The
journalistic profession changed forever just before 3 AM EST on November 9,
2016. That's not a political statement, it's a philosophical and deeply
personal one. Upon learning that Donald Trump had won the presidency, I began
wondering how the mainstream media, of which I am a part, got the call so
wrong. Just one of the last 20 national polls had Trump in the lead, and the
final poll margins predicted Hillary Clinton would win by more than 3 points
and NBC News analysts opined that Trump would have to pull "an inside
straight" to win the electoral college. When my network broadcasting team
held a pool to predict the winner and the final vote total, not a single person
chose Trump. Plenty has been written since about why the media didn't get it
right: the minority vote was overblown, Main Street America was
underrepresented, her likability, the FBI letter, the desire for change.... It
didn't matter. What mattered was that the people that were supposed to know the real story (the mainstream media), got the story wrong. That they got it wrong at a time when the man that would become president was warning that media was getting it wrong on purpose, only compounded the problem. The
election cost the mainstream media its credibility.
If you go back in history, the media has had its share of credibility problems. In 1948, the media overwhelmingly predicted victory for Thomas Dewey. The famous image of a smiling Harry Truman holding a newspaper predicting his own defeat foreshadowed a contentious relationship with the press throughout his time in office. In more recent times, Dan Rather's deceptive reporting about George W. Bush's flight records cost the veteran anchor his job and cast a cloud over his network. Brian Williams' misrepresentations of his own experiences forced him to step down from his post at the most successful night news program in the country. The wounds were self-inflicted. But it's one thing to hurt your own credibility when you're the only game in town. Yellow journalism, the blatantly sensational reporting that characterized newspapers at the turn of the last century, weren't fatal for the profession since there was no other way for people to get their news. It's a different story today.
Today, the platform of digital media and the phenomenon of social media is dominating the information-sharing landscape. Nearly anyone can disseminate information at nearly any time, and have the potential to reach literally millions of people, as many as the best-funded, most professional news outlets. And they can do it without any restraints whatsoever. There is no app, no technological barrier to reporting a lie, whether it be intentionally or unintentionally. Lies mix freely with truths in cyberspace and often, it's tough to tell the difference. Sometimes the only way to tell the difference is to do a little research on your own, something many people are unwilling to do, particularly in an age where information intersects only briefly with our attention span before we are on to something else. Journalism, in its traditional form, is established to take the guesswork out of the job of determining the validity of a piece of information. In generations past, the news was the news. You didn't question it, you simply accepted it as fact and moved on. But what happens when you don't trust the media to distinguish a lie from the truth? And what happens when people no longer agree on a common source for the truth? Daniel Moynihan, the late U.S. senator, once said "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." That may not be true anymore. Plenty of people are unable to agree on the most basic facts of what's going on in the world. An NPR program described it as living in a "post-truth" environment. The consequences are immense. Polarized politics mean fewer people are listening to opposing viewpoints, and the ones they are listening to can carry messages that are hyperbolic almost to the point of hysteria. Truth has become a relative commodity, defined by the messenger instead of the message. If we believe that there are people that refuse to entertain the validity of facts if they don't jive with their predetermined view of the world, then how can anything ever impact their world view? And will these people build a world in which dissenting viewpoints are welcomed or condemned, even punished? Napoleon once said that "History is a set of facts agreed upon." Perhaps that hits a closer to the heart of our current culture when it comes to journalism and the search for truth than the quote by the late Senator Moynihan.
Into this environment, we throw a new generation of journalists, intent on trying to shed light on difficult and complicated issues that face the country and the world. But how? How do journalists do their job at a time when roughly half the country doesn't trust them? How do you pursue truth at a time when blatantly false "news" is created and perpetuated online by paid operatives? How do you distinguish between citizen journalists who can help spread truth and "yellow journalists" who are dedicated to spreading falsehoods? And how can you thrive in an environment in which social media gives nearly everyone access to everyone else, gives anonymous individuals just as big a mouthpiece as entire news organizations, and rewards sensational, hyperbolic, often negative headlines with clicks, followers and cash? The fact that broad distrust of the mainstream media comes at a time when there are so many alternatives available online complicates the challenge for journalists. It also invites a specific focus on the pedagogical challenges ahead for journalism professors who are trying to get ahead of the changes and prepare students for the profession in its emerging state, not the world of TV-first talking heads that held sway in the news business as little as five years ago. In this thesis, we will dig into the current journalistic environment, the factors that have contributed to it, the consequences for the profession and the path forward.
If you go back in history, the media has had its share of credibility problems. In 1948, the media overwhelmingly predicted victory for Thomas Dewey. The famous image of a smiling Harry Truman holding a newspaper predicting his own defeat foreshadowed a contentious relationship with the press throughout his time in office. In more recent times, Dan Rather's deceptive reporting about George W. Bush's flight records cost the veteran anchor his job and cast a cloud over his network. Brian Williams' misrepresentations of his own experiences forced him to step down from his post at the most successful night news program in the country. The wounds were self-inflicted. But it's one thing to hurt your own credibility when you're the only game in town. Yellow journalism, the blatantly sensational reporting that characterized newspapers at the turn of the last century, weren't fatal for the profession since there was no other way for people to get their news. It's a different story today.
Today, the platform of digital media and the phenomenon of social media is dominating the information-sharing landscape. Nearly anyone can disseminate information at nearly any time, and have the potential to reach literally millions of people, as many as the best-funded, most professional news outlets. And they can do it without any restraints whatsoever. There is no app, no technological barrier to reporting a lie, whether it be intentionally or unintentionally. Lies mix freely with truths in cyberspace and often, it's tough to tell the difference. Sometimes the only way to tell the difference is to do a little research on your own, something many people are unwilling to do, particularly in an age where information intersects only briefly with our attention span before we are on to something else. Journalism, in its traditional form, is established to take the guesswork out of the job of determining the validity of a piece of information. In generations past, the news was the news. You didn't question it, you simply accepted it as fact and moved on. But what happens when you don't trust the media to distinguish a lie from the truth? And what happens when people no longer agree on a common source for the truth? Daniel Moynihan, the late U.S. senator, once said "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." That may not be true anymore. Plenty of people are unable to agree on the most basic facts of what's going on in the world. An NPR program described it as living in a "post-truth" environment. The consequences are immense. Polarized politics mean fewer people are listening to opposing viewpoints, and the ones they are listening to can carry messages that are hyperbolic almost to the point of hysteria. Truth has become a relative commodity, defined by the messenger instead of the message. If we believe that there are people that refuse to entertain the validity of facts if they don't jive with their predetermined view of the world, then how can anything ever impact their world view? And will these people build a world in which dissenting viewpoints are welcomed or condemned, even punished? Napoleon once said that "History is a set of facts agreed upon." Perhaps that hits a closer to the heart of our current culture when it comes to journalism and the search for truth than the quote by the late Senator Moynihan.
Into this environment, we throw a new generation of journalists, intent on trying to shed light on difficult and complicated issues that face the country and the world. But how? How do journalists do their job at a time when roughly half the country doesn't trust them? How do you pursue truth at a time when blatantly false "news" is created and perpetuated online by paid operatives? How do you distinguish between citizen journalists who can help spread truth and "yellow journalists" who are dedicated to spreading falsehoods? And how can you thrive in an environment in which social media gives nearly everyone access to everyone else, gives anonymous individuals just as big a mouthpiece as entire news organizations, and rewards sensational, hyperbolic, often negative headlines with clicks, followers and cash? The fact that broad distrust of the mainstream media comes at a time when there are so many alternatives available online complicates the challenge for journalists. It also invites a specific focus on the pedagogical challenges ahead for journalism professors who are trying to get ahead of the changes and prepare students for the profession in its emerging state, not the world of TV-first talking heads that held sway in the news business as little as five years ago. In this thesis, we will dig into the current journalistic environment, the factors that have contributed to it, the consequences for the profession and the path forward.
Historically, the press is
one of the pillars of American democracy, notable for its ability to
provide a check on powerful government entities that may try to run amok.
Examples of the press and the president going head-to-head are as old as the
country itself. Political
party newspapers operating as
propaganda mouthpieces waged war on behalf of their candidates when Adams and
Jefferson were squaring off. Grover
Cleveland hated the press,
Ulysses Grant felt he was slandered by the media. Even President Obama had
a toxic relationship with the press, believing it to focus on the sometimes
sensational details of politics as opposed to the big picture. As a Rolling
Stone article pointed out in
2014, "The White House suspects that reporters intentionally
sensationalize their stories; reporters suspect that the White House plays with
the facts to get its message out. Both suspicions are correct." Obama was
also the first President to use social media, joining Twitter in 2007 and using
Facebook to help build a base of millions of voters during his initial run for
the White House. In that same year, Scott Goodstein, who help Obama increase
his presence on more than dozen social networks said,
"These social networks are shopping malls that have millions of people
already hanging out in them. So the question becomes, how to find the people
that are going to be your advocates and have them talk about your
message?" It was a lesson that Obama's successor, Donald Trump, would
learn well.
For traditional journalists, the burden
is heavier and more complicated. The speed of the news cycle and the sheer
amount of information available to inform your reporting can overwhelm someone
trying to verify the truth of the matter. It is increasingly difficult to find
those who don't spin their side of the story. On the other side of the coin,
many so-called "citizen journalists" may not even realize their level
of responsibility to the discourse happening around the country, They can
bypass traditional media and potentially reach thousands if not hundreds of
thousands of people. What's more, many enjoy the ability to remain anonymous no
matter what they post and thereby often avoid any kind of legal or ethical
consequence for their information. As people who put information into
cyberspace, we must reassess our responsibilities in doing so and as news
consumers we must approach all information like this with eyes open. We, as
journalists, can not pretend that the dramatic cultural and technological
changes are happening outside of the sphere of what we do. The news is no
longer confined to the traditional gatekeepers. The digital media has torn
those gates down. Access once enjoyed by media conglomerates is now open to
anyone with a twitter handle and online access. What’s more, the number of people getting their news online has
skyrocketed as well. According to a Pew Research study , 62% of all American adults get news on a social networking site, with Reddit, Facebook and Twitter taking the top spots. In fact, among those asked where they "often" get their news, digital sources ran a close second to television, 38% to 57%. News websites slightly outpaced social networking sites as the primary source for digital users, but that may be changing. The number of visitors to all nine of the top social networking websites studied by Pew grew from a similar study conducted three years ago.
As we speak, traditional (or mainstream) media is trying to navigate an increasingly complicated, interwoven relationship with digital media and its users. Because of the ubiquitous nature of I-Phone's, the number of people who can create and distribute news content has skyrocketed. Because that video can be shared instantly on social media sites, it can be more appealing for those users for whom quick, easily accessible content is most important. Unfortunately, that often can lead to images being shared widely, without explanation and without any context. During the recent rash of shootings of African-American men by police officers, the vast majority of video, both of the incidents and the aftermath, came from individuals, which we will describe as citizen journalists. Those citizen journalists, it can be argued, helped in spreading the truth of what occurred, but hindered a full understanding of the situations and the circumstances that led up to them. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in the summer of 2014 led to weeks of protests and to the evolution of a hashtag: Black Lives Matter. The group, started three years earlier after the Trayvon Martin shooting, lived mostly online up until that moment. After the shooting, it became the platform for a real flesh-and-blood movement. In contrast, to past civil rights movements, the organizers were no longer reliant on traditional media, hoping that journalists were in the right place at the right time to capture developments. Instead the organizers were able to record and distribute the developments themselves. As an article in Wired put it, it demonstrated how, when it came time for the organizers to speak to the masses, they were able to bypass traditional media. "If you want to post a video of a protest or a violent arrest, you put it up on Vine, Instagram or Periscope. If you want to avoid trolls or snooping authorities and you need to coordinate some kind of action, you might chat privately with other activists on GroupMe. If you want to rapidly mobilize a bunch of people you know and you don't want the whole world clued in, you use SMS or WhatsApp. If you want to mobilize a ton of people you might not know and you do want the whole world to talk about it: Twitter." In addition, journalists relied on citizens inside the protests to post and send video, using it as the core of news coverage for weeks. But there was a downside to it too. Without traditional media to put a metaphorical box or frame around the information, some protesters allowed their personal agendas to shape the message they were sending. In ethical terms, this is something that journalists are taught not to do. But the protesters weren't journalists, nor did they pretend to be. They were messengers. And we can point to at least one part of that message, the symbolic chant of "Hands Up, Don't Shoot", as one that was based on a lie. Brown never said that, nor is there any evidence he ever tried to surrender. The media did its due diligence in working to debunk the lie, but the symbol endured. As one protester told the Associated Press, "Even if you don't find that it's true, it's a valid rallying cry. It's just a metaphor." Here we have those that were positioning themselves as the truth-tellers - as the ones that the traditional media became reliant on to deliver a true representation of the anger and frustration in the wake of the Ferguson shooting - basically passing on the job. But should we be surprised that citizen journalists are allowing their agendas to color what they send us? Of course not. We saw it during the Arab Spring as well, when citizen journalists became the key avenues through which the Western world understood what was happening. Of course they had a vested interest in knocking out the ruling governments. Syrian rebels have a vested interest in demonstrating the horrible actions of the Assad regime to gin up global opposition. The problem comes when there is no context or framework for the information. If we know that video of a certain incident is shot and distributed by a participating party, we can weigh what kind of agenda they may have, perhaps play devil's advocate. But if we don't have that information, it's not possible for us, as news consumers, to accurately assess the truthfulness of the content.
But I would argue that a tool is only useful int he way that the person who wields it intends it to be. During the general election campaign during the last half of 2016, a phenomenon grew up around fake news. Fake news was a deliberate attempt by groups of people, some motivated by money, others by political ideology to intentionally plant false news stories. The idea was that those stories would be circulated by the public and they would either generate advertising revenue or fuel political animosity or both. A recent Washington Post article describes two creators of intentionally false posts and tweets the "new yellow journalists" and shares interviews in which the men, who went from unemployed restaurant workers to wealthy entrepreneurs, describe how they play on people's fears, religious beliefs and deep-seated anger about political figures to elicit reactions, including getting them to circulate the fake posts to their own followers and friends. As one says, "All successful journalism has shock value". And if you base the metric of success on the sheer number of clicks or likes or retweets you get, then they are definitely successful. You could also base success on how much of a reaction you generate. A man named Gregg Phillips posted tweeted two messages in mid-November, each alleging that three million non-citizens had voted illegally in the general election. Two weeks later, President-Elect Trump himself able to refer to use those tweets as the foundation for his claims that he would have won the popular vote if not for those 3 million illegally cast votes. Media outlets reached out to Phillips to ask him what he was basing his information on. He wouldn't tell anyone. Why not? He said he didn't want the media twisting his words. Trump's tweet was retweeted more than 53,000 times at last count. The fact that Politifact and other media outlets declared it patently false didn't stop the President-Elect from tweeting it and no doubt, won't stop many of his supporters from believing it. Why? Well, is you ask some of the people creating the posts, the audience simply isn't smart enough to know the difference between a lie and the truth, or at very least, they don't care to try to figure out the difference. Paul Horner, the head of a Facebook fake-news empire, said "People are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it." But is that fair? How can people be "dumber" as Horner argues, when there is so much information around. One possible answer is that people simply don't want to take the time to check whether something is true or not. A second possibility is that when people see something they want to believe to be true, they will believe it, facts or no facts. There are certainly psychological aspects to this, and we will go into them later in this paper. But I would argue there is another reason why people might believe these "fake news" publications or anything, really, that purports to report information that has been otherwise repressed somehow. In other words, it leaks out into these "alternative" sites (alternatives to the mainstream media in other words) because the mainstream media has opted not to cover the stories, or to actively silence those reporting them. If the mainstream media was trustworthy, the chain of logic goes, the major television networks would tell you all of this stuff. But they aren't, so they won't. That lack of confidence in the truthfulness of journalists and the media at large is one of the most critical components to the changing environment surrounding the journalistic profession and, quite possibly, poses the biggest challenge.
In September 2016, Gallup asked people whether they trusted the media. Less than a third were willing to say they even had a "fair amount" of trust in the media to "report the news fully, accurately and fairly." In the 44 years that Gallup had been asking the question, the number had never been lower. And why not? Cable news media has become increasingly polarized in recent years, representing the right and left wings ideologies of our political system, often at the expense of more moderate views. Donald Trump made media bashing a central tenet of his campaign, calling debate moderators unfair, and calling journalists "the worst people I've ever met." While I tend to believe that many journalists try to be fair, my own experiences in the newsroom haven't always borne that out. Several years ago, while sitting in the newsroom, a Supreme Court decision was announed that was seen as a victory for cultural liberals and a great roar of applause rose up from the "journalists" sitting around me. I was stunned. How could people who were supposed to be working hard to report the news without bias wear their bias so openly. While I don't believe that such ractions preclude people's ability to report fairly, I have also seen political ideologies more openly expressed inside the newsroom today than ever before. Those ideologies tend to bleed through on air, whether it be through the phrasing of a question or the kind of context and additional information that's provided to the viewer.
The election of 2016 will also go down, I believe, as a critical moment in which the mainstream media lost a lot of credibility with the average American. The argument that the mainstream media had the real story, that all the stories indicating that Hillary Clinton was surging and Donald Trump was flailing could be taken together as the most accurate representation of what was going on in the country, was proven totally wrong. The average American that had believed all along that the media was misleading them suddenly had their proof - powerful proof that will be used as a hammer to bludgeon the mainstream media for a long time to come.
(COULD INCLUDE KATY TUR/KRISTEN WELKER INTERVIEWS HERE....)
Of course, we don't just have to make a counterargument against the mainstream media. We've already discussed a bit about how digital media can tell a story that mainstream journalists simply can't tell, whether it be because of a lack of resources or simply not being at the right place at the right time. Would the police-involved killings of Philando Castile or Eric Garner ever made the news if someone hadn't filmed the incidents and put them online? In the case of Walter Scott, a black man shot by police in April 2015, the media reported the police version of the shooting which claimed there was a "physical altercation". Not until video of the incident was posted online, showing Scott running away from the officer, did the mainstream media change its reporting and question the official narrative. The patrolman was later charged with murder. It's an extreme example. The media was forced to change its story in the face of obvious evidence contrary to what it had been reporting. But what if the media was the sole gatekeeper? Late in the presidential campaign, video and audio of Trump making inappropriate comments during an NBC taping in 2005 was "leaked" to the Washington Post. NBC raced to put the video out first, but only after it was forced to, to avoid looking like it had sat on the tape. In fact, the network had sat on the tape, trying to figure out how to protect an employee rather than fulfill its ethical obligations and release the tape regardless of the impact on the network's reputation or that of its employee. Unfortunately, that's the case of dealing with the world as we hope it is as opposed to the world as it really is.
Agendas are just as relevant to media outlets as they are to individuals posting pictures or stories online. Of course there are some significant differences. News organizations have a reputation to protect, for example. Any kind of failure to live up to the ethical standards as perceived by the public can hurt its credibility. While we may question whether the ethics are the same across the board and the severity of the media "spin", it is hard to argue that the vast majority of news organizations don't try to put accurate information on the air or in print. Journalistic ethics go back as far as the development of the printing press in the 15th century when editors assured readers that they "printed the impartial truth based on 'matters of fact'". Consider the guidelines of ethical journalism, as explained by the Society of Professional Journalists: Seeking truth and reporting it, minimizing harm, acting independently (without real or perceived conflicts of interest) and being accountable and transparent. By that definition, every single person that distributes "news" or information without revealing their name and their methods is violating journalistic ethics. In the cases of "fake news" that we discussed above, all four tenets are violated repeatedly. Many are faceless; anonymous and in situations where they have conflicts of interest or they aim to maximize as opposed to minimize harm, the anonymity protects them from consequences as well. And while cultural and technological factors will always contribute to who pays attention to what and what form of "news" gains traction , you could also argue that credibility will be the make-or-break factor when it comes to the long-term health of the journalistic profession. The reason is that credibility is a characteristic that real-life journalists can still claim (or reclaim) in a way that gives it an advantage over digital and social media. While we mentioned earlier that few have confidence in the mainstream news organizations, even fewer seem to have confidence in the news coming to them via social media. By not being afraid to take responsibility for their reporting and by being transparent about their methods and findings, mainstream journalists still have an opportunity to claim the mantle of credibility.
It's fair to take a minute here and wonder about who we can fairly define as a journalist these days. As Scott Gant put it in his book, "We're All Journalists Now", "the lines distinguishing professional journalists from other people who disseminate information, ideas and opinions to a wide audience have been blurred, perhaps beyond recognition, by forces both inside and outside the media themselves....It is harder than ever to tell who is a journalist." The book was published nearly a decade ago, but the implications are staggering. If the definition is someone that disseminates information, then the pool of journalists in America has become unfathomably large. Gant goes on to question whether those same people shouldn't just be afforded legal protections under the First Amendment guarantees of the Freedom of the Press, but journalistic "privilege" that often prevents journalists from being forced to reveal information they would typically have to reveal if they were ordinary citizens. But what if an I-Phone in your pocket and a Twitter account makes you a disseminator of journalistic information? Where do the rights of a journalist that works at the New York Times end and yours begin? But if those protections should apply to you, what if you looked at the coin from the other side? Should you,a s an individual, be held to the same standards as a newspaper or a TV network?
(COULD ADD MORE FROM LEGAL EXPERT HERE - )
Let's say, for the sake of argument, you can avoid the legal implications, either through luck or anonymity. Why should the average person care whether they uphold the standards of a traditional journalist? One reason might be a version of the Golden Rule. If you represent others accurately and fairly and express your best understanding of the world around you, others will do the same. This is particularly important when reinforcing social norms and mores online. The reason why things like body-shaming are frowned upon is not because of a rule or guideline distributed by the World Wide Web. Instead, the online community relies on a measure of self-policing. Some may argue that it's a naive approach to dealing with the glut of misinformation out there, but if spreading false information takes on the same stigma as, say, racial slurs, we could see people start curbing their own behavior.
For those who defy ethical standards because they get paid to do so, the obvious answer is to dry up the pool of revenue, much of which comes from advertising. Facebook is already working to do so. But Facebook is not a journalistic gatekeeper, nor is Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr, or any of the social media sites that have become the platform of choice for disseminators of "fake news". So in the end, the job may fall on journalists themselves.
DISCUSS JOURNALISTS ROLE IN GATEKEEPING
ALSO DISCUSS WHERE "EXPERTISE" FITS INTO ALL THIS - IS IT OK FOR SOME PEOPLE TO BE "EXPERTS" IN DISSEMINATING FACT? JUST BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS EQUAL ACCESS (AND EVEN A POTENTIAL CLAIM TO THE TITLE OF JOURNALIST), IS THAT A GOOD THING?
ALSO DISCUSS WHERE "EXPERTISE" FITS INTO ALL THIS - IS IT OK FOR SOME PEOPLE TO BE "EXPERTS" IN DISSEMINATING FACT? JUST BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS EQUAL ACCESS (AND EVEN A POTENTIAL CLAIM TO THE TITLE OF JOURNALIST), IS THAT A GOOD THING?
