Comments on: Custodian of fact…

By: Thoughtsignals

Thoughtsignals — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 04:56:48 +0000

Journalism, the truth, and facts

Vaughn Ververs has another interesting column on the role of the news media in our increasingly noisy media ecosphere: Because the mainstream media have lost the gatekeeper role, their position of importance has fallen. Vice President Dick Cheney no lo…

By: Donald E. L. Johnson

Donald E. L. Johnson — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 10:23:28 +0000

I’ve been an editor and publisher for 40 years next month and a news junky for more than 50 years.

Reporters reflect their environments and the values of their families and mentors, and we all have our agendas, which we allow to show one way or another. It is the public’s job to obtain information from many souces and come to personal conclusions, rational or otherwise.

Consumers are smart and decide for themselves whose reporting is honest and whose is usually suspect. Sometimes consumers perfer bias and subscribe to the Nation or N.Y. Times (totally biased) on the left or the Weekly Standard or The Wall Street Journal (for the editorial page) on the right.

It is up to a publication’s owner to decide what to present to consumers. Tragically, publishers fall down on the job from the day they hire their editors and give them their marching orders. The reason journalism is breaking down and losing respect is that publishers aren’t hiring smart, honest editors, and editors are hiring reporters and copy editors who share their views and lack of integrity. Too many reporters and desk people are poorly supervised, as we’ve seen at the Times and USA Today. Read the comments about Fox by the editor of the L.A. Times to see how off the wall some editors are.

Why is corporate media producing lousy products? Because it’s all about eyeballs and advertising, and except for the Journal, seldom about quality our journalistic integrity. If an employer forces good people to work in dysfunctional systems, even the best people will fail regardless of whether the employer is the CIA, CBS, the N.Y. Times or Tribune Co.

What’s the result? In response to receiving dishonest reporting from traditional media, opinion leaders turn to blogs, message boards, C-Span, radio talk shows and cable political and financial shows, which allow them to size up sources for themselves. And when a topic is hot, Google hums. No filtering.

Six years ago I spent $20,000 a year on several hundred magazines, newspapers and journals; today I spend less than $2,000 on WSJ, Investor’s Business Daily, Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, Value Line, an occasional USA Today and Denver paper and a few trade pubs. I read other papers online. And I spend a lot of time reading blogs and message boards and posting on the same, often while watching FOX, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC. The big 3 nightly news programs and local TV news shows are not part of my routine.

Seems like there are a few Ph.D. thesis projects percolating here.

By: acline

acline — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 06:32:58 +0000

Michael, Bryan, Bob, and Rebecca…thanks for the interesting responses. I’m running hard this weekend. I’ll respond further beginning Monday. I appreciate all of your interest and insight!

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 06:19:08 +0000

Here’s Jay Rosen’s take on this, or “He Said, She Said, We Said” as he frames it. This is all too little too late. It would have been more useful for the pressies to have been thinking about this stuff when they had some credibility. There is no reason to believe the press will accept responsibility/accountability unless it is forced on them by the courts. Speaking of courts, be sure to check out the presscourt.com link toward the end of Jay’s post – it’s like The People’s Court for bad reporting, but they are deadly serious about forcing accountability on a recalcitrant press. Power to the people! http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

By: Bob M

Bob M — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 02:48:23 +0000

“Fairness” builds in a bias that the unscrupulous routinely take advantage of. Offer up the most outrageous, self-serving statement you can (e.g., the Jenin massacre). Your opponents say it is not true. Both claims are (at best) presented, implicitly with equal status, and the impression is that the facts lie somewhere in the middle.

The deck is stacked in favor of the unscrupulous here. It takes minimal effort to make an outrageous claim but a lot of effort to dig into the facts. Most of the time, it won’t happen.

By: bryan

bryan — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 16:04:33 +0000

Actually, I would disagree with Jamieson. The notion of journalism as “keeper of the fact” has a nice sound-bite ring to it, but what happens is that journalists report what they choose, so they necessarily weed out some facts and present others.

I just finished a paper comparing two press agencies that reported about controversial events. The same events, and yet details (“facts”) that appeared in one were absent the other.

or consider this example:
http://arguewithsigns.net/mt/archives/001715.html

I suspect the same thing would happen if you compared newspapers or other media. It’s nice that we all want to be keepers of the facts, but that assigns us as journalists too high a value.

By: Michael Greer

Michael Greer — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 15:41:09 +0000

I would like to vote for an agonistic conception of “news.” In other words the more scandalous, complex, in some cases, fictional “an event” is, the more the community, paradoxically, has to gain from it. My reason is rooted in an interpretation of Plato’s _The Laws_ which is provided in Robert Hariman’s _Popular Trials_.
The point is that the community needs to see its own laws, its ethos dramatically contested.

Take the Scott Peterson case. See it as an instance of questioning the nature of the American family: haven in a heartless world or nightmare of destiny.

By: Outside the Beltway

Outside the Beltway — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 11:20:59 +0000

‘Fair’ or ‘True’: Pick One

Andrew Cline makes a persuasive argument why “fairness” undermines journalistic objectivity….