Who are the Mass Media, and how do they think?

Considering the frequency with which the mass media is mentioned in class and in the texts, I thought I would write some notes about what makes members of the mass news media tick and where they perceive their successes and failures. This isn't a research work. It's only what my thoughts have been related to readings this quarter.

A problem of context

Each semester in my CU classes, when we have our sessions on digital imaging ethics, I ask around the room for the students to raise hands if they imagine images are altered frequently in the press. For the last ten years about three quarters of the hands go up. I can't say I blame them.

But then I ask them to think about how often in a given year they hear about a new case of laziness leading to an ethical gaffe in journalism. The answers come in at once or twice a year.

That's too much, don't get me wrong. And I tell them so. But then I ask them to think of how many photos are published in the typical paper, magazine or news site in a given day.

"Thirty… Forty… Fifty…" come in the answers.

"And how many newspapers and magazines are there in the U.S. alone?" I follow.

You get the point. Relative to the volume of journalism published, ethical lapses in the photography are a rather miniscule fraction of the total stuff published. My point to them is that it only takes one gaffe to dent public trust in what we do. The facts of the numbers are irrelevant. It's the result that matters.

The profession of journalism is certainly suffering of late, and those of us inside it will either argue that according to statistics we've never done better in serving the public, or that we should be put out of our misery.

The positivists (like me) argue we are more self-policing than ever before, we have the highest ethical standards journalism has ever seen, we have a broader reach, and we have a deeper connection to the stories we cover. But that's not relevant. If the public doesn't see it that way, it's wasted effort.

The negativists in the profession (probably the majority) understandably have an easier time focusing on the errors, the conflicts, the seeming irrelevance of it all.

Why so many negativists?

"Journalists are unemployable in any other field," a former boss once told me, "because they're too cynical, inquisitive and prone to seeing corruption to get a job anywhere else."

I think he was right, and from what I heard of this quarter's lecture by Mona Eltahawy, the visiting Middle East correspondent, it sounds like little has changed. I know that person well. They've long had desks right next to mine. And I think they ought to be kept in perspective by the comment from my former boss. We are an inquisitive, cranky lot who are as prone to complain relentlessly about the comfort of our desk chairs as we are to complain about the profession, politics and the state of the earth.

Why are we that way?

In regards to the news media at least, we all started out hoping to save the world. To be a journalist is to suffer a public esteem akin to an attorney, but without the income. We all admire the Watergate reports of the Washington Post that brought down a corrupt presidency, the wrangling with government secrecy regarding Viet Nam and two Gulf wars. The relentless pressure on the Bush administration to acknowledge and react to climate change, among others. We all started with those ideals and generally hold them to the end. This is true in print, broadcast and on the Web, and in the mainstream or alternative press.

Many journalists (myself included) wander through all those media. I've worked in the alternative press, radio and the Web as well as working for "The Old Gray Lady." To me they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

Somewhere along the way, though, most journalists slam into a wall of inability to see change as a result of their work. It takes a long-term view of political and social evolution to see what we do have a great effect. Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, and other sea-changers are very rare. And often the loudest attempts to upend wrongs just seem at first to go unnoticed by a jaded or disinterested public.

So many of us have our (perhaps narcissistic) egos left wanting for glory, and it is the failings of the institutions or profession that often get blamed. "How could it be my fault? I fought the battle, and nobody paid attention." Or "Geezus. Another school 'bored' meeting."

For these same reasons it is naive to assume that reporters are easily influenced by publishers, administrators, editors or even sources. I think there is much assumption that advertising and economic pressures have a direct effect on what gets covered and how.

To assume that, though, is to not know the reporters. I have yet to meet one who would play along with those sorts of pressure. At the most pliable even the weakest reporters I know would just smile, nod and go about their business.

I even ask Fox reporters about this when stuck waiting outside some courtroom or event for the subject to appear.

"How's life under Bill O'Reilly?" I've asked. "They have you spin your reporting?"

The answer is usually, "Geez. I'm as liberal as anyone, and on the job we're no more directed than the rest of you."

Of course that doesn't mean influence hasn't been peddled. It's like the photo alterations above — only a tiny fraction.

That's why it was premature to think that Rupert Murdoch would wield a strong influence over the Wall Street Journal. The reporters and editors there are too good at what they do to generally let the owner's politics get in the way. It's a more conservative paper than many, to be sure. But that's a result of the industry they cover and the interests of the people who seek to work there. And even then, they are usually the first mainstream whistle blower in the financial sector.

I have worked at one paper where the publisher and editor attempted to lean coverage one direction. "Take a positive point of view," he'd say. This tends more to happen at smaller publications because those interested parties are more involved in the process directly. But as above, not a one of the reporters or photographers willingly took part. We scuttled every attempt from the inside, and it never worked the way the hyper-conservative editor hoped.

And now looking back those 20 years, that man and the paper's owner were not forming a cynical plot. It was simply two men who had grown up in the little town pitted against a staff of transplants who didn't give a damn about the place one way or the other. The bosses were far from sinister. They were simply invested in the success of their economically devastated home.

Media as a plural

I come from the print world. As we say, I have printer's ink in my veins. I first sat at a newsroom desk pecking on a Smith-Corona at age five. And we print people are pretty judgmental of the broadcast media, and, yes, the Web.

All those seemingly air-headed, Dippity-Doed TV reporters also started out from the same place. They too, are smart and want(ed) to change the world. And radio reporters are generally just print people with nice voices. A journalist is a type, no matter the medium. None of them particularly like being edited, and that's why so many now love blogging.

But we print people often bristle at being lumped in with those TV types, or with others we might feel don't hold up the standards we try to keep. Indeed the readings have stung in places when "The Media" is used to describe behaviors in the broadcast or entertainment worlds. "Wait a minute!" I think to myself. "That's not us!"

But the media is the media to the average person, and like the case I started with, the semantics don't matter. It's the result that counts.

Much of the differences in operation depend on the link to entertainment. TV news suffers often from being a department within an entertainment company. The news shows must drive ratings the same way a sitcom does.

Over time that has eroded the quality of TV news to a very dire point, and we printies often blame the sad state of attention to our hard work as the fault of infotainment masked as news.

It has over the last 20 years leaked into the print newsroom too. As readership has slipped (for much longer than the existence of the Web), many publications held focus groups and made redesigns that shortened standard stories and introduced more celebrity and entertainment coverage to try to win readers back. The reporting staff of any paper would tell you that reducing the quality of the product certainly wasn't going to help that problem, and it hasn't.

TV and radio have both succumbed to similar pressures. TV news is shorter, more celeb- and scandal-driven and delivered with a hallmark breathlessness. Radio news has simply ceased to exist other than in the non-profit sector.

But so far the Web has been no salvation for this. To get attention above the overriding noise of meaningless info there requires work from the reader. Whether right or wrong, for a journalist that is certainly a failure as we see our work as not a luxury but a necessity in democracy.

Online worlds

Publishers have seemed slow on the uptake regarding digital media. For years, newspaper, TV news and other "old" media Web sites were a pretty poor use of Web space. And upstarts have certainly beaten up on them in that realm.

Why so slow? Probably because the economic model there hasn't worked on the scale needed for a large production company like a Denver Post or a 9News. To staff those entities requires millions of dollars, and still, their related Web entities are not turning a profit to cover more than the few Web designers on the project. The profits there cover far less than the cost of the reporters, editors and producers.

This holds for the New York Times as well as Fox News. Their income still comes from the old delivery, and for the NYT it's still falling. Fox's profits are rising thanks to an even more blurred line between opinion and news that makes us old print hacks shudder. The insanity of the opinion apparently has a disturbing attraction.

But contrary to many opinions, I don't think that reporters or their editors are made particularly nervous by bloggers and other new media journalism. The reporters I work with were two steps ahead of their editors and most of my other friends with embracing the value of social media and the new access of information provided in the digital world. Digital media has revolutionized reporting.

Most of the real news workers see it all as an extension and complement to what they do, as well as another vehicle for their own hopefully world-changing work. I know a number of journalists who are nervous about the ethical considerations. They have good cause in some areas and not in others.

It's easier to see Fox News' editorializing for what it is because a big, known institution is behind it. The viewers and critics are all in on the conceit. But though the ease of publishing has allowed many off-the-radar subjects to be aired, knowing the source of the info and their interests is more difficult. I think this subject should be discussed, but with the understanding that readers and viewers are not idiots.

Many journalists are also worried about other professional standards that have been hard-won and may be now easily lost. An institution like the New York Times is extremely thoughtful and careful about what sources it uses, how they are interviewed and with what background information and how their points are verified. Some online news sites are careful with this and others are not. They worry this standard may erode.

On sources and academic assumptions

Amusingly to journalists, then, is the fact that a criticism often leveled at the mainstream press is use of unidentified sources, off-the-record background and other techniques that make the work seem less reputable. The criticism rarely seems to hit the online world or academia where those questions also exist.

From my own experience, those decisions are deeply considered before they are used in the mainstream media. But who's debating that with the solitary blogger or citizen journalist?

One of the advantages to a sizable news organization, or system of them, is a tacit enforcement of standards. Journalism has done well for 200 years policing itself and evolving its standards to an ever higher level. It's similar to a peer review of a scholarly article (some of which fail too). And many of us who value those standards are openly talking about ways to apply them by other means in the event of the failure of many news institutions.

Oversimplification is a problem throughout the history of journalism. Driven by the necessity to be concise and to fit the news in limited space, we often fail to communicate enough context. For example Rio de Janeiro is one of my favorite cities in the world, and a pleasure in which to reside. But most Americans imagine it a war zone because coverage of its problems outweigh coverage of its pleasures.

Criticism of journalism — including its problem of oversimplification — is often oversimplified itself. And a variety of spots in the reading have made me cringe for lack of context, the aftertaste of a vendetta, or a criticism based only on hearsay or assumption.

Chris Atton's chapter in Digital Media and Democracy outlined one of many such issues for me. I found it a thoughtful segment that looked at not only the successes and failings of various media types, but also successes and failures of media criticism itself. There was a big assumption made by the Glasgow Media Group's survey of the BBC and bias:

The GUMG's work challenges the BBC's claim that it is objective and impartial by showing how facts and values are routinely combined to favor one group in society over another. GUMG argued that this represented a hierarchy of media access where professional journalists uncritically presented the ideologies of elite groups to the public. Journalists present the worlds of politics, society, economics, and culture through the narrow, ideological lens of what Stuart Hall termed primary definers. (Boler 2008, pp. 215)

Criticism of this sort, as Atton notes in the section, fails to take into consideration the working patterns and needs of journalism. I feel it also breaks a sacred journalism rule valuable in academia as well. It makes an assumption. The GUMG researchers should have asked the journalists themselves about this pattern.

I am sure, to a one, they would have said that the need of a reporter is to tell a story concisely and effectively by talking to people educated on a subject who can explain clearly their point of view on facts. The "ordinary people" a later paragraph applauds often have a very hard time elucidating their thoughts. So the reporter seeks out the experts, and by nature they are "elites" at universities, who by perhaps a failing of academia, not journalism, are predominantly white and middle or upper class.

This isn't a justification on my part. An effective reporter will always try to seek the opinion of those affected by an issue rather that simply some expert voice. But that is far harder to achieve than it sounds, and the bit from the GUMG report is guilty of the same problem they criticize, and just calls the kettle black. Reporters are as human as anyone and can be lazy. That would not be different in alternative or amateur media, nor academia.

Axel Bruns, in his chapter, made me choke on my tea as I read a parenthetical quip in a section about the power of blogs that accused journalism of an ethical lapse I have never seen as a common problem:

Compared to traditional vox-pop (often a relatively cynical task conferred to junior reporters: "get me one in favour and two against")…(Boler 2008, pp. 248)

No quibbles in Bruns' look at blogs here, but throughout academic media analysis like Bruns' there is criticism of lack of proper attribution of information as a woe of old media. I'm not arguing with that either. But he really needs to attribute what is in quotes too, or take it out of quotes and identify it as hearsay. His use of it this way implies it is a common practice.

I've done vox-pop (or man on the street) reaction interviews for 20 years, for more than 20 different publications of all sizes, mainstream and alternative, and never once has an editor asked for a specific result. Hearsay like this comes about because it happens, yes. But like my opening example it is an extremely rare case, and Bruns fails to double check something he presents as a common fact.

Even Jenkins, whose book I read with admiration, got a giggle from me as he described the debate about the political divisiveness of blogging:

Of course, as bloggers are quick to note, mainstream journalism itself is increasingly unreliable, being driven by ideological agendas rather than professional standards, burying stories that run counter to their economic interests, reducing a complex world to one big story at a time, and trivializing politics in their focus on power struggles and horse races. (Jenkins 2006, pp. 216)

What got me there was not the ideas — I'm sure many bloggers would say that though they suffer the same issues — but that a comment as inflammatory as this wouldn't pass journalistic standards without being attributed to someone, either as a quote or paraphrase. On a quick read it appears to be the opinion of the author (and maybe it is). As a journalist I'd like examples rather than hearsay.

As Detouches said, "Criticism is easy. Art (in this case, journalism) is difficult."

On objectivity

Objectivity has also been a long-term issue in journalism, that journalists have bellyached over for centuries.

The 1950s were probably the height of the idea that journalism should be objective and report with the greatest effort to avoid bias possible. The decade proved that objectivity is impossible, and it even had some dire effects.

Often cited in studies of journalism history is the style with which Sen. Joseph McCarthy was reported. I paraphrase:

Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, today accused Elia Kazan of being a member of the Communist Party. Kazan replied he has never been associated with such a movement.

This, of course, would lend more power to McCarthy's statement because few would feel McCarthy had any reason to make that up. Therefore Kazan must have been lying.

It didn't work until some key journalists let go of the notion and reported with effort to disprove McCarthy's statements. See Good Night, and Good Luck (Clooney, 2005)

Today professional journalists readily acknowledge that the idea of objectivity is merely an impractical ideal, but few would argue, the way many alternative media like Democracy Now or Rush Limbaugh would, that we should embrace subjectivity.

We've already been there in American journalism and it was pretty ugly. The partisan press era of the 19th century has long been seen as one of the low points in delivery of information to the voters, and I agree. The tendency of the moment is that direction, with both sides arguing that they must be partisan to counter the efforts of the other side. This is leading, in my opinion, to an escalation of partisanship and spin, in some mainstream media outlets like Fox News as well as the liberal alternative press.

Partisanship in media has always been around, and it serves a function. I applaud the existence of Democracy Now and The National Review, but this best serves the public on the edges. In the mainstream what we see as important is not objectivity itself, nor subjectivity, but a striving to report completely. That means an examination of the other side. "Fair and Balanced" to quote Fox's ironic mantra.

Filters

A frequent criticism of mainstream journalism is that it is "filtered." The use of the word in some of the readings has read as if a journalist's story goes through some Orwellian process to make sure it fits the political interests of the publishers or the advertisers.

I have certainly been in newsrooms where the aftermath of an angry advertiser sent one of the "business side" people of the paper storming into the room to complain. But the only sort of response I've ever heard from the news side people has been, "Then we lose that advertiser."

Again, not to say this doesn't happen. But the problem of context implies it is common when it is not. And where it is most likely to happen is in the small news outlets that cannot weather loss of income, as in McChesney's case. (Boler 2008, pp. 55)

In contrast, the editing process is less a filter and more a peer review designed to remove as many errors and problems as is possible in the time allowed. No journalist loves being edited, but most see its value.

One thing all journalists and academics could use

I've long felt that all journalists should be, at one point in their lives at least, the subject of a news story. Our work has great impact on the lives and perceptions of others, and for this we need to be as careful as possible.

From the point of view of the subject, the story is never accurate and always lacking. If the story doesn't reflect what is in the head of the subject, it is, from their perspective, wrong. Failings in a story can also come from the source not explaining the situation well enough for the reporter to understand, and then from the subject's point of view, it's wrong also.

These same issues exist in academia, as the perspective of the studied often does not match the research. So here has been my internal perspective.

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So that rambled on far too long. As a source who agreed to be interviewed only on condition of anonymity once said, "A good rant is never finished. It is only abandoned."