Time to get off the carnival ride
The media is making us dizzy, and it’s at least partly by design.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
The media is a disaster. It’s a basic refrain often heard in America.
Only about a third of Americans think that we journalists aren’t a partisan bunch of hacks — especially those of us in the New York and Washington press corps, and even more so those of us covering U.S. politics. (I just moved to Seattle after 20 years in NYC media. Please don’t @ me — I’m still writing for outlets back East.)
And yet, while it hurts to admit this, I get it. Partisan and just plain crap journalism has broken the public trust that once allowed most people to see our work as a tool critical for the health of the country’s democracy — to see that media can and does help improve public understanding of the difficult and important issues of the day.
“The media coverage tends to entertain and outrage more than inform,” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U. who writes the blog PressThink, said Friday on “The Ezra Klein Show.” “It amplifies our partisan instincts instead of our civic ones.”
Rosen explained that “the news system isn’t really designed for public understanding. It’s designed to produce new content every day.” It’s all about the clicks. The eyeballs. The ways outlets can show advertisers and funders they are succeeding. Aka it’s all about the money.
And while many people, including friends, have tried to school me in how politicians and corporations make every decision for me about what I cover, whether I know it or not, it just isn’t true. I realize there are deeper issues at play, but not once in my career have I been curbed by an editor because of deference to such people. It happens, sure. But not with the frequency non-journalists seem to think it does.
Rosen uses the example of news coverage of the machinations behind moving a bill through Congress, which often winds up resembling a kind of insider-baseball “drama.” He talks about how that sort of play-by-play “horse-race” journalism offers not information useful to the public in understanding the world, but at best “a sort of an appreciation for who are the savvier players in this drama,” resulting in nothing but “cheap drama itself.”
Remember how many insane soap operas the last administration starred in? What if the media had instead framed stories like the Russia investigation, or so-called voter fraud, with an intent to clarify instead of simply gobbling clicks with grabby headlines?
Rosen identifies a fundamental problem with a press obsessed with feeding the ever-starving content beast: Consumers mainly end up with a lot of surface coverage. I see it as the media putting readers on a Tilt-a-Whirl, dizzying them with tricks and spins — neat graphics! dramatic speculation! breathless explainers! — rarely pausing the ride to allow heads to stop spinning and ensure that people truly understand an issue.
And while this problem may have become exacerbated recently, it’s not exactly a new one. Bob Woodward saw it when he told “Frontline” in 1996: “Ultimately, I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.”
Rosen’s alternative to horse-race journalism is something he calls “the citizen’s agenda style”: “instead of beginning with the candidates and the operatives and the strategy and the horse race and all that — the industry of politics — you begin with a very simple question: What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? And you ask the people you’re trying to create your coverage for this question again and again.”
His full argument is nuanced and fascinating, and I encourage you to read or listen to all of it.
Asking people what they want — on a massive scale — becomes more difficult as the news industry continues to lay off thousands of journalists and shutter hundreds of newspapers. It is literally a matter of too few bodies to do the work. (Although, it’s probably more accurate to say that there are lots of bodies wanting to do the work, but few places willing or able to pay them.)
Nearly 1,800 papers have shut down since 2004, according to research by Penelope Abernathy, a scholar at the University of North Carolina. And the country lost 90 more newspapers during the pandemic.
Fewer local papers means less voter participation, less government transparency and more political polarization, studies have shown.
Not only are we suffering broad consequences like hearing and learning less about parts of the country that are already traditionally under-covered by large, East Coast news outlets, but the industry that remains is also not hiring enough people to possibly make up for that reporting deficit. Newsrooms have lost about 30,000 jobs — about a quarter of the workforce — since 2008, according to Pew Research. All the while, nearly a quarter of the U.S. press corps is concentrated in the Northeast, which holds just 18 percent of workers in general.
This leads to what I think of as the “Center of the Universe” problem in U.S. media.
Recently, a newish journalist asked me to look over a couple pitches that she felt were strong but that national outlets weren’t taking. One was a local story. Not “hyper-local” — aka situated in a tiny town — but local to a midsize non-East Coast city. Immediately, I saw the problem.
“We’re a bunch of snobs,” I told her.
The gatekeepers of the U.S. media see their backyard as the Center of the Universe — and for most of them, their backyard is New York City and Washington. If a story like this journalist’s wasn’t happening in the Center of the Universe, it wouldn’t be of any use to the universe. Which is not to say that no stories from her city would be of interest to the NYC/D.C. media deciders. It’s just that if it’s a story that is “happening everywhere,” then it better be grounded in a big, fat, media-ridden (and preferably Northeastern) city.
The journalist told me that my explanation was “validating.” That she’d suspected as much but that no one would outright say it. She was pitching stories that paid close attention to what mattered to the people she lives among, and she (rightly) believed that such a story would help others understand a broader problem, be they in New York, Boise or an unincorporated farm town.
Surrounded by their peers and their regular cast of sources, journalists can become trapped in a bubble within a bubble. Among reporters and their media outlets, there is an almost single-minded focus on covering what is important, which would be good if it wasn’t only important to those journalists, at those media outlets.
When journalists lose touch with their (often national) audience, it can lead to a spiraling kind of coverage that gets more and more niche, aimed at a smaller and smaller group of insiders — what some call “elites” — which only exacerbates the problem Rosen identified. It’s just one more way in which large media outlets have lost their connection with what matters to Americans outside of an intensely navel-gazing circle.
One of the first things I learned in journalism school was never to alienate my readers. For an early assignment, I’d written what I thought was a very clever New Yorker-style column — very internal political gossip about Guliani’s New York, in a winking tone I thought seemed savvy. My professor was appalled. Did I really expect anyone — even in New York — to know what I was talking about, much less find any use in it? And what was with my snooty tone?
I was quickly disabused of insidery cleverness. I had been writing for me, and for my wonkish friends, and my professor reminded me in no uncertain terms of my responsibility to speak to a much, much larger audience — no less than “the public.”
I know that lesson is still taught by good professors in journalism school. But, unfortunately, when we get caught up in ourselves and in the horse race, and we forget that lesson — or simply don’t take it to heart in the first place — we risk pushing away the readers we so desperately need to reach to do our job well. And to reach them, as Rosen points out, we need to understand them, to know what they want, and how.
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The media as a whole (excluding notable independent reporters, and local reporters such as Julie K. Brown and Will Bunch) are increasingly becoming victims of their own choices. Woodward is a perfect example of a former journalistic icon devolving into a caricature, churning out meaningless books for dollars...long after the information divulged is no longer useful to inform public opinion. Another factor tarnishing the 4th estate is the lack of accountability. When Pelosi had power to slow the spread of authoritarianism, she chose instead to ignore it. Biden, campaigning to restore the 'soul' of America, has similarly chosen to ignore (and thus further marginalize) the vulnerable. If nothing happens when increasingly fascistic actions are taken or rampant corruption exposed, we can't be surprised when reporters stop covering such stories. Unfortunately, as we have seen the pattern with every struggling democracy lost to authoritarianism, a free press is the first casualty. It's clear that revamping libel laws is on the hit list of our remarkably corrupt SCOTUS. And then what?
I don’t live on the east coast but I do consider myself fortunate to have several good newspapers available, although their slants are obvious. Never was this more blatant than during the Detroit water cutoffs and the contamination of Flints water with lead. The national coverage in print was relatively small for both stories, but I never thought of it as snobbery. I read the Washington and New York papers for international and political stories, which the Detroit papers can’t begin to cover.
I understand the financial imperative to nearly all journalism, which is why my most trusted source is NPR. But it doesn’t have the capacity that a well funded newspaper has for in-depth reporting.
You didn’t ask, but I’d love for you to cover my biggest peeve right now. What’s up with all the journalists saving the juiciest exposes for their books? As employees of papers or networks, don’t their companies have the ability to publish that information? Scientists doing research at a university don’t own all the rights to their results. I didn’t expect more from John Bolton, but Bob Woodward? Jonathan Karl? Very disappointed.