The average
American’s and Canadian’s trust in the mainstream media has been steadily
eroding – on both the left and right. Liberal and conservative media outlets
have been losing credibility and the more fanatical and irrational elements on
both sides have been getting attention. New
York magazine recently interviewed 40 journalists and surveyed 113 others
on the state of their profession. Most of the responses were not exactly
surprising but were refreshingly honest and severely self-critical. The
following is a sampling of the more insightful and revealing admissions.
-----Bill
Keller, editor in chief of the Marshall Project and former executive editor of
the New York Times:
“The major feature of the media landscape today is the acceleration of
everything. Probably the most troublesome tension is the one between the need
to file immediately, because a thousand other people are filing immediately,
and the time it takes to do real
reporting, to reflect on what you’ve got and then to write it in a way
that’s fair and clear but doesn’t gloss over the complications. And that tension
just seems to get more intense. I think one of the greatest casualties of the
high metabolism of the news business is complexity. That’s a big loss.”
-----Soledad
O’Brien, journalist and CEO of Starfish Media Group, and former CNN anchor:
“When I started producing, you would start reporting from a position of
‘I don’t know.’ You would love someone who told you the untold story — the
unknown story. That’s a been a big shift. Now, it’s ‘We’re doing a story on
deadbeat dads, so here’s what I need you
to say. Are you going to say this? And guess what, if you’re not going to
say this, then I’m going to move on and find someone else who will say this.’ ”
-----Bill
Keller, editor in chief of the Marshall Project and former executive editor of
the New York Times:
“The genius of Donald Trump is
that he knows how to change the subject. ‘Oh, they want to talk about taxes?
Well, I’m going to insult someone so we won’t be talking about taxes, we’ll be
talking about how attractive my wife is.’ He understands the business of
journalism. He understands journalists
can be like a school of fish, they all turn in formation really fast,
chasing the bright shiny lure.”
-----Gay
Talese, magazine journalist and author of fourteen books:
“If you really have an ill feeling about a person, you can find
information — legitimate, factual information — to turn that person into
anything you want. It’s the selectivity of the information. The selectivity of
the evidence. You can go into a country under a dictatorship and say,
‘Flowering freedom is emerging here.’ It’s what you’re looking for, who you
talk to. You choose people to be reflective, and to be in concert, with what
you think. And you can get any kind of
story, you can ruin anybody’s career. People believe the first time they
read something, and it makes an impression on them, and you can’t alter it, no
matter how much pleading you do to get it right, you’re lost.”
-----Jay
Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU:
“I treat he-said-she-said reporting as a problem, but it’s also a
solution to a problem. A lot of the problems I see in press coverage happen
because the journalists involved don’t have time to do a better job, or they
don’t have enough knowledge, or they’re under pressure that prevents a more
serious story from emerging. When a new study comes out, and the hospital
association says, ‘Costs are decreasing,’ and the consumer’s group says,
‘Actually that’s not true, costs are continuing to go up,’ and you have to
write a story by deadline, then
he-said-she-said makes it writable. Then you don’t have to know who’s
right. So a lot of times repetitive narratives, or lazy narratives, or devices
like he-said-she-said, are substitutes for real knowledge.”
-----Daniel
Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times:
“In the atomization of media, audiences find the one that’s most
gratifying to them, the one that tells them what they want to hear rather than
what they don’t want to hear. Now, I’m a Twitter addict. I probably check my
Twitter feed ten times a day. And I think I’m getting this wide range of
opinions from different perspectives — I can add it all up and come to my own
conclusion. But I’ve built my own news
organization by who I’ve chosen to follow on Twitter. I don’t want to pat
myself on the back, but you are what you choose to read. That applies to
everyone on virtually any subject. If you read broadly, and choose the best of
different viewpoints, I think you’re getting very good journalism right now. If
you’re reading narrowly, you’re not.”
-----David
Simon, creator of The Wire and former reporter for the Baltimore Sun:
“You can’t have drama without
conflict. And you can’t have melodrama without good guys and bad guys. The problem
for journalism is: Our actual problems are bigger, more complicated, more
sprawling and complex, than good guys and bad guys. I don’t take any issue with
the press attending to conflict. That’s Job One, actually. But the simplicity
of the narrative is incredibly debilitating. News organizations chase simple narratives, and if they are
prize-hunting, they look for an evil actor. Such folks can be found, to be
sure, and a scandal is a scandal. But it is mortifying to realize that much of
the press thinks exposing the overt scandal is the equivalent of examining,
assessing, and arguing for systemic solutions to systemic problems.”
-----Dean
Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times:
“The media did not create Trump. I don’t think the media missed a story
of Trump, or failed to scrutinize Trump — that’s a ridiculous criticism. The
criticism that might be valid is whether
the media understood the circumstances that caused so many Americans to vote
for Donald Trump. It’s always hard to have your finger on the pulse of the
country. It’s one of those things that we’re always beating ourselves up for.
We probably didn’t quite understand the deep economic fallout after the
financial crisis a few years ago. There were fewer national correspondents out
in the country, and we’re one of the last institutions to have a big national
staff. That’s probably part of it. Some of the anger was quiet, and Donald
Trump came along and turned the volume up. The anger hadn’t quite showed up in
ways that were obvious until he came along. But our job is to be out in the
country, trying to understand the country, and to reflect the country back to
itself in some way.”
-----Tucker
Carlson, founder and editor in chief of the Daily Caller:
“The real problem with journalism is groupthink. My father was a
journalist — he never graduated from high school, he joined the Marines as a
17-year-old and then went to work at the L.A. Times. It was not a
profession; it was a trade, and you had a whole diverse field of people
entering it. Now, for a bunch of reasons — and this is the problem with
American society more broadly, in my view — it’s …….filled with people who
think exactly the same, who are from the same backgrounds, who have the same assumptions about everything. And you get a much
less interesting product when you have that. And you also get a lot of fearful
people……. And they get older and they realize, ‘I’ve got tuitions, and this is
actually a pretty shaky business model on which to build a career,’ and they
just become unwilling to take any risk at all. When was the last time you saw
anybody in the press — except the fringe press — really write a piece that
challenged the assumptions of their neighbors? That would actually make their
friends in Brooklyn avert their gaze?”
-----Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editor of the Intercept:
“I think
that a lot of coverage decisions that get made are often made subconsciously —
most journalists think they don’t actually make decisions about what’s
newsworthy and what isn’t, that their media outlets cover anything that’s
newsworthy. And this is plainly not the case — there’s huge numbers of obviously newsworthy stories that are
routinely, systematically ignored by large media outlets. One major pattern
is that the political media in particular views everything through a partisan
lens. Journalists want to be respected by their colleagues and they want to be
mainstream, and in American political discourse, the mainstream figures are the
Establishment heads of both political parties.
“So if
there’s some sort of dispute between the two parties, where the Democrats think
one thing and the Republicans think another, that tends to get covered, because
that’s viewed as an important political debate. But on the issues where there’s
bipartisan consensus, where the two parties essentially agree, which is far
more common than disagreeing, those tend to get completely ignored. So you look
at U.S. support for Israel, or the idea that the U.S. should have the largest
military in the world, or that we should continue with our state of mass
incarceration, or just the general neoliberal economic policies that both
parties believe in and support, those tend to be completely excluded from any
kind of media discussion or coverage.”
Source
The Case
Against the Media. By the Media http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/case-against-media.html
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Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
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