser and Downie argue, in essence, that while tinkering with the financial operations of news organizations certainly helps, the profession will benefit most from a reassertion of high-quality journalism, involving the thorough and responsible reporting of issues that matter to the broad public. That sounds obvious, perhaps, but it needs saying in an age when the contrary pressures and temptations are very real. The credibility of professional journalism is at stake, and the fundamental way of preserving it is to provide excellent professional journalism.  

In practical terms, this means a few things:

* Reduce the dependency on anonymous sources. The practice of quoting unnamed officials or participants has allowed a great number of major discoveries, but may now be reaching a point of diminishing returns. Not only does anonymity, when over-used, diminish the authority of a story (if not necessarily its truth value), but anonymous sources are also an effective means of planting disinformation in the media.  

* Assert the importance of professional training, certification, and expertise. This is particularly the case in specialized areas of journalism, such as science reporting. As members of a profession with a long and distinguished history, and with real differences in quality between different outlets, journalists should be comfortable explaining not only the criteria used in editorial and employment decisions, but the very purpose of such criteria.  

* Develop investigative journalistic projects funded by nonprofit organizations. Investigative reporting is the life-blood of the Fourth Estate, and as long as the reporting itself is accurate, the source of funding is not the principal concern. As Philip Meyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina school of journalism, puts it: "Allowing charitable foundations to pay for the news might be risky, but it is probably no more dangerous than a system in which advertisers pay for it" ("Saving Journalism: How to Nurse the Good Stuff Until It Pays," Columbia Journalism Review, Nov./Dec. 2004).  

* Avoid being intimidated or influenced by conservative attacks. Instead, journalists need to expose these attacks for what they are: an effort not to improve the quality of journalism, but to undermine the media's credibility and cow reporters into toothless coverage of controversial policies. Far from being biased, that kind of intrepid reporting will be indispensable to giving the public a faithful picture of the modern political environment. It would be in the public's interest if the attacks and efforts at intimidation would themselves become the subject of reporting.  

* Aggressively call attention to political content masquerading as journalism. A sense of professional courtesy has tended to inhibit journalists from fully analyzing the ideological slant of such organizations as Fox News or the Washington Times, but the conservative infiltration of the news business has now reached the stage where it is a legitimate news story in itself. In addition, journalists should stay ahead of the curve by investigating the ongoing conservative effort to co-opt the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  

* Put objectivity ahead of the cop-out idea of "balance." Everybody knows that true objectivity is impossible, but at some point the journalistic craft means calling it as it is, with the journalist's own knowledge and judgment coming to bear - even if that involves direct confrontation. By contrast, the specious notion of "balancing" a story by simply offering two or three different viewpoints can undermine objectivity by implying that all these perspectives are equally valid. It is an abdication of journalistic responsibility not to assert what the journalist knows is true.

And that, indeed, is what we rely on journalists to do for us. At their best, they are not mediators, or ideologues, or mere scribblers, but people with the dedication and the talent to go get the story and bring it back to us more or less intact, and basically straight. That's why they matter to a democratic system, and that's why they get paid.  

 

© Commonweal Institute, Inc., 2005

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