Journalism’s Throes
It’s probably no exaggeration to say that the mainstream American media, as an institution, are in crisis. Between falling revenues (from both subscriptions and advertising) and falling public confidence (a recent Harris Poll found that only 12 percent of the public have a high degree of trust in the media) the newspapers and television news programs that once largely shaped the knowledge that Americans brought to their daily lives and political positions now have to scrape for every reader and every dollar, and many of them are not succeeding.
On balance, this is not a good thing, but there are still positive aspects to it, and hopeful opportunities involved. To boil it down, the traditional American news business faces four serious and interconnected threats:
* The first is the rise of alternative sources of information, principally the Internet and its array of independent bloggers, e-zines, newsletters, and the like – all of which are highly maneuverable, and therefore capable of targeting specific audiences and siphoning off readers from the mainstream outlets.
* The second threat is the relentless drumbeat of anti-journalistic criticism that the political Right has kept up ever since Vietnam, which has slowly but surely nurtured the myth of an unreliable “liberal media” at odds with American values.
* The third runs deeper: That is the increasingly skeptical, even jaundiced, attitude of modern Americans toward the usual figures and institutions of cultural authority, and toward the reliability of knowledge itself. For all the hostility aimed at the “postmodern” mindset, with its supposed “moral relativism” and lack of conviction, its basic vision of the contingency of truth and the inadequacy of representation is one that many people bring to their encounter with news, whether they realize it or not.
* Finally, journalism suffers from the control exercised over the mainstream media by major corporations that, when the chips are down, will tend to put profit before journalistic integrity. This has limited the coverage of topics that might be uncomfortable for corporate sponsors and compromised the financial commitments necessary for the pursuit and presentation of difficult or complicated stories.
These four factors reinforce each other: as the quality of news reporting deteriorates, the public trusts the mainstream media less, alternative sources become more attractive, establishment journalism become more vulnerable to conservative attacks, and media owners and publishers seek then to appease the accusers with less balanced programming.
There’s something salutary here, however, and that’s the fact that readers have become more assertive and questioning about the information they receive (or gather), and that they are able to get that information from a greater diversity of sources (despite the agglomerating tendencies of corporate news organizations). Yet with the sheer quantity of available information, and the deliberate undermining of professional journalism by conservatives, the question of how to evaluate sources of information has become ever more pressing and ever more vexed. Anybody with access to a computer now inhabits (if they want to) an absolute wilderness of facts, ideas, perspectives, stories, claims, and counter-claims. On what basis should we ground our evaluation of what we read or hear? Is the capacity for misinformation (or disinformation) heightened or diminished by a wider array of news sources? By what standards do we compare differing representations of the world in which we live?
From one perspective, it’s a positive development that people have become more skeptical about journalistic objectivity. That skepticism recognizes a whole host of factors that mediate what we receive as news – factors ranging from corporate influence to government spin to editorial mandates to the human limitations of individual reporters. The problem, or the risk, is that this skepticism can become debilitating or nihilistic – that people will end up seeing everything as equally truthful or equally untruthful, or that in the Babel of contending voices the impulse will be to tune them all out, from despair or frustration.
The body blows to the mainstream news business have been coming hard and fast, and they have seriously undermined the public’s trust in the very notion of journalistic integrity. The current brouhaha about Newsweek’s retracted story of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay is only the latest installment in a long run of bad press for the press. Partly, this is itself a classic instance of news distortion or magnification, in which one dramatic story (e.g., vicious dog attack) stimulates others of the same ilk (vicious dog attacks across the country), whether or not the reality bears out all the attention. Yet the crisis of American journalism is a real one, and the wounds are bleeding.
As news organizations struggle to survive in an adrenalized and hyper-competitive business environment, and in a more cynical political culture, they risk both self-inflicted and deliberately inflicted wounds. Most notably, the excessive reliance on anonymous sources not only makes readers suspicious, but also increases the potential for manipulation of stories, or even the planting of false information, by sources with an agenda who prefer to remain in the shadows. Who, after all, outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent? An anonymous source with an agenda. Who provided the forged document about President Bush’s National Guard service to CBS? An anonymous source with an agenda – but was the target really the President, or was it CBS? Ad nauseum. Anonymity allows the reporter to “get the story,” but it now seems to entail unjustified risks.
Then, of course, the pressures of the high-speed news market have provoked media organizations into rushing flawed stories into print or onto the air, and made plagiarism or corrupt reporting both more tempting for journalists and more difficult for editors to prevent. The reporter Jack Kelley’s elaborate fabrications, for instance, found fertile soil not just in his imagination, but in the lax newsroom culture of USA Today, while Jayson Blair at the New York Times operated with little editorial oversight but with strong incentives to get the scoop. In turn, the same competition for readers and advertising dollars translates into pressure to pander to the lowest common denominator by making the news “entertaining.” This has had the paradoxical effect of turning off the very audience it was meant to woo – for there is, believe it or not, a longing and a market for sober reportage.
Less visibly, the quick-and-easy cost-cutting strategies of both print and television news, particularly the reduction of the number of professional correspondents and the growing reliance on non-staff reportage, have made the problem worse by increasing the potential for error and constricting the range of coverage. The amount of information goes down, while the amount of opinion goes up; hard facts become scarcer, while “perspectives” propagate; news from Pakistan takes a back seat to news from Hollywood.
All that said, the most serious wounds to the reputation of the media are those inflicted from without. The conservative movement has had its sights set on the journalistic establishment for 35 years, and takes every error, every lapse, as an opportunity to pile on. The goal is very clear: to discredit or destroy non-conservative points of view by intimidating the media from reporting them, to hamper the media’s traditional “watch-dog” function, and to shift public attitudes rightward by framing centrist or neutral reportage as “liberal” bias. At the same time, the current administration has virtually gotten into the news business itself, using the fake White House correspondent Jeff Gannon (real name James D. Guckert) to lob softball questions at press conferences, and paying conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, through the Education Department, to promote the No Child Left Behind Act. The problem, beyond the obvious one of government propaganda, is that these shenanigans don’t just redound to the credibility of the administration, but to the reliability of news generally. Who knows, on any given day, where our information is coming from? What’s its provenance, its history, its purpose? Those are the kinds of questions that can lead people to dismiss everything, to throw out the baby with the bath-water – and God knows there’s a lot of bath-water out there.
So what to do? How should we hew our way through the jungle of information that surrounds us? For their part, consumers of the news need to be active gatherers and interpreters of knowledge. Obviously, that means evaluating any particular purveyor news according to the standards of good journalism: Do they have an established history of getting the facts straight? Professional reputation does matter. Do they seem to aim for objectivity (elusive though it may be) instead of copping out with mere “balance”? Simply quoting two sides of an issue is no substitute for independent analysis. Are they honest about their limitations and their perspective? Much better to have a forthright argument than covert spin. Is the reasoning strong when it comes to complex issues? Few things offend the principle of informed democracy more than intellectual superficiality. Which sources have been consulted, and how knowledgeable and/or neutral do they seem?
Being active, engaged consumers of news also entails the recognition that each of us will probably gravitate toward sources that reflect our own pre-existing biases and inclinations, and that we have to get outside our comfort zone to be fully informed. That might mean putting down the Utne Reader and picking up The Economist, or – if the example is not too outlandish – flipping the dial from Rush Limbaugh to NPR. Certainly it involves acquiring the critical mass of information needed to judge the validity of new information or unfamiliar claims.
Finally, however, readers have a responsibility to be skeptical of skepticism, which too easily grades into laziness or apathy. Question authority, but also respect institutional histories. Read the blogger, but also respect the credentials of the paid professional. In today’s information whirlwind, the credibility of particular media outlets may be a hard thing to judge, but it’s still possible to separate the wheat from the chaff. The wheat’s there and it nourishes us all.
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