News industry suffers from self-inflicted wounds
News industry suffers from self-inflicted wounds
BY JEFF MCCALL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/23/18 09:00 AM
EDT
Doing journalism is difficult work. News organizations
make countless decisions each day that affect the nation’s news agenda and
subsequent civic discussions. Today’s technology-driven world means those
decisions are made quickly. Every second provides a new deadline. Having
acknowledged the challenge, however, doing solid journalism shouldn’t be
impossible. That is what it seems like these days, as the news industry
continues to stumble with self-inflicted mistakes and colossal errors in
judgment.
News media blunders over the past several weeks
dishearten even the most ardent defenders of journalism. The damage done at the
White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner will take years to undo.
The vulgar display by a so-called comedian was only part of what ails this
overblown tribute to journalists’ self-importance. That our nation’s top
journalists and news executives want to hob-nob with the powerful politicians,
corporate fat cats and entertainers who should be the subjects of news coverage
is the real mistake. This event demonstrates that the news industry is firmly
entrenched in the elite establishment, living in an alternative universe
disconnected from real people.
The WHCA defends the event as a scholarship fundraiser
and tribute to the First Amendment. Then have a First Amendment scholar address
the crowd, not a crass comedian. It is hard to build credibility for the news
industry when its leaders promote a keynote speaker to tell off-color jokes.
Here’s betting the American Medical Association won’t have a crude podium
performance at its upcoming national meeting.
Results of a recent study of journalism hiring practices
further underscore the elite and detached state of the journalism industry.
Researchers Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina published a study showing that almost
half of employees at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended
what they defined as “elite” colleges.
The news industry should, of course, try to attract smart
people to the field, but there are plenty of smart prospects who didn’t happen
to emerge from elite settings. This incestuous hiring process narrows the range
of perspectives brought into the news decision making process. The 20th century
Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Walter Lippmann, once wrote, “Where all think
alike, no one thinks very much.” That sentiment rings true in too many
newsrooms today.
The media’s fascination with Stormy Daniels’s bumptious
attorney, Michael Avenatti, suggests further that news standards have warped.
Data from the Media Research Center show Avenatti has been interviewed on
broadcast and cable news shows 147 times over a recent 10-week period. This
saturation coverage could be justified if the Daniels story were being
advanced, but that has not been the case to date. Meanwhile, CNN, the main
cheerleader for Avenatti, gets to keep showing video of Daniels in glamor
poses.
Then there was the obsession with the royal wedding. The
marriage of a British prince to an American actress is a charming feature
story, the key word here being “feature.” Yet, the broadcast “news”
organizations blanketed the wedding with coverage that tied up anchors and
producers for days, and cost huge money. NBC had five anchors involved in its
broadcasts. CNN sent its highest profile personalities, Don Lemon, Anderson
Cooper and Alisyn Camerota. There just has to be a better journalistic use for
such air time and resources.
Edward R. Murrow warned of this problem in his 1958
“wires and lights in a box” speech. He would be shocked at the extent to which
his prophecy has played out.
The nation yearns for a news industry that realizes its
First Amendment promise to serve as a public surrogate and fuel the information
needs of a democracy. Surveys of media credibility from Gallup and Pew Research
show dismal results, and that decline in trust was well underway before Trump
began his constant bashing of journalism. Surveys show confidence in news
sources is quite low across all political groupings, with right-leaning and
independents particularly distrustful of news outlets.
It will take courageous leadership to turn the news
industry around. It will take corporate leaders who have read the history of
why a First Amendment was created in the first place. It will take leaders who
have read the ethics codes of the Society of Professional Journalists and the
Radio Television Digital News Association.
Without confidence in the news media, citizens turn to
social media or the guy at the bar for their information needs. Worse yet, many
citizens today just tune out the news altogether. An uninformed citizenry, with
no suitable surrogates in the news media, is left disabled in addressing the
serious issues the nation faces.
Jeffrey McCall (@Prof_McCall) is a professor of
communication at DePauw University.
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