Restoring Journalism Trust: Is It Too Late?
The Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust project officially began last week with a Restoring the Trust symposium at Kennesaw State University and the announcement of an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism grant to make the project possible. However, as we move forward there is this nagging issue: Are we, in talking about Restoring the Trust, fine tuning the fiddle as Rome is burning?
Jay Rosen, chair of the New York University journalism department, says the age of the mass media is just an age, Philip Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper, talks of the death spiral and Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, says the Roman Empire that was the mass media is crumbling.
So how do we as journalists, journalism teachers and citizens, deal with the firestorm that is fueled by conservative and liberal critics, the swarming blogosphere, revenues being siphoned off to places like eBay and craigslist, declining trust and declining audiences? Do we deal just with the trust issues and let others deal with the firestorm? Or do we try to deal with Restoring the Trust in the context of all the other issues?
If we are just going to stick to the trust issues, we could dip back about four years to the Freedom Forums Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists booklet (There’s a similar booklet for television journalists). In the booklet for newspaper journalists, the table of contents includes this listing:
Newspapers are unfair when, they:
Get the facts wrong
Refuse to admit errors
Wont name names (as in anonymous sources)
Have ignorant or incompetent reporters
Prey on the weak
Concentrate on bad news
Lack diversity
Allow editorial bias in news stories
Cant admit that sometimes theres no story
For last Fridays Restoring the Trust symposium at Kennesaw State University, we used that frame to start the audience interactive discussion with our three panelists: Angela Tuck, public editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Richard T. Griffiths, CNN editorial director, and Matt Towery, chairman of InsiderAdvantage.com and a TownHall.com columnist.
Another framing element is our initial rationale for doing this project. In writing the Ethics and Excellence grant proposal we wrote:
Change is a slow process and it will not begin by itself. It needs catalysts for action, and the proposed project is designed to be one of those catalysts. With proper presentation, the project organizers believe journalists can see which changes would be beneficial to them, their profession, and the general public.
Change might be a slow process, but when the interactive symposium ended last Friday, after an hour and a half, several of the 100 people in the audience told the symposium organizers that we ended the talk too quickly. At least this audience, which was heavily weighted towards academics, was eager to talk about the issue and to be able to voice their opinions, while allowing the journalists to provide theirs.
Griffiths agrees saying he spends a lot of time speaking to churches and other groups. He tells of a journalist who went to Iraq risking his life each day, while leaving spouses and children at home. Ego might be involved, he said, but a bigger motivation is that he believes he is making a difference.
The Project for Excellence in Journalisms, State of the News Media 2004 found:
Journalists believe they are working in the public interest and are trying to be fair and independent in that cause. This is their sense of professionalism.
However, the report also said,
Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s.
An apparent disconnect exists between what the public perceives from the outside and what journalists perceive from the inside. So one lesson from the symposium is journalists and journalism organizations must find ways to bridge this perception gap. Of course, that sounds almost too obvious to mention, but alas it is not happening.
At the audience interactive symposium, someone asked why television doesnt report more serious, thoughtful news. Another audience member, Mike Klein, a director of Georgia Public Broadcasting productions, said WBBM-TV in Chicago at one time was a ratings leader, but then experimented with an in-depth, high level discussion approach to the news. It lost viewers, Klein says, and never recovered them.
Basically, he put the onus for low quality TV news on audience preferences. Klein might be right, but just being right and throwing the problem back to the audiences that are abandoning the news, might not be the best strategy for Restoring the Trust.
This is just Part I of Framing the Issues. Next week I will post other issues that I believe have to be developed as we try to deal with Restoring the Trust in the midst of all the other issues slamming into journalism. Of course, I am always seeking the ideas of other people interested in Restoring the Trust.
February 18th, 2005 at 6:29 pm
I think a big part of the problem is that we journalists take ourselves too seriously. The old maxim used to be: “Never get into an argument with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” Our power often gets the better of us. Those days are beginning to fade. The mainstream media outlets no longer have uncontested power. Perhaps this new competition will help in ways that we can’t yet predict.
February 18th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Think about how many of those criticisms (get facts wrong, don’t admit mistakes) are the main ammunition for blogs. Newspaper reporters and editors have never had to face the wrath of a readership with any power.
February 20th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
Hi Matt:
Jeff Jarvis and Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, are having an interesting discussion on how bloggers and the mass media might, or might not, work together.