By Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.
This text was originally published in a series of posts on the Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal weblog. I have edited it for continuity in this format.
The Complex System
I want to consider, in brief, each section of the new survey of American journalists conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Check here for the survey methodology. Pew has conducted this survey twice before, in 1995 and 1999. I'll be highlighting issues, perhaps idiosyncratic, that arise for me in each of the four survey areas.
Section 1, Views on Performance.
Journalism evolved into a profession in the latter 1800s, and objective methods of reporting became the norm in the early 1900s. For an excellent accounting of these changes, you should read Discovering the News, by Michael Schudson. Procedures and the values they assume arise together. These changes led to a system of professional ethics that prescribed professional behavior and normalized professional values. One of the longest enduring values of professionalization and objectivity is the notion that a free press is essential to democracy. And this value, among others, leads journalists to worry about their professional performances. This is one of the admirable traits of journalists.
Despite professionalization and objective methods, journalism remains an impossibly complex practice because, among other things, it deals with the human perception and evaluation of events and the relaying of those events in language (spoken and written) and pictures. And at every conceivable point along the path from event to publication to consumption, journalists deal with coordination and collaboration in the production of an industrial product for two distinctly different customers--advertisers and readers. And let's not forget bias in all its variety in the human system and the bias inherent in the structure of journalistic practice.
How could anyone be satisfied with the product of such a system?
To Be Good
Section 2, Covering the President and the Campaign.
A question: With what adjective should journalists modify "coverage"?
Several are bandied about in this section of the survey, including: easy, timid, hard, cynical, ideological, liberal, and conservative.
I ask this question because any adjective overtly assumes a political point of view (the lack of one does, too, but never mind for a moment). Asking journalists about coverage with a constrained set adjectives seems to me to be skirting around a more important issue: What is the relationship of coverage to sources and the news? And, yes, one could write an entire book to answer that one.
But let me suggest a direction at the very least. While there is no such thing as an objective point of view, there is such a thing as an objective procedure. The objective point of view is a fantasy of philosophy. The objective procedure is a bound system of rules--bound, that is, by human intention. In other words, we have two very different uses of the adjective "objective" here.
I am not proposing that we modify "coverage" with "objective." Instead, I want to suggest that modifying "coverage" with any adjective (with the possible exception of simple evaluation: "good" or "bad") automatically removes it from one of journalism's greatest achievements: the modern objective processes of reporting and editing.
Coverage should never be easy, timid, hard, cynical, ideological, liberal, or conservative. It should be good, i.e. conform to a set of professional standards that reflect the values of a free press that sees itself as integral to the healthy life of a democratic republic.
Information Utility and the Internet
Section 3, Today's Changing Newsroom.
One could make an excellent argument for this proposition: The biggest change in journalism in the past ten years has been the use of the internet as a news outlet and research tool.
Is this a good thing? I can hear Neal Postman reminding us all to question very closely what problem it is that a new technology solves (plus: who wins? who loses? what changes?). And he'd remind us that once introduced it can't be taken back.
Because I consider the internet to be primarily a text-based medium (i.e. you have to read it), I'm inclined to suppose it is on balance a positive addition to our culture and the practice of journalism. But let's not suppose everyone wins. To use the internet requires enough income to afford the equipment and an ISP. It requires a certain amount of time and technical skill. That public sphere created by this technology is still rather small. How many people on your block have internet access at home? How many know what a blog is?
From the survey results:
Another widely noted positive impact of the Internet is its ability to deliver information to the public more quickly and to promote greater competition among news organizations. This view is much more prevalent among print journalists than among those working in TV and radio. A frequent comment within this theme is that print journalism now has the ability to compete with television and radio for breaking news. Also, the speed of the Internet in delivering information was the single most cited benefit among journalists who work primarily on their organization's websites.
I believe competition in print journalism is a good thing. The loss of 2-paper towns in America is, to my way of thinking, a civic catastrophe. Whether the internet can provide a similar dynamism remains to be seen. I am disturbed, however, that journalists see the internet as a way to compete with television. Print journalists should not allow their eyes to be sparkled by any medium that promises the impossible. I believe the more print tries to compete with television the more it loses. The road to salvation is good local journalism and strong second-day coverage of important national events. I believe the era of print as a medium of consistent breaking news has long passed.
More from the results:
Those who think the Internet has been bad for journalism most often cite the fact that it promotes the spread of unvetted and unfiltered information to the public; nearly half (53% national, 45% local) cite this concern. Others express a related concern about the speed and pressure of the Internet leading to too many factual errors in news coverage (17% national, 29% local).
Another concern raised by some is that the Internet has promoted the rise of pseudo-journalism, "junk" sites, and low-brow news. One negative consequence cited by several respondents is that "news" reported on these sites force mainstream journalists to waste time chasing down baseless rumors and innuendo. In a similar vein, a smaller group refers specifically to the Internet having damaged the credibility of journalism in the mind of the public.
Surely only consumers may judge the political or social utility of information for themselves. Journalism works on an editorial ethos necessary to the smooth operation of a limited system of information delivery. And, just as surely, journalists develop an expertise in judging the newsworthiness of events based on the structural biases of the profession. But journalists should never suppose that they are keepers of a deeper understanding civic information, knowledge, or wisdom. The political and social utility of "junk" or "unvetted and unfiltered information" has nothing to do with the professional journalist's opinion of it. Journalists should be learning from the internet that information, knowledge, and wisdom are being freed from editorial control, and many citizens--news consumers--see this as a good thing.
The Big Difference
Section 4, Values and the Press.
Earning a college degree places one in an elite class in America. While the bachelors degree may seem ubiquitous today, the percentage of Americans with a college degree hovers around 25 percent. At least since Watergate, the institution of American journalism has all but required a college degree of its practitioners. This means that journalists are different from average Americans.
I don't think there's compelling evidence to suggest that earning a college degree makes one more liberal or more conservative. But I do believe (without evidence) that four years of exposure to critical thinking of the academic sort invasively changes, if only in small and subtle ways, the thinking patterns of most students.
Journalism students (those getting a good education) get a grounding in the liberal arts followed by intensive study of professional practice. Even if the art and science of asking questions is not specifically taught, journalism students come to some understanding of how to ask questions and what to ask about.
Learning to ask critical questions is, as Neil Postman claimed, "dangerous." What he meant by this is that teaching students how to ask questions--and that asking questions is good--leads directly to their "questioning of constituted authority." This is exactly what we teach journalism students to do. And it's any authority they learn to question, including government and religion.
Education is a conservative enterprise in the sense that it attempts to reproduce the status quo. But it is also a decidedly liberal enterprise in the sense that, when practiced well, it teaches students to question authority. And this may be the biggest difference indicated by the education statistic cited above.
That many journalists consider themselves politically liberal or moderate (whatever those terms mean) is nearly meaningless to understanding journalistic behavior or the social and political values of individual journalists. I think the educational difference between reporters--nearly all with college degrees--and average Americans--only one in four with a college degree--says much about any differences in social values that exist. Further, with education comes socio-economic differences. Reporters make decent salaries. And the higher they move up the ladder of influence, the greater those salaries grow.
Do not suppose that I am making a smarter-than argument here. Education does a lot of things to students, but making them smarter isn't necessarily one of them. I'd say it's far more certain that a college degree makes graduates think they're smarter, and this leads to certain attitudes and values. The economic success that often follows education adds to this illusion. And I have seen this again and again in my former career as a journalist and subsequently as a critic of journalism: Journalists are prone to seeing themselves as smarter than the public--an attitude I find completely unjustified.
So, it is not surprising to me that, for example, such a high percentage of journalists think it is unnecessary to "believe in God" to be moral. By virtue of their college educations, they have been exposed to (or should have been) philosophy, anthropology, and biology. They have (or should have) learned to be skeptical. This is not to say that education drives out God. Instead, I think it expands one's view of the divinely possible and allows one to resist dogma without guilt--that questioning I mentioned.
That's just one example (perhaps the most incendiary). But you may see the same questioning and skepticism at work in the attitudes of journalists toward any given authority. And this skepticism--what Postman called "the principal mind-set associated with the Enlightenment"--is a classically liberal attitude.
One Thing Leads to Another
Conclusion: Commentary by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell.
I want to end this blog essay with some observations following from the commentary section of the Pew survey. I have no grand conclusions to offer regarding the survey because I simply don't have enough data. Further, I'm not sure grand conclusions are even possible considering the complexity of the journalistic enterprise.
First, let's consider this:
Five years ago, people in the news business shared two overriding concerns. As we said back then, "They believe that the news media have blurred the lines between news and entertainment and that the culture of argument is overwhelming the culture of reporting. Concerns about punditry overwhelming reporting, for instance, have swelled dramatically in only four years."
Today, the concerns are more varied and less easy to categorize. The worries about punditry are still there but they have diminished both nationally and especially locally.
A bigger issue now is a sense of shallowness. Roughly eight-in-ten in the news business feel the news media pay "too little attention to complex issues," up from five years ago to levels seen in the mid-1990s, at the peak of the fascination with tabloid crime stories like O.J. and JonBenet Ramsey.
I think the concerns of today are related to the concerns of five years ago. The culture of argument (I don't like that choice of words) is puddle deep. Entertainment as news has always been as thin as rice paper, but, then, it's supposed to be--although I've certainly worn out enough keyboard plastic complaining about it.
Punditry (which is what I take the "culture of argument" to indicate) and news as entertainment lead to shallowness. So the concerns of five years ago were well justified, I think. As is the concern today for the resulting shallowness. At the release of the next survey will journalists be complaining about problems that (obviously?) follow shallowness? Hmmmm...
What can be done about it? Let's blame readers!
Ultimately journalism is predicated on faith in the public. Here, journalists' views have become dramatically more pessimistic.
The percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999. Confidence among local journalists has fallen as well.
What is going on? Does this suggest that as news people get closer to their audiences they conclude people are less wise than they once believed? Is it possible that market research data is persuading journalists today that they understand their audiences better and also that those audiences are dumber than they thought?
Or, is the loss of confidence in the public more tied to journalists' views about the content of news? They see news doing a poorer job of covering complex issues and conclude that this will leave Americans unprepared for making good decisions.
It is also possible that journalists are leaping to another conclusion: They see the content of the news becoming shallower and conclude that this must be what the public wants or why else would their organizations be providing it?
And the authors posit one more possibility which will act as a lightening rod for the simplistic thinking of the typical bias critic:
There is also a fourth possibility: liberal journalists unhappy with President George W. Bush's policies could be dismayed that the public chose Bush in 2000 and until recently have largely approved of his performance.
Until recently it has appeared that the press has approved of Bush's policies, too. For example: all the recent bellyaching about not being more skeptical in the build up to the war in Iraq. But never mind.
The commentary also spends a lot of ink on the economic woes of the profession. Journalists live with very real economic constraints that hurt news coverage. Far too many news organizations are owned by companies that demand a profit margin that would make a robber baron blush. It's difficult to practice good journalism under such conditions.
But good journalism can still be practiced because, ultimately, what it takes is fidelity to the best practices of the profession. One can, among other things, take readers seriously, be custodian of the facts, follow the objective process of reporting, seek fairness and understanding, and edit with sensitivity and skepticism without spending very much money.