Introduction
Most Americans have a strange, but innocent, belief about how the news media decides what is and isn’t news.
Growing criticism of the media at the beginning of the new century has encouraged many of them to give voice to that belief, and the voice is instructive. One critic, in a recent letter to the editor in San Diego, CA, found the heart of the issue in a single sentence.
“It’s strange to me,” said the reader, Stuart Jewell, “that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism is no mystery; it is as black-and-white as mathematics. Journalism uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs. If first-year journalism students can’t define what news is by the end of the semester, and its relative levels of urgency, then they flunk the class.
This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they never studied “News” in school. Not their fault; it isn’t taught. But it should be, right alongside English, civics and computer literacy. In this age, of all ages, the study of “News” should not be confined to journalism studies; it should be a core social sciences class in every American high school.
In the Introduction to its 2001 book, “The Elements of Journalism,” the Committee of Concerned Journalists states: “In the new century, one of the most profound questions for democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means, and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.” The answer from citizens, according to Stuart Jewell, is that citizens have no idea what to care about. They have never been taught what their role is.
That is the purpose of this course of instruction. Welcome to one journalist’s attempt to articulate what an independent press means. It is time for the public to learn its responsibility in the media-public relationship, as a step in accepting that responsibility. If a course in civics equips students with the information and means to participate in a democratic society, “Conjugating the News” will provide students the knowledge and background to become discerning consumers of information, in which they are immersed every single day. Their subject of study will be the same subject that media professionals have been studying for years.
Actually, my first-year journalism students never flunk my class because they don’t know what news is. They may flunk because they can’t spell, can’t punctuate, and slide around grammar as if it were a greased flagpole. But they don’t flunk the news part, because of a wonderfully elegant wrinkle: they know what the news is before they ever get to my class.
I didn’t understand that until about five years ago. I had been teaching, for some years, the survey “Mass Media and Society” course. Doing that work, it became clear to me that the definition of “news,” and the values and categories of news, were not created by the media. They were created by early humans, tens of thousands of years before the media existed. Taken together, they constituted a “reaction package,” that humans from the earliest days to the present, carry around with them all the time. The media simply took that reaction package, starting about 3,500 years ago, and turned it into a business.
It made me curious. I wanted to test it. Back in my “Introduction to News Writing” classes, on the first day of the next semester, I said, “Before I teach you a single thing in this class, you already know what the news is.” I gave them a page of notes, several lines of details, arranged randomly, as if they were notes in a reporter’s notebook, about an event that had “happened” that day.
“Imagine you are reporters for the morning paper. I want you to look at this information, then write the first sentence of the story – what this information is about – and bring it with you to our next class. I will ask you to read your sentence, and we will see if you know what the news is.”
Their rate of success was about 90 percent, and after five years – 10 semesters – of testing, it remains steady at about that level. They were carrying around the reaction package all along. It must mean that most – practically all – of the American population knows what the news is. It must mean that Stuart Jewell knows what the news is. So what is it, about what columnists and reporters do, that seems strange to him?
It brings us back to the beginning: education. A free press is vital to the survival of a democracy, so vital that it predates the Constitution. Very interesting to realize that the Constitution did not create press freedom. The First Amendment states, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.” The key word is “abridging,” which means to reduce in scope, or diminish. That means the framers understood, in the infant democracy after the Revolution, that freedom of the press already existed.
The First Amendment guarantees the press almost absolute power to do its job. Now we have evidence, more than 200 years later, of citizens to whom this work, of columnists and reporters, seems “strange.” I remember that strangeness very well, leafing through an algebra book that had just been issued to me and thinking, “I’ll never learn this stuff.” But I did, and I was allowed to move on toward graduation.
What is strange to me is that if algebra is required for high school graduation in the United States of America, then news – this conscious-unconscious reaction package that we all carry, that the media turned into a business – sure as hell should be, too. Public knowledge of where news comes from is vital to a basic understanding, and a basic acceptance, of how this enormously powerful, beyond abridging, press, the mainstream media, does its job. That acceptance is at the heart of the “profound question” posed by the Committee of Concerned Journalists for democratic society in the 21st century.
There is something else the public needs to understand. The media originally turned the human “reaction package” into a business to keep people informed. But a second media function, totally separate and distinct from information and news, has evolved. The reaction package makes people vulnerable to manipulation. Over time, the media, and groups (entertainment, marketing, political) who are expert in using media, learned and developed extremely sophisticated ways to use the package to manipulate public reactions. That second, enormously powerful, function of the media, is a powerful second reason for public education in the conjugation of the human responses that started it all.
3 Comments:
Yes, and everyone comes to a story or issue with preconceptions, existant "frames" about things, unchallenged assumptions, predispositions, and a whole constellation of concepts that we tuck into "bias."
For most American readers, "liberal democracy" is that default "bias," so when they read something that does not fit that bias, they react. Ironically, liberal democracy is quite elastic of necessity and by definition, but it is the fundamental readers' bias. Certainly, other biases come to the fore as well; religious, political, economic, cultural, etc. But the one bias most readers share is liberal democracy, however elastic that appellation.
So here's the question: Readers are certainly an educated class by definition, and most know their own biases quite well. What seems to jar us is that reporters' biases are no less involved. When the two biases conflict, reaction occurs. But don't reporters learn that "objectivity" is the criterion?
Often, as a reader, I'll deliberately choose a different "default" from my usual biases in order to "see" the matter quite differently. Do reporters do this? To me, at least, that is how objectivity is attained. And, maybe I'm wrong, but readers' reactions to "news" almost always regards their upset that their default bias has been trespassed.
Maybe it's trivial, but I frequently find I must read "opposing" default biases of the same story to get a sense of its veracity. Why? Because reporters don't do this for us. Rarely do they question their own bias sufficiently to give readers a sense of objectivity. Never a story is read that the question: Did the reporter consider this instead of that when writing this? does not occur.
Example: The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have deliberately different "frames." That's a given. Fundamentally the "same" story reported by both organizations often produces quite different reports. But why, as a reader, must I read these two (three, etc.) reports to get a true sense of the story? Isn't it the reporters' job to do this? Biases on editorial and opinion pages are one thing, but in reportage it's quite annoying. Don't reporters ask themselves as "reader personas" the same questions we ask when presented with the "facts?" Clearly, they do not.
When I read an article in Reason Magazine, I know its default, and keep it in mind. Ditto, the New Yorker, New Republic, Dissent, New Criterion, etc. But these articles are polemical generally; they stake a position and try to defend it with evidence. That's the nature of opinionated journals. But news is different, or so I hope. News begins with "facts" and gives reasons for its importance. But a good reporter goes beyond the "facts," and reasons and should ask questions that his reader is likely asking. Amazingly, most reporters' questions are surprisingly narrow in focus. Why? Why must a reader/viewer scan dozens of reports of the very same story in order to get a true sense of it?
Take television journalism: Why does each broadcast network, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, the Lerher Report, etc., all "spin" their reports to fit an agenda? That's not news, that's propaganda. If one reporter sees X and another sees X-1, okay. The more nuances the better. Yet that's the exception. Reporters "take" the news and spin it. If a rightwing organization, then a rightwing "report." If a leftwing organization, then a leftwing "report." Journalism has devolved into a propaganda warfare.
Fox News Channel, for example, finally brought rightwing questions to a story. Unfortunately, it's the only kind of questions FNC continues to ask. It seems to me that reporters' tasks are to be more catholic than their typical provincialism. And that's the rub.
Since I'm on a roll, two more questions:
(1) A major story this past week was the joint coalition/Iraqi military exercises in Iraq. Why was this story important? Surprisingly, only Fox seemed to answer that question, perhaps unintentionally. Reason: It was important because (i) it's the first time in over three years that 800 Iraqis actually joined the 650 predominant U.S. soldiers in combat; (ii) no weapon was fired; and (iii) it caught the Pentagon by surprise. Yep, that is significant. The story itself isn't, but Fox's context is. How did Fox capture that significant nuance and others totally miss it?
(2) John on AmericaBlog is a man on a mission: Why don't the White House press corps ask, more precisely challenge, the White House for its transparently spurious claims? John's right. Why do the White House press corps simply pass along the Administration's line without so much as a, But? Former AP writer Helen Thomas was always annoying, because she always questioned Administration claims. Over numerous administrations. She's gone, and so are the questions. Why?
You're jumping from the Introduction to Chapter 23. At the heart of your interest are a couple of realities, one public, one media. The media is compelled to compete for consumers' eyeballs, to show to advertisers so everyone can stay in business. The public reality is demographics. The liberal democracy demographic represents the huge belly of the bell curve, but even in the middle, demographics are at work, spreading readers and viewers to either side of middle. Within that range, news providers can do no better than find a balance in their stories that is agreeable both to the left and right of middle in the liberal democracy. In other words, there is no perfect balance, even when balance is the mission. Then there are the demographic groups that become conscious targets of Fox, MSNBC, etc., because they can count on those eyeballs coming back to that spin. They may be into reporting, but they are very manipulative at the same time, using the reaction package as a sales tool.
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