Maybe part of what’s wrong with journalism today is not journalists, but readers.
You don’t have to engage in many conversations about the news to find people whose main complaint is that they read a story containing information they didn’t like or didn’t want to know about.
A representative sample from a recent Facebook post:
“I dread when (X) writes an article. The spin he(/she) puts on his(/her) writing is not helpful.”
Ignore the reference to spin. That accusation, like the charge of fake news, is bandied about all the time these days whether it’s true or not. No, the key word here is the last: “helpful.”
Some people now appear to think journalism is supposed to be “helpful.” It’s not.
Mainly, journalism is supposed to be questioning. The cornerstones taught beginning journalists are that new stories should answer the questions who, what, when, where, how and if possible why.
Stories that do that turn out to be informative, and while they might be helpful to some, they are seldom helpful to all. Nor should they be.
A lot of news centers on the mistakes people make and the things people do that they shouldn’t do, be the latter acts criminal or political or both. And given the political and social climates of today – supercharged as they are with partisanship – anything deemed less than helpful to one tribe is likely to be celebrated by another and vice versa.
Troublemakers
“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black observed in 1971. “The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
Nationally in this country, that idea has been fading for some time. Some, probably too many, journalists became friends with the comfortable, and you don’t afflict your friends. Others became the servants of the governors.
Journalists to a large degree forgot their responsibility to censure during the two-terms of Barack Obama, the nation’s first, African-American president. The euphoria of the idea that a man of color, in a nation still split by race, could win election to the most important political position in the world made many journalists forget the need to ride herd on their heroes as aggressively as on their enemies.
Obama’s Drone War represents but one example of media acquiescence. It never attracted the attention it deserved, and when it did the context was shifted to a new target.
“Obama’s Weak Defense of His Record on Drone Killings,” The Atlantic headlined in Dec. 2016. “His choices made unjust strikes predictable and inevitable—and with Donald Trump poised to take power, the precedents he set are all the more alarming.”
Never mind that the Obama-ordered killings by Empire-esque drones possessed of a Star Warian style that left hundreds of civilians dead were plenty alarming on their own.
“Two terms and 540 strikes later, Obama leaves the White House after having vastly expanding and normalizing the use of armed drones for counterterrorism and close air support operations in non-battlefield settings—namely Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia,” Micah Zenko wrote at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Zenko put the total number of civilian dead at 324. The government of Pakistan put the death toll in that country alone at 400 to 600 with more than 600 others injured. In a 74-page report in 2013, Amnesty International suggested the Obama administration should be investigated for committing “war crimes” in connection with Pakistan drone attacks on innocents.
The drone attacks drew very little attention from a media which has since aggressively pursued any contacts President Donald Trump might have had with Russians in the run-up to the election.
Powered by their disdain for Trump – who is as admittedly prone to mistruths as Lyin’ Brian Williams of MSNBC – the media has returned to a watchdog role it should never have abandoned, but the contrast between what was and what is now makes today’s behavior look like nothing but a witch hunt to Trump supporters.
OK, so the problem is in part the media, and it is admittedly simplistic to even suggest the problems started with Obama.
Markets
But it’s not all the media. There’s some symbiosis going on here.
Tom Huddleston Jr. at Fortune in 2016 credited the New York Times’ coverage of Trump with helping power a big jump in newspaper subscriptions. “The New York Times Has 132,000 Reasons to Thank Donald Trump,” the headline above the story read.
Getting the Times delivered to your door every day for a year costs about $240. At that rate, those subscriptions would be worth more than $31 million to the Times, not counting whatever additional advertising the growing circulation might help the Times leverage.
Clearly there is money to be made as the Trump attack dog just as there is money to be made as the Trump protector. Trump-leaning Fox News is a $2.3 billion company that has led cable news network ratings for 15 years.
These are the economic realities of news. The United States is a market driven economy.
In market-driven economies, consumers tend to get what they want sooner or later, and a lot of consumers these days really don’t want news – they want propaganda.
They want what is “helpful” to their side, agenda, cause or tribe. The country now has a fake news problem for the same reason it has long had a drug problem: There is a demand for the product, and there is money to be made because of that demand.
This upsets some people. Under pressure from politicians both in the U.S. and Europe, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – who has made billions off the platform that allows “friends” to “share” news, stories, rumors, fish tales, phony golf scores and everything in-between – has vowed to launch a war on fake news.
Zuckerberg’s war sounds a lot like censorship and is sure to be about as effective as the War on Drugs.
The information genie is out of the bottle and unlikely to be put back easily, at least in the democratic states. Democracies are messy and hard to control. The mainstream media’s steady monopolization of news in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s brought only temporary stability.
And that monopolization was itself a product of the market. The best way to make money with a high-overhead business operating in a competitive market is to kill the competition. Newspaper publishers – who drove the media bus for a long time – adopted objectivity as a marketing tool.
“Objectivity is a standard that requires journalists to try to put aside emotions and prejudices, including those implanted by the spinners and manipulators who meet them at every turn, as they gather and present the facts. They recognize objectivity as an ideal, the pursuit of which never ends and never totally succeeds,” Steven J. Berry of the University of Iowa observed almost a decade ago. “Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and the intellectual guru of journalistic objectivity in the 1920’s, viewed it as a discipline inculcating scientific principles that can guide one to ‘victories over superstitions of the mind.'”
Lippmann had one hell of a noble idea, but the smart marketers saw in it only the economic opportunity: If the newspaper is objective, nobody will need more than one. And because we’re objective, they’ll only need us.
Pretty soon, most major cities had only one newspaper. The good part was that many of the journalists who worked at those newspapers bought into the Lippmann ideal, too. It became part of the culture.
Not that old mainstream was perfect. Objectivity is the ultimate moving target, but reporters at least tried to hold to the ideal.
Now you have sometimes have to wonder if those “superstitions of the mind” have won out over “scientific principles.”
Today anyone can be a journalist and a publisher, and there’s no telling what they might produce. And the latter can be said of a lot of what’s left of the mainstream. Mainstream publications fighting for their economic lives are facing a whole new market from that which existed only a decade ago.
It may be that the propagandists who dominated the early scene in America are rising to the fore again. Market indicators would argue that’s the case. Cable “news” is booming, led by Sean Hannity, once former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s biggest booster, on the right, and followed by Rachel Maddow on the left, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on the right, and Lawrence O’Donnell on the left, according to The Hill.
Categories: Commentary
The author has a hard time distinguishing between News (facts) and opinion or news commentary.
The two rules of journalism:
A) If it bleeds, it leads
B) Sex sells
I wonder if this site’s comments section will ever evolve beyond a place for two guys that seemingly have nothing better to do than whack computer keys with which to whack each other?
And my other two cents: facebook and twitter have had a lot to do with degradation’s throughout. Ctrl-Alt-Detweet.
I apologize for getting so far into the weeds about an area that really didn’t need to be involved IMO. I’m probably just too gullible to be able to ignore such distractions. Will try harder.
I’ve seen comments under the same name on at least 3 other sites, I think it must be one of those bots they talk about. Usually the comments are only vaguely about the subject in the article and most of the time they just attack other posters. I’ve found it best to ignore posters/bots like that.
Craig, I think it would benefit all journalists to ask themselves if their reporting is in line with the four pillars of the Society of Professional Journalists ethics code.
https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
1. Seek Truth and Report It
2. Minimize Harm
3. Act Independently
4. Be Accountable and Transparent
“I dread when (X) writes an article. The spin he(/she) puts on his(/her) writing is not helpful.”
I get your point, but I think you may be misinterpreting what (at least some) people mean when they say that certain “spins” or “tones” aren’t helpful.
I use that phrasing to point out that their spin can turn an otherwise informative article into a partisan or unprofessional screed, which then turns people off, leading them to not get the otherwise good info inside.
I agree with you Craig.
Sadly, what has infected national tv and print news has reached small news outlets like the ADN and local tv news outlets.
Case in point are the numerous commentaries submitted by education folks basically saying that Anchorage teachers are underpaid and are working in deplorable conditions. The facts just do not bear these claims to be true and the ADN silence on these claims is tacit approval.
Making matters worse are claims being made by Anchorage School District, that high school graduation rates are on the rise, which is true but not a peep out of the ADN regarding the impressive lowering of the bar to graduate. Less than 1% of Anchorage high school graduates would be accepted into any one of the state colleges in California. The facts matter but local tv news and the ADN can’t be expected to be guided by any level of journalistic credibility.
“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.” This is Michelle Wolf at WC Dinner when she wasn’t going after Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Wolf also specifically discounted Sean Hannity with: “People want me to make fun of Sean Hannity tonight, but I cannot do that, this dinner’s for journalists.”
Michelle wolf is discusting. She’s not worth repeating. Bill I hope you clean your computer keyboard after typing in her words . No compassion or coothness . If a comedian has to stoop to derogatory comments to get people to laugh ,they show a lack of work ethic and intelligence. Being funny can be done without slimeing others in a cruel way.
Rayme, the same sort of flack was thrown at Stephen Colbert after his roast of GWB and you can see where it got him. I thought Wolf’s roast of everyone there (and some not) was a breath of fresh air and entirely relative to Craig’s Commentary. Frankly I’m amazed you are so thin-skinned and I suspect it has more to do with your being unable to laugh at your own politics. Satire can be that way and Colbert’s alter persona was masterful IMO and he has been rewarded for his brilliance. We’ll get to see if Wolf’s performance is rewarded similarly.
The fact that she has pissed off so many, most mistakenly attributing her comments to Sanders appearance, including you for I have no idea why, suggests that she will do well.
Also Rayme, I’d like to recommend an old Barry Levinson movie starring Robin Williams: “Good Morning Vietnam.”
Williams is a disc jockey brought in to entertain the troops over there, and his humor disagrees with a particular officer who succeeds in replacing Williams for a time. The troops complain and one complaint in particular goes; “the officer sucks the sweat off the balls of a dead man.”
Now I suspect that your humor would be along the lines of that officer but such humor doesn’t pack it in a decidedly “roasting” that takes place every year at WH Correspondents Dinner.
There’s a time and place for even your humor but the audience will be small IMO.
So bill were you trying to say Robin Williams made good humor? I think you have fallen in your own toilet when you compare robin Williams to wolf . Good luck with that . What’s the rule of thumb with humor ? Don’t make fun of something someone can’t change . Play to your audience. Wolf violated both of those items . Robin tended to have a good feel for those . To my understanding he was rarely vicious. The opposite of wolf . Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. But don’t confuse having standards with a thin skin . You and I have both probably seen some rough language ect running in rough and tumble work crowds ,but does that mean we share it to a diverse audience that will get published? Wake up bill . P.s I will buy your stamp when you send wolf some fan mail.
You missed my point Rayme. Williams’ act was in a movie that was scripted and had nothing to do with his playing to any audience. The script clearly played to an audience, though.
Wolf was well known in comedic circles and she was hired to do exactly what she did. She was not hired to play to any audience but, in fact, to roast them (and roast she did).
I have no idea of your “Don’t make fun of something someone can’t change.” This sounds more like Don Trump making fun of the severely disabled reporter. Obviously there is no “rule of thumb with humor.”
Bill you appear to confuse humor with arrogance ? That’s what wolf does . I am the worst comedian on the planet but it appears it would do you well to brush up on your understanding of humor . I suggest reading the 8 tips of workplace humor. Cheers my freind !
Nobody is talking about “workplace humor!” This was a roast and if you’ve ever watched roasts, this was appropriate. You didn’t like it-tough noogies!
Simple as that. I understand and appreciate satire. You don’t-again tough noogies!
I wasn’t talking about just work place humor. Good humor is timeless. You missed the point. You need to brush up on definition of good humor. Check the dictionary if you will . Anyway, you are funny bill ! Much funnier than wolf . I would pay to go to your comedy show anytime!
Rayme, my original post was not intended to be hijacked, by you, as some kind of humor but as something relative to Craig’s Commentary. Wolf poked those journalists for their acting like they hated Don Trump when they’ve been profiting off him.
That said, we’ve beat this dead horse enough and we’ll just have to disagree as to what is “good humor.” I suspect it’s always a bit subjective but as I said before, my point had nothing to do with Wolf’s humor (you insisted on throwing that in there for your own reasons).
Nobody gives a shit what your opinion on humor is IMO (or mine for that matter). At least on this comment section-another posting may be different.
Hmm , bill seems you were triggered? Can’t take a bit of humor? That’s ok . Go watch your favorite,Michelle wolf abuse helpless people. Maybe you can laugh at that .
Rayme, you call this post humor??
“Michelle wolf is discusting. She’s not worth repeating. Bill I hope you clean your computer keyboard after typing in her words . No compassion or coothness . If a comedian has to stoop to derogatory comments to get people to laugh ,they show a lack of work ethic and intelligence. Being funny can be done without slimeing others in a cruel way.”
Must be some sort of code humor on your part as I didn’t see anything humorous in it. I’m just going to have to be more careful of your humor, it seems.
Bill if you don’t like my humor- (tough nuggies -as Bill Yankee would say ) . That said I think Craig does an amazing job of pulling information into the light He has an uncanny ability . Currently there is so much bs juarnalistic bias all articles must be dissected word by word . Never take an article at face value .
Very insightful. Glad someone is willing to prod the truth out of dark corners into the light .
Today’s National Enquirer has more credibility than most major news outlets. We have come a long, long way.
Be fair, Craig; Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham make no pretense of offering news. Their programming is strictly opinion commentary.
offered up on a “news” channel where it has become the main focus of the “news.” and it’s significantly more partisan than the fact-based news commentary of the past. Hannity pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy story even after Fox News retracted the original story as unsubstantiated. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/24/529809256/fox-news-retracts-dnc-staffer-conspiracy-story-but-hannity-keeps-it-alive