So, this one is a day late, but better late than never. (And no, the irony that I missed a deadline on a post about journalism is not lost on me!)
I studied journalism in college. I thought I was going to be a globe-hopping reporter until I realized I hated talking to people. Then I found out that I could get paid to read what those globe-hoppers wrote and clean up their typos and sentence fragments. It was as close to a dream job as I could imagine—instead of paying for a newspaper subscription, I would get paid to do something I was already doing anyway.
I worked for six newspapers in six years, five in California, one in Florida. Then I moved to Virginia and worked very briefly for a niche magazine focused on HBCUs, and then I moved over to work at a company that covered Congress via a weekly magazine, daily newspaper, and eventually 24-7 website. The industry changed a lot behind the scenes while I was paying attention, and I could see it wasn’t going anywhere good, so I bailed. It has changed a lot more since then, and it gives me no pleasure to say that I am not surprised with how things have deteriorated.
However, my view of what has changed is probably not what you consider bad journalism. People go on and on these days about how they miss “unbiased news.” I am here to tell you that your news was never completely unbiased. Choices are made all the time, and it is literally impossible to make that many choices without introducing some kind of bias. What news story will you deploy your team to cover (and what story will you ignore in the trade-off)? Who will reporters talk to (and who will go unnoticed)? What will the headline writer focus on? What kind of language gets used to impart the information?
People talk about how Fox and CNN are awful because they are biased garbage. But here’s the thing: You know where you stand with them. Newspapers aren’t the heavy hitters they used to be, but they’re not blameless in these shifts. Anyone who thinks that “Democracy dies in darkness” isn’t expressing a bias is kidding themselves. I haven’t been in a newsroom in decades, but I would be very surprised to find that the average metro newsroom now has a majority staff—or even a 50% staff—of MAGA supporters, or Mormons, or anti-abortion activists.
Plus, all this bias business is not without precedent. Back in the 1800s, virtually all newspapers had a slant. There was also generally more than one rag per town, so—sort of like Fox and CNN now—news consumers could pick their poison. I don’t think it gets more honest than that.
The problem with news today, as far as I can see it, is a decline in intellectual curiosity and suspicion. A reporter asks a mayor, “What is the plan for gentrification?” The mayor answers, ”Gentrification is terrible, we do not want to displace anyone.” The reporter relays what the mayor says to the news-consuming public. That’s all well and good up to a point, but it seems like these days that point is the end point, and it shouldn’t be. It’s rare that anyone bothers to ask a follow-up question “OK, so what is the plan for dealing with the cruddy neighborhood that’s there now, and what about the resulting lousy economy?” I don’t see a lot of coverage along the lines of “we talked to the people who own those buildings, and here’s why they aren’t cleaning up the slum.” Some reporters might go talk to the folks who want to gentrify, and that might yield one “we are very disappointed” quote in the story that might or might not make it to the public eye. Some reporters will almost certainly talk the folks at risk of being displaced, and that story is far more likely to reach news consumers. But there is next to no squinty-eyed questioning of “who’s benefitting from this? Who has the power? What is the real story behind why this is happening or not happening?”
There are a lot of places to throw blame for this. I am not sure if journalism schools still teach critical thinking, but the college kids I encounter make me think these schools—all schools, really—might need to throw some extra effort that direction. But even if kids do come out of school able to sniff out a full story, shrinking reporting staffs can’t cover as much news. Shrinking editorial staff can’t review coverage with a critical eye. There’s always pressure to cover what “experts” think consumers “want” (and—she said cynically—there’s probably more pressure now to use language that consumers want used; for example, “spending cuts” rather than “smaller increases in spending than was originally requested”). The current news cycle doesn’t really allow for reflection or follow-up. A story goes out, it hits social media, and then the story becomes the story and the folks reposting get spun up and shouty and those people get other people spun up and shouty without actually doing any research.
I don’t know how we get away from that. The easy answer is that the news consuming public should demand better information, but the hard part is that most of them aren’t willing to pay what it would cost to provide. Once upon a time, paid and classified ads generated most of the revenue to provide this service in print and online, but online marketplaces wiped that out to a large degree. Subscription fees help, but it’s not much. When someone finds a way to make a ton of money from investigative journalism, it will come back. Until then, I guess the answer is for the news-consuming public to be a little more dubious. Pick your battles, do your research. Read the source texts for legislation and court rulings; find out what the bureaucratese means in English. Maybe make sure you know what you’re shouting about before you add to the noise.
I imagine a lot of my J friends (and ex-J friends … and probably J ex-friends, but I assume they aren’t reading this), have a lot of thoughts and feelings on this, so what do you guys say? Do things need fixing? How do we fix them?
Arwen Adams Bicknell 