The quote of the day comes from, of all people, a GOP President of long ago:
“Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this–in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. –Dwight D. Eisenhower http://bit.ly/aGUbaP
Why should we worry about the death of newspapers?
Reading any newspaper is pretty much a two-dimensional, impersonal, top-down, one-way, and often stupefying experience. News reports are infuriatingly self-referential and incomplete. If they stir us up they don’t give us any place to go. Is this civic engagement? The endless stream of revelations and problems, celebrities and disasters, seems disconnected from our own personal choices and public solutions. Too often, newspaper readers feel like “passengers in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver,” as MIT Prof. William Uricchio once put it.
Now we, the public, can be the drivers in a three-D world, with enticing participatory media that are upending power relationships, changing the links between user emotion and action, creating and engaging communities, providing platforms for people to do things for each other, and allowing a new sense of public space. We get more information than we can use, including original documents and expert opinions. We can all be prod-users: publishing our news to the world through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a wealth of cellphone tools that allow us to collect, geotrack, prioritize, keep and spread stories, pictures, videos and images.
These tools enable people not just to have more fun, but to contribute to political campaigns, bear witness to official misconduct, arrange meet-ups to deal with local problems, crunch and visualize data, and write rough drafts of history for public resources like Wikipedia. If watching television disengaged people from community, as Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam asserted in his famous “Bowling Alone” study, new media technologies are drawing us together with extraordinary results.
So why don’t we wash all that ink off our hands for good?
We certainly can give up the ink and paper format. But we are suicidal idiots if we give up the professional service that newspapers provide. Newspaper journalism is the foundation of the watchdog news chain. The best newspaper journalists have our back and work on our behalf to sort out what’s true and publicly relevant, whether they or their advertisers like it or not. That is what they mean by “objectivity.”
Good independent journalism is hard to do. It costs money. It also requires a popular culture that supports unpopular questions and answers. It asks citizens to live in the real world and care about what is factually true. It requires a support structure based on something other than the voyeur pornography of violence, sex and celebrity.
At their best, newspapers provide what Alex Jones calls the “iron core” of news, the honest, time-consuming effort by paid professionals to hold the powerful accountable. Television and radio newscasts, Google news, Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, and the people who run the world still depend to a large extent on the flow of facts and assertions vetted, organized and prioritized by newspaper journalists. Internet advertising without subscription fees cannot finance “iron core” journalism. So newspapers, even as they adapt to the web and cell phone platforms, are going bankrupt and journalists are losing their jobs.
Technology is not the sole culprit. Neither journalists nor the public have adequately differentiated good journalism from bad, nor defended newspapers when they have been under attack from self-interested ideologues. It has been increasingly hard for news organizations to resist offering simply whatever the public wants, instead of fighting for what the attentive citizen needs to know. Journalists too often have abandoned the qualities that made them both controversial and essential.
For new business models to work, journalists need to provide news services of unique value and promote their credo as effectively as the critics have attacked it. Media literacy training should be part of basic education for everyone, as power and responsibility for evaluating the news moves from the elite to the street. Technology alone didn’t destroy journalism, but a thoughtful use of digital and participatory media can help save it. We need to build and organize fan groups for real journalism and turn that support into sustenance.
The smartest digital entrepreneurs understand the continued importance of good journalism. Despite our information overload, vital news and information is deliberately hidden—as prize-winning newspaper and magazine exposes of corruption, torture, spying on citizens, and other issues, continue to teach us. We need someone with clout to hold propaganda creators accountable, while being accountable themselves. We know where to find these journalists if they mess up. In contrast, we can’t expect the evanescent and sometimes anonymous virtual digital folks who volunteer their pieces of information, to provide the consistent, influential flow of relevant, verified news that people require every day in a democracy.
We need a common picture of the real world that we cohabit today, if we are going to work together to build the future. Without professional journalists in the mix, we are tempted to travel only the streets we already know, mirroring ourselves with our media choices, rather than facing unwelcome facts. That is why we need to save newspapers—or at least the journalism they can provide. They help us demand the best from the powerful, and from ourselves.
Originally published in Newsday, December 2009.
…MIT Prof. William Uricchio observed that old media make us feel like “a passenger in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver.”
…Phil Balboni debated a skeptical MIT student about news “objectivity” at Balboni’s new online GlobalPost venture.
…Harvard’s Shorenstein Center handed out prestigious Goldsmith investigative reporting prizes to mostly old media folks.
…And across the river, people started hearing the death rattle of the Boston Globe.
Even for the optimists, the media landscape remains a minefield of unresolved questions:
Is it enough that anyone can be in the driver’s seat now, creating and re-creating content, consuming whatever we like, and the hell with the rest of it?
Is news more authentic now?
Will my friends and colleagues spread the story to me if something relevant is out there?
Aren’t we glad to be washing our hands of “objectivity” and other myths?
Isn’t it glorious to be in the age of more information than we can possibly use?
Every day I am surrounded by people who have moved on from the mainstream news media with no regrets. The media didn’t tell us about the Bush Administration lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They didn’t warn us about the pending financial collapse. …it’s all much better now that we are getting our news from real people.
My bottom line has always been: how can people understand their real choices for shaping their own lives and communities? How can the flow of news actually promote personal and community agency? This is why the future of journalism and civic media are important to me.
Many of my truly smart civic media colleagues believe that crowd sourcing and individual participation will fill in the gaps and do a better job than the mainstream media have done with this, offering better watchdogging of political, economic and cultural institutions. I would love to see this. The projects that have worked—such as the Ft. Myers newspaper expose of a corrupt sewer contractor, and the Sunlight Foundation’s efforts at illuminating what is actually in the budgets and laws being passed, are wonderful examples of what is possible. But for cultural rather than technological reasons, they are far–-very, very far–from covering the waterfront. In Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, wonderful examples of civic media prowess are given but in each case, they seem to require the MSM megaphone at some point, to actually affect policy and change things on the ground.
Others note that news audiences haven’t really left MSM. They are flocking to the best MSM websites. It’s just about a broken business model. Yes, but… it’s about a shifting culture as well. If the best and brightest young folks don’t value agnostic, professional journalism, even a dozen new business models won’t work for long. I am waiting for a public relations campaign to argue the virtues of Kovach and Rosenstiel-style journalism (http://www.journalism.org/node/71), combined with a comprehensive news literacy curriculum at all levels, in all countries, that invites people to produce, consume and pay for public service news.
Fair, important, earth-shaking journalism is actually hard to do. It’s harder than simply repeating what anyone tells you, or selecting the facts that support your own biases. That is what all the fuss is about as newspapers around the country collapse and die. Look at the winners of the Pulitzers (http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/2009) and the Goldsmith awards. They have demonstrated real expertise at teasing out something important that others didn’t want them to know. Their legitimacy came from their honest broker status, rather than their witty personas. Some became expert at reading obscure documents, figuring out the proper context and meaning of them, and then using their institutional clout to make their findings matter. Some used new algorithms and other computational tools. Others, like my former Wall Street Journal beatmate Jane Mayer, insisted on verifiable evidence and persuaded people to trust her with what they knew about top-secret U.S. torture policy (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/07/hbc-90003234.) This work takes not only skill, but time and, alas, money.
A feature of the new participatory ad hoc media is that people can participate anonymously and briefly, and then go away. This can capture moments of expertise that would have been wasted before. But no one can criticize them for letting down the public or making things up. They can just click away from that activity whenever it grows tiresome to them. So our challenge is not just how do you obtain the journalism you need without a professional group of experts being paid to do this, but also, how do you organize amateurs who wish to participate sporadically with acts of journalism, in a way that has value both for them and the publics they wish to serve? Will these mechanisms provide adequate information on which to base critical policy and voting decisions?
To be sure, what has called itself journalism has too often been a hack job, a pile of missed clues and mistaken identities. It’s not just about messing up the facts. It’s about misunderstanding what they mean. Stupid journalism is just like stupid anything else. It’s demonstrably bad and people should expose or ignore it.
It’s not about the platform, even though too many MSM moguls have lost their shirts by responding as if it is. Many fine journalists are net-based and have never set foot inside an MSM organization. Joshua Micah Marshall is I.F. Stone2.0 (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/). I see exciting new civic media possibilities on the horizon. Twitter is dazzling, as a headline service and a conversation. But I need more than Twitter, YouTube and my Facebook social network to understand this complicated world.
Phil Balboni’s talk at MIT inspired another installment in the debate about objectivity. Students seemed uniformly skeptical when he advocated objective news. Objectivity means less transparency. Why hide your inevitable biases? Why would anybody prefer a journalist who won’t tell you what she thinks about what she’s witnessing?
“Objectivity” was impossible, of course, but the effort to achieve it was the journalist’s shield against the influence of the advertisers, political bosses and owners. It required real discipline. It was an act of idealism and selflessness, an effort to step back and honestly present what one witnessed as truthfully as possible, even if it didn’t reinforce one’s own beliefs or the politician’s or advertiser’s wishes. For example, there was the day my colleague and I had a lead story in the Wall Street Journal documenting how everyone around President Reagan—including Mrs. Reagan, Vice President Bush and virtually the entire cabinet—thought Attorney Edwin Meese should resign. But theJournal’s editorial page, on the same day, thundered that the only people who wanted Meese to resign were the liberal critics of the Reagan Administration.
My belief in the value of agnostic journalism—to offer facts on all sides of the issue, and trust the ability of my readers to connect the dots—was tested when I wrote about people like Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and conservative prankster Terry Dolan. I forced myself to be open-minded, to understand and present what they thought of themselves, and what their admirers as well as their critics saw in them, instead of simply lining up my own objections. Now newsmakers can offer themselves to the world through their own platforms, and they don’t need journalists like me to paint their portraits. But are we better informed now, better protected against bias because we don’t believe in trying for objectivity anymore? Is the personal lens always the best model for every news situation?
Roger Ailes—the GOP media guru who now runs Fox news—once told the students in a class I was teaching at Harvard that journalists got up in the morning with a goal of tearing down his GOP candidates. Did he really believe that? That wasn’t what we thought we were trying to do. We asked unpopular questions in order to hold the powerful accountable. A few months before Ailes made his comment, I had been a Wall Street Journal reporter questioning Ailes’ client, GOP Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle in a “press availability” in Huntington, Indiana. Quayle complained that I was unpatriotic to question his finding a personal safe haven in the U.S. National Guard during the Vietnam War, while others were being drafted and dying in a war he vigorously supported. I took more heat than Quayle did for the exchange, which was captured live on CNN. Critics said I seemed disrespectful and “biased” against Quayle. I thought it was our job to ask uncomfortable questions, not to seek accolades as celebrity pundits in a patriotism contest.
But without cultural support for that kind of insolence, journalists have made popularity their Faustian bargain with the bottom line. Bloviators are hired on radio and cable TV for their ratings rather than their honesty or wisdom, and a news story’s spreadable popularity (as the most emailed or highest ranked on sites like Digg) establishes the journalist’s value to sponsors. Few noticed untilafter Hurricane Katrina, the faltering of the Iraq War and the economic meltdown, that the unpopular questions were not being asked effectively beforethe crisis. This has always been a challenge, of course, but it is more so when the paying customers prefer faith over facts.
It’s been an extraordinary privilege to serve for 18 months as research director at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. The work has been highly experimental, creative and public-spirited. This is a wonderful place to invent communication technologies and practices that promote civic engagement in local settings. Some of it is already a lot more promising than old journalism ever was. We need to apply these new media affordances for civic good. How can people build cultural practices that use communication technologies to best advantage personal agency and healthy communities, all around the world? Let’s all keep working on that, even as we see the terrible and stirring pictures and words coming out of Iran, Gaza, and other crisis areas.
Part of the original C4FCM team is breaking up, as Henry Jenkins moves on to USC, and outreach director Ingeborg Endter and I depart MIT. But the Knight Foundation grant work is in excellent hands with two of the original creators of the Center, C4FCM Director and Principal Investigator Chris Csikszentmihalyi, and Associate Director and Principal Investigator Mitchel Resnick, as well as C4FCM’s new administrator, Sarah Wolozin.
As I leave to take up a new life in Budapest, I will be working on a book, and updating my monograph, “Tabloids, Talk Radio and the Future of News,” (Annenberg Washington Program, 1994), which predicted the demise of journalism and started my thinking about technology’s impact on news. Please keep checking in with me through my website, www.ellenhume.com
Published in the January 2005 issue of Nieman Reports Magazine.
Journalism will survive, but it might appear in the form of Web sites designed for people who want to check in on the real news when they don’t get the jokes on the Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show.”
It is tragic that we’ve come to this. For years we’ve been warned that great journalism is being tainted by all this ersatz stuff. Too many reporters are chasing too few stories and conveying them with more hype than meaning. People are suffering from news fatigue, along with compassion and political fatigue.
Audiences flee to the blogosphere and talk shows, where the chatterati seem more candid and therefore, honest, seducing audiences by confirming their prejudices. The passion for “attitude” plays well in our attention economy, but it’s bad for news. Journalists become no different than salesmen and jesters, except they’re usually less amusing.
Real journalism will recover, but only if its supporters take action. First, they should get out the plastic sheeting and duct tape and wall off everything about celebrities, movies, Laci Peterson, rumor, prediction, and a lot of other popular stuff. Take a page out of factcheck.org – the most admired Web site of this campaign year. Stay with the basics. Don’t just repeat someone else’s story. Do original reporting. Help us understand what’s a lie and what’s the truth, and why this matters.
Journalism that still tries to do this is better now than ever. It is found in the detailed take-outs in The New York Times and other newspapers which separate myths from realities, about aluminum tubes in Iraq, John Kerry and George Bush during the Vietnam era, and other hotly debated issues. But these days this kind of careful, researched journalism has more enemies than friends. “You’re either for us or against us,” President Bush declared after 9/11, in message that was absorbed too well by the U.S. media.
To win back people who want to know what’s really going on, journalists need to return to what they do best: providing verified information that is, in Bill Kovach’s and Tom Rosenstiel’s phrase, “comprehensive and proportionate.” News outlets also need to get more credit when they do this; even their best work is often taken for granted by those who pay close attention or dismissed by those who do not.
It’s time to launch a public education campaign and take back the phrases “fair and balanced, and “no spin” from those who claim them, but do just the opposite. Journalism doesn’t need to give up and join the overtly biased. Instead, it needs:
- A effective consumer movement
- An educational effort
- New business models
- A lot more lawyers
It’s way overdue to use these tools to reverse the 35-year cultural war against the mainstream media, led by folks like Roger Ailes on the right and Noam Chomsky on the left. These critics, who never appreciated the honest efforts of good journalists, exaggerate and exploit high-profile mistakes by major news organizations. When the federal government, which rarely finds scrutiny convenient, subpoenas reporters to hand over telephone records that go far beyond the scope of the Valerie Plame inquiry, a lot more lawyers are needed. When reporters can’t protect sources, they can’t hold the powerful accountable.
Fortunately, a long-needed media consumer movement is gaining momentum. Organized through the Internet, people successfully challenged Sinclair Broadcast Group’s decision to provide blatantly erroneous, partisan content during the president election. Before that they forced the Federal Communications Commission to rollback its loosening of cross-ownership rules. Journalism companies should get on the right side of this issue, even though the business model for independent journalism is under severe stress.
The rise of factcheck.org is evidence that journalism can morph into new formats and succeed at its core task of holding the powerful accountable and providing access for citizens to information they need. But it’s a nonprofit operation. Most journalism cannot enjoy that protection. Mainstream journalists often confront market-driven executives who demand cross-promotion of entertainment products by their news divisions. Niche markets might be journalism’s best hope, as National Public Radio illustrates, even if news balkanization is not good for democracy. Better business models must be found, fast.
Finally, a return to a civic education curriculum would help. Those who teach media literacy should move beyond deconstructing messages to helping students find reliable information. They need to show how to value real journalism – by looking for transparency, verification, independence, context and proportionality. Let’s be sure that when the audience comes back to look for this, they’ll be able to find it.
My premise is that the facts matter, and that journalists are in an ideal position to hold the powerful accountable. This is what I tried to do for 19 years as a reporter. The news media also must be held accountable themselves-because they, too, are among the powerful forces that shape our policy, politics and preoccupations. That is why I quit journalism in 1988 to be part of a group that is trying to hold the news media themselves accountable, and to improve their quality and role, from within the business.
Before I became a full time teacher in 2003, I saw enough candidates, presidents, and political campaigns up close to be hard-hearted about politics. Nevertheless, I was particularly disheartened by the 2004 presidential election. It was a huge victory for those who set out to destroy the ability of the news media to serve as watchdogs.
Now…don’t get me wrong. The news media have done a lot to wreck their own watchdog role since Watergate. We journalists have been own worst enemies! If we hadn’t done a lot of stupid things -and failed to be more transparent about our own limitations, mistakes and yes, biases-we would have more credibility when we write about the realities of Iraq, the reality of changing tax policies, the reality of the Social Security situation, the real costs and benefits of job outsourcing, the choices our government faced about securing the homeland or pouring money into the Iraq war, when we write about global warming, the plight of women, the Soviet style leadership of Putin, and so on.
The news media–the broadcast networks, the newspaper chains like Gannett, the talk show culture across all media– have too often gone for the commercial gold instead of the real news. They have too often degraded us and themselves, by focusing so much on sex, crimes, and celebrity nonsense. All along, real journalists also have been hard at work-all across America and in Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya. But they are hardly noticed in the din of talk shows and partisan attacks.
That is why no one blinked when Gen. Tommy Franks, whose miscalculations in Iraq have led to unnecessary bloodshed and backlash against America, said on Fox News after a presidential debate this October, that it was the media’s fault; we had built up expectations too high about Iraq. No. It had been Tommy Franks and his colleagues who told the media what glories to expect in Iraq, and journalists reported their assessments. This time, it was clearly NOT the media’s fault. Who now, will hold Tommy Franks accountable?
The assumption that it IS the media’s fault may be part of why no one especially cared when the New York Times reported just before the election that the Administration had plenty of warnings about the bogus intelligence that led them into Iraq in the first place. And it is part of why CBS became the issue-rather than George Bush’s integrity, which is what the National Guard story was about. The public chose to believe honorable a man (Bush) who clearly ducked his responsibilities during Vietnam, over a man (Kerry) who risked his life and saved others there. It is important to note that many people felt that all of this was simply in the past, and believe (I think correctly) that Bush is now a better man than he was, a born again Christian who has found a way to manage his alcohol problem, who now steps up honorably to his responsibilities. But he was not then; the facts are very clear, with multiple sources to prove them. Many chose instead to believe it is all about CBS and bias.
When President Bush can get away with shrugging and saying, during a debate where his facts are being challenged, that the New York Times is not credible because “you know, the media…” then we have lost our watchdog press. The attacks on the professional mainstream news media have worked. The public has accepted his dismissal of real journalism. Watergate is forgotten.
And we news consumers are partly to blame for this, too, because we are of two minds. We have access to serious news, presented in a sober and factual way, but we click away or fail to pick up the newspaper because it isn’t amusing. It tugs too much at our consciences, it annoys us, it brings a ‘downer” to us when we have enough challenges already in our lives. And when we do get the news, we love the gossip and trivia. It’s fun, and we like to hear what our favorite celebrities are doing. We like to look at beauty and hear about its secret lives. Unless we think there’s a terrorist attack, or our loved one is on the battle lines. Then we go to the media where we will get what we want, rather than be challenged by something we don’t want to hear.
It is particularly galling to note in this media landscape that the news organizations which are least likely to observe the standards of verification, fairness, comprehensiveness and proportionality (the hallmarks of good journalism)-those news organizations are the very ones who with impunity call themselves “the no spin zone” and “fair and balanced.” Joining Fox and Bill O’Reilly in particular are now Chris Matthews and MSNBC. They are not more honest, they are only more effective.
If the New York Times were simply out to elect liberal Democrats, as the GOP/Bush campaign constantly alleged, then why were they the original critics of Bill Clinton’s new presidency? They savaged him about the Whitewater scandal, in page one investigative reports and editorials that called for a special prosecutor. Clinton gave them a special prosecutor, who was a Republican who then picked up the Monica Lewinsky sexcapades and turned that into an impeachment process. It was the “liberal biased” New York Times that wrote some of the negative profiles about Kerry throughout the primaries and into the general election. If they were in the same business as Fox and the talk show culture, they would have always come back to a refrain of support for their man. They did not. They were actually trying to be fair and balanced.
So where do we go from here?
Journalists need to keep struggling to do honest reporting. Live in truth, Vaclav Havel counseled people who were surrounded by lies during Communism. Let everything you do and say be as true as you know it. Don’t build up the lies in order to have balance. Prove that they are lies. Secondly, to the public: pay attention to the watchdogs even if they are unpleasant, or annoying. See if they are right before you change the channel. There are limits to what journalism can do. It takes people to act on the facts they uncover. Insist on government accountability as much as you worry about media bias. The first is a far more serious problem, no matter what you’ve been told. If the journalists are dismissed, then who will hold the government accountable and tell the citizens what choices they really have?
