Journalism is Poised on a Pedestal of Rubble

This post has been composing itself in my mind for many years now. I’ve hesitated until now because I’ve never been able to put my finger on the problem. But I think I finally have it.

Journalism has for some time been placed on a pedestal for the public.

“Journalism is undeniably the most important profession in a democratic society.”

I am now at the point that I read a sentence like that, and my immediate response is “bullshit.” At this point, if you are a journalist, or have any direct attachment to news media, and you feel personally attacked, please take a moment and read this post first, Sharing our Lives. What I am writing about now, is about how I view journalism, as an aggregate influence in the public sphere. It is not about you, as a person.

Why do I think that it is bullshit that journalism is the most important profession in a democratic society? Because how the information is conveyed is usually imperfect. Is there good journalism? Absolutely. Have there been key stories that have reshaped society, governments and institutions? Absolutely.

But those key stories that shaped society include both the good and the bad. Bad journalism hurts as much as good journalism helps. And this, is the nub of the issue. Journalism has a lot of “bad apples” spoiling the barrel.

I wish I could find the research piece I read a long time ago. Because it has one essential point in it about print journalism. The much noted decline in subscriptions to newspapers and news magazines started before the Internet entered the public sphere. Information conveyed over the Internet has contributed to that demise, but it did not cause or start it. This is important.

When print journalism started, they were published after frequently being heavily censored by government. It was instinctively understood that disseminating bad information would reflect poorly on the government. But as private industry took over, journalism became a tool by which good and bad information could be used to influence public opinion and government policy.

It was a tool to shape opinion. That is the central flaw inherent in the premise of the importance of journalism.

The printing press was the dominant means of disseminating information, and the power of its influence notably attracted wealthy men of industry who wished to shape public opinion to their own ends. And thus began the era of the “right-wing/left-wing rag.” Competing local and national newspapers working to shape public opinion for their own partisan ends.

And as new technologies came along, new forms of journalism competed with the established titans of the print industry. The era of the 24 hour TV news network came and, that was probably, in my opinion, the pinnacle of when mostly objective journalism crested.

Objective journalism has been the basis of the ideal for the pedestal on which journalism was placed. But this basis was flawed from the beginning, it never encompassed all of what was published or broadcasted. I leave it to you to decide whether the resulting pedestal was half rubble or half solid. The point is, it was never solid to begin with.

The posts decrying the influence of social media are many and nearly infinite. But the benefit that I noticed is that Social Media, starting with Blogs, and now particularly with Twitter, has democratized access to subject matter experts. No longer are we solely relying on a journalist’s interpretation of what an expert said. No longer does journalism gate-keep access to experts, and decide who the experts are that we should listen to. (Historically speaking, the white male.)

This has become the critical fracture point between what journalism does, and how it has portrayed itself. Because the public can access expertise directly, we realize that journalism has often been shielding us from the whole truth. Shaping it, twisting it, or even lying to us completely. We have ripped away the curtain that shielded the public from the sources journalism reported on.

I have to pause here and state that, this was all inevitable and not all that revelatory. Many news organizations, to their credit, worked (or work) hard to eliminate bias and personal motivation that colour and distort the objectivity of the news being presented. To do so reliably, and regularly is probably an impossible goal. There are many examples of good journalism. It existed and does exist.

But the consumer exists in a world of good and bad journalism. To take in the one means taking in the other. We’re back to the nub of the issue.

As a consumer, how do you separate the good apples from the bad? I have often bitten into an apple that passed visual and tactile inspection and have experienced many a horrible apple.

If we the people, have to devote our time and energy to separating the good journalism from the bad, have to consume the ugly to discover its ugliness, what is the purpose of journalism? That was one of the problems it was trying to solve. To educate the common person.

But if the common person has to work at doing the research, and undertake the background learning to discern the truth of the journalism at hand, would it not take less time and energy to bypass the journalist and do the research ourselves?

I submit many people have intuited this conclusion themselves. It is not stated in this manner, but it is the seed that has caused many of us to distrust the media. The pedestal of journalism has crumbled back into the rubble it was built with. We, the consumers of journalism, are abandoning that which we no longer trust.

What we’re facing now is a crisis of trust. And the journalist, to be fair, is caught in the middle. Everyone, journalists included, wants to trust what they read and hear. A world where we have to research everything anyone tells us is a very exhausting world indeed. And the journalist is caught in the harsh light of public scrutiny. Omissions, errors, conflations of fact, and misapplied logic are easy to find with so many volunteer editors willing to apply themselves. The public can verify or undo the work the journalist has done.

The public is now caught in a Gordian Knot. Doing our own research is time consuming, exhausting and requires resources and skills that we do not have (or always have available.) Journalists, and the news organizations that fund them, have always faced this problem, but at a different scale. It is impossible to take in all of the information and issues the world, a country, a community experiences and to parse it, analyze it and accurately report it in a timely manner. And yes, those resources are being ever more constrained.

As our trusted sources have often been exposed as untrustworthy, and the world gets ever more complicated and hard to understand, how does the citizen stay well informed?

We are all journalists now. That is what makes me sympathetic to those that are and were in the professional role of the journalist. This shit is hard to do right.

As is often the case, understanding and describing the problem does not offer up any credible solutions. No person, and no organization can be perfectly objective. But we each have our tolerance for how often that person or organization can be wrong. Defenders of the media organizations, both public and private can and do argue that their chosen organization is mostly objective. Is mostly truthful.

But a “mostly” sound foundation is not a foundation you can trust at all.