People will be parsing this election for years to come. Here’s one thing I know: Journalism failed us badly. Since we are going to need good journalism more than ever in the days ahead, I offer some thoughts about what went wrong:
I included this chart from the New York Times in my March 28 blogpost: A tough test for Journalism and the Midterm Grades Aren’t Good.
As the Times story said, “Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in.”
Of this development, CBS Chairman Les Moonves famously said: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Here’s what else he said: “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
He did. So did they.
Continue reading Journalism failed us badly. Here’s how.
A Harvard study by Tom Patterson, released in late September, looked at 10 major news outlets, including the New York Times. It concluded that “substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention so far in the 2016 election coverage.”
Another study, released in late October, looked at the networks’ news coverage to determine how much of it concerned issues:
Total ABC CBS NBC
1988 117 36 40 42
1992 210 112 38 60
1996 98 29 53 17
2000 130 45 39 46
2004 203 40 119 44
2008 220 41 119 66
2012 114 13 70 32
2016 (YTD) 32 8 16 8
(Andrew Tyndall 10/25/16)
“With just two weeks to go, issues coverage this year has been virtually non-existent. Of the 32 minutes total, terrorism (17 mins) and foreign policy (7 mins) towards the Middle East (Israel-ISIS-Syria-Iraq) have attracted some attention. Gay rights, immigration and policing have been mentioned in passing.
“No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.”
The Times’s Nate Cohn may have no regrets, as per this tweet:
Nate Cohn @Nate_Cohn Nov 10 Most of our journalism this year was about how people were ignoring the importance of white working class to Dem chances. I have no regrets
But something surely went wrong, since virtually everyone else in the world was in shock, no matter where they stood politically.
As Nick Bilton put it: “Every big-data, number-crunching Web site, from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times’ Upshot; every poll, from Fox to Bloomberg to Rasmussen, had predictions that were so off that it now seems surreal. And while we now all have to swallow the noxious potion that is President Trump, the chaser is that polling is completely and utterly broken.”
4. False equivalence. And more false equivalence. And more…
As in: They’re both unpopular. They both tell lies — no matter how vastly different the proportions:
Ethan Coen’s sarcasm in his “thank you notes” in the Times rang painfully close to how the stories read:
“You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more.”
The Times’s columnists tried to tell ‘em so:
“I know some (many) journalists are busy denying responsibility, but this is absurd, and I think they know it,” said Paul Krugman in “The Falsity of False Equivalence.”
And Nick Kristof: “Of course we should cover Clinton’s sins, but when the public believes that a mythomaniac like Trump is the straight shooter, we owe it to ourselves and the country to wrestle with knotty questions of false equivalence.”
The primary response came from the then fairly new public editor, Liz Spayd, in an exceptionally weak column, urging Times journalists not to be intimidated by the false balance charge.
They weren’t.
Does this kind of flawed journalism happen because a news organization wants to avoid driving away the right? Did it make for more interesting stories? Did it seem harmless, because Clinton was sure to win?
The New York Times — this newspaper on which I depend (as is evident in this post), and which leads much of the other news coverage in America — is deeply implicated here. It is perhaps the most important news outlet in the country, one of the most important in the world, and it must be better than this. A statement from its publisher and executive editor, after the election said this:
“As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”
Rededication? Yes. “Same level?” Please, no.
Organizations like Google and Facebook make decisions that have enormous power over what Americans know and believe. Outrage over the fake stories that proliferated during this campaign is finally being recognized by these reluctant corporations.
It’s a step, albeit a belated and limited one. And one reason it’s belated and limited is this, as one employee told Gizmodo about Facebook: “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.” (Some things, new and old media share.)
After every election, we agonize about journalism’s coverage. But this one feels bigger, the stakes higher. Legacy media still matter. The choices they make will affect our future, just as they affected this election. They are searching for economic survival in a Wild West of media change. My conviction is that, if they distinguish themselves by being trustworthy and fair-minded, dedicated to the truth as close as they can determine it, committed to purveying news that is proportional and comprehensive — well, that will be their best chance of survival.
Ours, too.
Last week, I was part of a national conference https://sustainlocal2016.sched.org/ on journalism sustainability convened by Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media. Our panel was asked to begin with an overview of the state of local-news sustainability.
Having no particular expertise regarding the mix of revenue streams everyone is testing these days, I decided to focus on what I think lies at the heart of the question: the public. Whatever happens with advertising and subscriptions, events, membership or repurposing of content, I’m convinced that a key to survival will be a public willingness to support journalism. We must come to see information in the public interest as we do the arts or education – as a civic good, one we are responsible for sustaining.
This is no small challenge, since we’ve trained the public for years to believe that the news comes to them for free — or really cheap. You turned on the TV, or you plunked down your quarter for the paper, and you never really thought about the fact that advertisers were paying the bill. This means that we are going to have to make our work so important, so engaging, that people will feel they can’t do without it.
In other words, we’ve got to make our journalism indispensable. Here are a few thoughts I shared with the journalists at the conference about how to go about it:
— Be IN and OF your community. When I started as a cub reporter at the Colorado Springs SUN, the editor and publisher wrote a column published on the front page. As a newly minted Medill master’s graduate, I found this unorthodox custom disquieting. But it surely worked for the readers, who sensed the editor’s engagement with the community. Later, when I became editor of the Des Moines Register, we kept alive the paper’s historic tradition of running our cartoon on the front page. Register cartoonists had won two Pulitzers over the years; more important, they’d won the hearts of Iowans. In particular, the Sunday cartoons, poking fun at the state and its residents, made it clear that we were all in this together.
Continue reading Making Journalism Indispensable
— We need to be honest about who we are and what we’re attempting to do. The hardest voice I ever had to write in was the editorial voice of The New York Times, when I served on its editorial board. People don’t respond easily to disembodied voices. Amid today’s endless debates about objectivity, I’m struck by the power of the view espoused by the Dutch news organization De Correspondent. They believe that their journalists should be, first and foremost, AUTHENTIC — a quality that is essential if they are to cultivate the rich relationship with readers that the organization seeks.
— Keep in mind that HOPE may be bigger news today than disaster. In this era of cynicism and division, we need a journalism that helps people understand that solutions are possible and government can work. Journalism is supposed to provide an accurate picture of the world around us, but ours has looked pretty lopsided for years. This is not about softball questions or happy-talk stories: Good journalism creates community through a common understanding of accurate information – the good as well as the bad.
— We must remember that we are most effective when we reach people through their hearts as well as their brains. We’ve always known that good writing and powerful photography were key to our success. We have so many more tools today for engaging people and making lasting connections. Elizabeth Alexander closed her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by asking “…and are we not of interest to each other?” In recent years, journalism has done as much to distance us from one another as it has to connect us. Our future now may rest on our ability to correct that course.
By Geneva Overholser / 2016 August 3rd
“Want to attract more readers? Try listening to them.” That’s the headline on Liz Spayd’s debut as the New York Times’ new public editor. That she devoted her first column to the need to pay attention to readers’ views shows how central the idea of engagement has become for journalists.
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Please see article as published by the Democracy Fund.
The New York Times’s new public editor worried recently that the paper is perceived as liberal; she advised trying to address that problem. Like NPR’s bid to shed the “liberal-media” epithet by shedding Vivian Schiller, like Walter Isaacson’s attempts to cleanse CNN of it by paying a visit to Trent Lott, this is doomed to fail. Thanks in no small part to Roger Ailes.
Ailes, when he set out to create a cable network with a point of view, was clearly filling a market need. But his real brilliance lay in the motto he chose: “Fair and balanced.” The outlet designed to serve conservatives was inoculated at birth from charges of bias by claiming that it alone was free of that taint.
A few years into Fox News’s existence — on the occasion of an award being given to Fox’s leading newsman, Brit Hume — I suggested a public discussion about the merits of this new (for the U.S.) kind of journalism, The Washington media were so dog-whipped by the “liberal-media” lashings that nobody wanted to own up to noticing that Fox was conservative. But the reticence protected no one. The “liberal-media” accusations have only grown, as the public editor’s column reminds us.
Continue reading It’s not just the Fox, it’s the sheep’s clothing
Ailes himself must have been amazed at his success: Not that having a point of view would appeal; not that having that POV be conservative, to serve Americans who felt they didn’t see themselves in media. What distinguished it all was the masquerade of being something other than what it was, until it didn’t need to masquerade any more, and a new kind of journalism was firmly entrenched – including the spawning of other POV media such as MSNBC.
Fox New still does it best, as this research shows: “Fully, 60% of Fox News viewers describe themselves as conservative, compared with 23% who say they are moderate and 10% who are liberal, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center. By contrast, the ideological makeup of CNN viewers (32% conservative, 30% moderate, 30% liberal) and MSNBC viewers (32% conservative, 23% moderate, 36% liberal) is far more mixed.”
Unsurprisingly, the skill with which Ailes’s inventive cable channel carried out its work (helped along by its self-proclaimed uniqueness as an exemplar of fairness) has had an impact on the nation’s political environment. And it has had another impact too, the one I find most worrisome: Its allegiance to point of view seems to trump its allegiance to facts. According to Politifact, about 60 percent of the Fox claims checked in their study were rated Mostly False or worse. (By comparison, 80 percent of the claims made by CNN were rated Half True or better.) Or see this research on how Fox News viewers do worse on factual questions than those who watch no news at all
Perhaps this is why Megyn Kelly became a hero, during her coverage of presidential election results in 2012, simply by questioning a fiction being clung to by Karl Rove. When a reporter is deemed courageous for pursuing a fact over the view of a favored ideologue, it says something about the network’s normal regard for facts.
Meanwhile, over the years, mistrust in media more broadly has grown ever higher. Interestingly, this plays out differently across the political spectrum.
Obviously, your (and my) own point of view determines what we think about the impact of Ailes’s achievement on politics and on media. But if you think, as I do, that our future relies on a significant number of Americans’ believing that they want the closest thing they can get to the truth, this is clear: From the moment Ailes’s new creation sailed forth under that cunning motto, he has been leading us ever farther away from that target.
The 2016 presidential campaign is handing journalism an extraordinary challenge: How to deal with so many remarkable developments — a mold-breaking Republican front-runner, a former first lady in the lead for the Democrats, an extremely volatile electorate — all at a time of disruption for news organizations.
Given the importance of this election, trying to figure out what is happening in time for some mid-course correction feels critical. Toward that goal, here are a few thoughts about some of the factors at play:
1. All Trump, much of the time.
The catnip of Donald Trump’s candidacy has been irresistible to the media, resulting in coverage that is unprecedentedly cockeyed. As a recent New York Times article put it, “Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in.”
This chart, from the Times article, shows how utterly out-of-whack Trump’s “free-media” coverage has been:
This constant coverage – even of the outrages (maybe especially of the outrages, in Trump’s case) — has undeniably served to elevate him above all others.
Continue reading Election 2016: A tough test for journalism, and the midterm grades aren’t good
2. Normalizing the out-of-the-ordinary
The question of how to cover a candidate as unusual as Donald Trump is a tough one — particularly considering how unusual several of this election’s other candidates are. Ted Cruz must be the first senator to run for the presidency while being universally reviled by his colleagues (even as a few have begun endorsing him). Then there is Bernie Sanders, who would be not only the first Jewish president, as well as its oldest, but a self-described “democratic socialist” as well. Then there is the former first lady, senator and secretary of state, prospectively the nation’s first woman president, with a lot of complicated baggage herself. But, however complex the coverage question, the answer is not to “normalize” Trump with the kind of false equivalencies richly illustrated in a recent story by Michael Barbaro in the New York Times. Here’s one quote from the article:
“Even those who vote for Mrs. Clinton harbor reservations. Renee White, 31, a Democrat in Youngstown, Ohio, is not entirely convinced that Mrs. Clinton, her choice in Tuesday’s primary, cares about people like her, she said. ‘A lot of people,’ she said, ‘just don’t trust her at all.’
“The views of Mr. Trump from Republicans are almost equally uncharitable and unwavering [my emphasis].”
Trump is sui generis — a candidate whose party is desperately trying to halt his momentum. Coverage that treats him as if nothing unusual is going on is misguided. Or, as Paul Krugman tweeted about this piece, “Can media really claim that Clinton, who has very strong favorability among Democrats, and Trump are similarly ‘divisive’? Yes they can.”
3. Back at the horse race
The longest running critique of political coverage may be that far too much of it is about the horse race – who’s ahead, who’s behind — with little that is substantially informative. Some observers have hoped that emerging media, with their new tools and reach, would help correct this. And indeed, some of the strongest coverage on the political scene these days is coming from sources that didn’t exist a couple of elections ago, such as Politico, The Upshot and 538. But if anything, these sources –with their dedication to mining data — are placing an even greater emphasis on the horse race. New media like Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox and Fusion have done some good issues reporting. Yet all in all, the focus on numbers rather than on context, explanatory reporting, investigation or enterprise seems only to have increased.
This may feel justifiable because, as one New York Times editor put it, this is a
“horse race for the ages.” This same New York Times editor predicted that attention would turn more toward substance as the candidate field is narrowed. But that is lamentably late.
4. Social media’s moment-by-moment claim on news attention
With so many of us getting our news through social media (second only to cable television), the hope for a deeper look, a continuous story, a helpful context, is overwhelmed by our fragmented, in-the-moment notion of what’s going on. When it comes to going viral, the latest outrage will beat the latest issue story any time. And the legacy news organizations, which have traditionally provided the in-depth stories, are themselves compelled to be in the social-media mix – placing additional demands on fast-depleting newsrooms.
5. Legacy media fighting for survival
Those newsrooms are not only losing staff; many are facing fundamental doubts about their very survival. With economic health no longer assured by the advertising that once guaranteed editorial independence, a journalism enterprise now is obliged to pay attention to the choices that consumers are making. Newspapers used to do in-depth profiles, lengthy investigations of candidates’ past positions or deep dives into the issues facing the nation without thinking about how many people would read them. Now they know exactly how big an audience there is for any particular piece of content – and they no longer have the luxury to ignore that knowledge.
6. So long, Walter Cronkite
On some previous occasions when the nation seemed to be moving in a particularly perilous direction, authoritative media figures have stepped forward and changed the national conversation. Consider Walter Cronkite’s
remarkable Vietnam commentary in 1968. Or the 1954 Edward R. Murrow exposure of Joseph McCarthy.
NBC’s Tom Brokaw may have had such examples in mind in his moving December 2015 response to Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims. But there are no figures in today’s media world with the kind of standing or reach to enable them to affect the nation’s mood that Cronkite and Murrow had.
7. Objectivity: a shifting standard
For good and for ill, the time-honored notion of objectivity is being questioned – and variously interpreted — today. A public preference for “voice” in media, the rise of news organizations with a clear viewpoint (Fox, MSNBC) and the fractionalization of the audience – all of these mean that media are finding their way on new ethical terrain. And they are doing so in a time when many in the public are clearer than ever about what they want: news that affirms their views, not news that brings new information and different viewpoints.
There is no question that these and other issues affecting the election are complicated and most of them deeply rooted. And there’s no denying that many news organizations are fighting for survival. Still, there are some things that journalists can do. And, with the nation’s future in the balance, they ought to do them now. Enough with the free media for Trump; let serious news judgment determine the coverage. Cut the normalization of what is truly out-of-the-ordinary; false equivalency misinforms voters. And, as for all that horse-race coverage, the field is wide open for the kind of desperately needed journalism that would truly inform public understanding.
As part of the University at Buffalo’s International Education Week, I gave a keynote address about what’s happening in the media world today — what we’re losing, what we’re gaining, and what the students ought to do about it. I urged the students to “seize the opportunity to make contributions. And take responsibility for the contributions you make.”
Here is the text:
University at Buffalo, International Education week, November 2015
“The Media Revolution: What It Means for You”
It’s a pleasure for me to be here as part of International Education Week. And I’m especially delighted that you have made media your focus. Nothing could be more essential to an understanding of this fast-globalizing world than media.
You know, we say that we are what we eat. More generally, we are what we consume. And that surely goes for media. Our media diet, like our food diet, shapes us every day – for good and for ill. If we select wisely, we nourish ourselves and contribute to good health. If we choose junk, we pay for it. Moreover, our society pays for it. Just as the nation’s health and economy are affected when people eat poorly, our democracy is undermined when people fail to nourish their understanding of the world around them. A government of the people, by the people and for the people is only as good as the thinking and participation OF the people. A democracy of know-nothings will get what it deserves: poor public policy, an inability to progress, a loss of international standing. You, individually, are part of the recipe for good health – for yourself, and for the society of which you are a part.
Continue reading The Media Revolution: What It Means for You
I want to say right up front that it used to be much easier to have a balanced media diet. You turned on the evening news. You picked up the newspaper. Other people did the collecting and the selecting for you. With minimal effort, you could keep up with what was happening in your community, your state, your nation, around the world. You could go to the polls with an understanding of what your candidate stood for.
We no longer have that top-down media model, and educating yourself has become harder. The opportunity exists to be BETTER informed than ever before, but more of the burden is on you – on each of us. Because we are putting together our own media diet, making it up for ourselves out of countless numbers of sources – a cacophony of information that runs the gamut from useless to reliable, from base to inspiriting. That’s why I’m here to talk to you this afternoon about the fast-changing world of media – what’s disappearing, what is being born, what that means to our society, and what you should do about it.
Let us begin by noting that we are in the middle of a great revolution in information. Many have said that it is comparable to the Gutenberg Revolution – when the invention of the printing press made it possible, for the first time, for information to come directly into the hands of the multitudes. For the past 500 years, that has remained true – but for most of that time, the information was expensive to assemble and produce, and therefore remained in the hands of institutions – book publishers, media organizations, governments. Thus it was that the great press critic A. J. Liebling said that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” But now, thanks to new technology, EVERYBODY owns a press. And now, thanks to social media, each of us has a limitless, unmediated space for communicating with one another.
This is exciting stuff, indeed. But before we dwell on its many benefits, we should think briefly about what we are losing. The institutions overturned by that revolution – the powerful daily newspaper, the near-monopoly enjoyed by your local television newscast: These organizations brought people together in a common body of knowledge. These institutions gave us three square meals of information without our having to put them together.
You know how people speak of a free press as the cornerstone of democracy? Well, that free press as we know it in the United States has seen its economic foundations broken into smithereens. Because of the fractionalization of people’s attention, the advertising model that paid for journalism no longer does so, and the results are dramatic. Let’s look specifically at newspapers, which used to get 80 to 85 percent of their revenues from advertising, but have been seeing drastic declines for years. According to the American Society of News Editors, there has been an almost 40 percent drop in newsroom employment at daily newspapers in this country over the last decade — from 54,100 to 32,900 today. That is a lot of reporters, editors and photographers, gone. That’s a lot of eyeballs no longer focused on your city hall or your local police force. That’s a lot of prisons, nursing homes and regulatory agencies no longer being investigated.
This dramatic downsizing of traditional newsrooms, we should note, does NOT mean the disappearance of newspapers. Indeed, more people are consuming what those shrinking newsrooms produce than ever before. But many are reading online, or on mobile devices, and that is not bringing in anywhere near the revenue the print newspaper long produced.
Meanwhile, digital ad revenue is growing – though nowhere near as fast as people once hoped it would. And the traditional news media are not getting much of that revenue. According to Pew research, in 2014, “five technology companies took in half of all display ad revenue, with Facebook alone accounting for 24 percent.”
As legacy media struggle to keep up with the revolution’s effects on their economic underpinnings, they are beginning (belatedly) to make changes in the way they relate to their readers and viewers and listeners – or, what has come to be known as “the people formerly known as the audience.” They are beginning to recognize the importance of community engagement, to collaborate with other organizations in ways that once were unheard of, to use social-media tools, to work with data, and to be interactive.
Network news viewership has actually been climbing slightly but steadily in recent years (although cable is struggling with substantial declines). Online radio listening is booming, with podcasts leading the way. It’s taken a long time, but legacy media are at last finding their way into a new world. We should, in my view, hope that they will continue to play a key role, for they remain essential – particularly in arenas such as local and state government coverage, watchdog and investigative reporting.
Now let’s look for a minute at what we have gained – or appear to be gaining – from this revolution.
The key development is that news is no longer a top-down stream from one organization to the multitudes. It’s now a multi-point system in which each individual – that includes you and me – plays important roles as both consumer and contributor.
There are, of course, still some principal actors, many of them fairly new. While legacy media revenues are drying up, cash is pouring into digital media companies like Vice, Buzzfeed, Vox and Gawker, which are also seeing enormous growth in their traffic. Some such sites may have begun with an emphasis on cat photos or “listicles” – articles made up primarily of lists, which are eye candy for most folks. But, happily, we are seeing a number of these sites move toward substantial news, including, in many cases, reporting abroad. These developments seem promising for national and international information in the public interest.
A bigger challenge is local reporting. Digital-native local-news sites have struggled with revenue-generation. Few have been able to figure it out. Many have given up; others plow on, with little profit in sight.
State reporting, too, has posed a challenge, though there is happy recent news in Politico’s opening of bureaus in the state capitals of New Jersey and Florida – with a reported “dream” of doing the same in every state.
In addition to the more familiar reporting models, there are new ways of reaching the public with important information. For example, consider the fact that it was on Medium — a “platisher,” meaning both platform and publisher – that the White House posted this year’s State of the Union speech before giving it to the press.
There are also many interesting new things happening in the arena called “civic tech,” which emphasizes tools that foster government transparency and civic engagement. There are tools that enable you to find out much more easily than before what’s going on in your local city council or state legislature. You can research crimes in your neighborhood, or report potholes to your local council member. You can track the progress of a bill in Congress or check the vote of your state representative. You can fact check a candidates’ debate and figure out who has donated what to a politician.
An organization called Code for America is seeking to make government documents more understandable. A tool called NextRequest helps streamline the public records request process. Some government agencies (though not enough, and not quickly enough) are beginning to present their own information more effectively to citizens, making government processes more open, and government data more easily understood and useful.
An especially significant development, of course, is that we – the people formerly known as the audience – are now also creators of content. We are all mobile and global, producing videos, sharing photos and links, vibrantly interacting with one another.
All of these changes mean that, when news breaks, what happens next is very different. Little more than a decade ago, we would have had to tune in at just the right time to see coverage on television, or wait until the next morning’s newspaper to read about the event in-depth.
Today, virtually instantaneous reports of the event are on Twitter and Facebook and other social media, enabling us to see video and hear audio. Live streaming gives us official reactions. People around the world take to social media to see what their friends have to say, and to express their own views.
But along with all this opportunity for good, this Wild West media world has created opportunities, also, for ill. There are fabrications and false reports. There is cyber bullying. There is appallingly prevalent hate speech on some social media platforms. And, sadly, the promise of democratization that the birth of the Web seemed to offer has not come about. Instead, we seem to be replicating online the old-media dominance by the white, the male and the wealthy.
Before we talk about what all of us can do to extend the gifts of this revolution and to counter its ills, I want to broaden the lens for a moment.
Let us look, just briefly, at what is happening globally.
We citizens of the United States can be woefully inward-looking. We tend, far too often, to think that we’re the ones inventing everything, and that we’re the best at all of it. That is a view that is utterly inaccurate, and one that robs us of the opportunity to learn from others.
A few years ago, when I was working in the Washington bureau of the Missouri School of Journalism, I held an annual symposium at the National Press Club on a topic connected with public affairs journalism. One of the best was the year that I invited people from various countries around the world to share their experiences in arenas where they were considerably more advanced than we were.
One speaker came from Accra, Ghana, from a radio station called “Joy FM” – an extremely lively news organization that was playing a central role in Ghana’s vibrant civic life. As I mentioned earlier, radio has been booming lately in the United States, but that came more recently. And the interactive role that Joy played in radio in those days was eye-opening for our audience, because it was uncommon here at that time.
Radio continues to be the primary news source in Africa – accounting for over 70 percent of the delivery of news across the continent, according to an Afrobarometer survey this year. But what is interesting now is that mobile Internet adoption in Africa is taking place at almost double the average rate in the rest of the world – resulting in remarkable advances in education, health and politics. IBM’s 2014 global consumer survey confirms that the percentage of Internet users in the three African countries it surveyed were among the highest of all the nations it looked at. Quoting from the survey: “In South Africa and Nigeria, instant messaging has become the number one channel to communicate with each other; in Kenya social networking is the number one communication channel. In fact, Africans are probably leading the major shift to mobile Internet use, with social media as its main drivers. Mobile broadband penetration is still low, but has by far the highest growth rate worldwide.”
Interestingly, African news organizations are sending headlines out as text messages – a practice that African governments find hard to block, while blocking radio is easy.
Another speaker in my program came from Sweden, where something that is looked upon with aversion here, is embraced as good public policy: That is, public financial support for media. Smaller communities in isolated parts of Sweden are guaranteed continued high-quality sources of information even where it is not commercially viable – supported in part by a fee levied on television and radio sets. Sweden understands something that we do not seem to be able to see in this country – that public funding for media does NOT have to mean state CONTROL of media. Various forms of public support for media exist in many countries with a vibrant free press – including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. If they can all figure it out, why can’t we?
Back at the National Press Club, we also had a speaker from Canada. Every province in Canada requires media education in its curriculum, and they’ve done so for many years. Our speaker, an academic who has studied the matter, joked that one reason the requirement came into being was to protect Canadians against everything flowing across the border from its overbearing neighbor to the south! But the real point is that Canada had come to understand something that we very much need to understand, too – now more than ever, with the media world in revolution. And that is, that citizens need to be educated to consume and create media with discernment and understanding.
I want to talk bit more about media literacy, as we look at what you and I can do in this new media environment. But let me make two more quick points about the international scene.
We should note that there is, in many places around the world, a great deal of violence against journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 1,150 journalists have been killed since 1992 – 46 already so far this year. Another 221 journalists were imprisoned last year. Countries like North Korea, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia continue to be black holes of information, and in places like Syria and the Philippines, doing the work of journalism can be a living hell.
Finally, you might be surprised to find where our own nation ranks in a listing of nations around the world based on their degree of press freedom. The most recent Reporters Without Borders ranked us, out of 180 nations – are you ready for the ranking? Not one or two, not 10 or 20 – the U.S. came in at number 49 out of 180. This ranking is due to pressure on reporters to reveal sources, aggressive prosecution of journalists, legal attacks on leakers, and hacking and surveillance of journalists.
There is work to do here at home, as well as abroad, to ensure that professional journalists can continue to make the contributions that remain essential in this fast-changing world of media.
Okay, so: What should we be doing about all this?
As we have seen, the news used to come our way in a reliably regular (if more limited) fashion. We got the basics if we just picked up the paper or turned on the TV. We didn’t have to worry about how to select it; it was curated. We didn’t pay much for it, either; advertising did.
Now, a much bigger supply of information is available to us, and a much wider variety, as well. But the consumer’s job has grown harder and harder, as fewer and fewer people do pick up the paper or turn on the TV news. Those sources are still available, but they are being diminished because the advertising that used to pay for them no longer relies on being connected to content. Now we can get news in countless places, but it’s up to us to curate it. We can be more widely and more deeply informed than ever – or we can know only what people who think exactly like us know. And that can mean, very little indeed.
So here is the counsel I would offer:
Remember that, as your own curator, you will be as healthy as the nourishment you choose to consume. That means you must be discerning about it. Seek opportunities to understand media better. When you find information online, consider where it came from. Go to the “about” section and see who funded the site, and what its goals and intentions are. Consider, for example that opinion can surely be as valuable as news. But opinion masquerading as news is deception. Be clear about what you are looking at.
Some people seem to believe everything they read on the Web, and some – at the opposite end of the spectrum – seem convinced that they can’t believe anything. Neither, of course, is true. I was once at an event where the veteran newscaster Marvin Kalb looked in amazement at new-media guru Jeff Jarvis, asking Jeff, “Do you actually BELIEVE what you see on the Web?” “Marvin,” said Jeff, “that’s like saying, ‘do you BELIEVE what you hear on the telephone?’ It’s just a tool, said Jeff. It all depends on who is saying it.
But if the Web is just a tool, it is a very powerful one, and one we could all use help in figuring out. There are many sources of this kind of help, from media-literacy courses in universities and communities to simpler offerings such as On the Media’s “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook,” which you can find online. It has a handy little guide that it suggests you cut out and tape near your computer. Here’s a sampling of that guide:
“1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. 2. Don’t trust anonymous sources. “ Also, “Look for news outlets close to the incident.” ”Compare multiple sources.” “Big news brings out the fakers. And photoshoppers.” And, my favorite – “Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you.”
It is also on you to think about whether you’re allowing a wide range of views into your diet. Are you following only the news that friends are sending you? Is it cast entirely in terms that you agree with? Are you learning, and challenging yourself? It is VERY easy to be lulled into narrow notions of the world – and, even worse, to be taken in by urban myths, or seduced by conspiracy theories. If it sounds too remarkable to be true, it probably is. Check it out.
And remember this: You are rewarding responsible producers of news and information when you click on their stories: You click; they get paid.
Just as what you consume matters, so does what you contribute. What YOU say, or link to, or send photos or videos of, matters – again, for good and for ill. What you create is the face you present to the world. Think about it. You are building a record. You are also shaping the debate – informing, or degrading, the public dialogue.
Seize the opportunity to make contributions. And take responsibility for the contributions you MAKE.
In closing, I want to say that I personally am very enthusiastic about this new world that the revolution is giving us.
Sure, I’m worried about the future of professional journalism, because its continuation is an essential element of the information universe. But I am also aware that we have the opportunity now, because of all the tools we have been discussing, to IMPROVE on what legacy media have done.
Consider, for example, that three-fourths of African-American news consumers and two-thirds of Hispanics have doubts about the trustworthiness of media report about their communities, according to a survey released last year by the Media Insight Project.
That must change, and you can help see that it does. We must create safe spaces for new ideas to be heard, for unpopular opinions to be voiced. We must ensure that ALL of us – women, people of color, the poor – are able to shape public policy, and able to work together to bring about a more just society.
I love that you have, as part of this week’s activities, the Dear World project. Reading about it –– an interactive photo shoot that celebrates the diversity and energy of the campus and highlights the message that there is much more that brings us together than keeps us apart – this is inspiring. You’ll be sharing your stories, focusing on international students, celebrating the differences and commonalities among us. Celebrating creativity.
This kind of thinking, and the world of ideas of which you are a part at this university – all of this is providing you with a terrific foundation to be the citizen consumer and creator that YOU are becoming.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions and comments.
