As a result the world of cyberspace is filled with many views of reality-many of them designed to distract us or to control and dictate our public behavior rather than inform our independent public judgment. This new competition requires a new journalism to assure that the view of the world in which the people live is one constructed with the integrity and reliability self-government requires.
There are two aspects of this new age that journalists must think more deeply and more creatively that I would like to talk about today. The first deals with the impact on the producer end of the information stream; the second is the impact on the consumer.
Those of you who are just beginning your career in journalism are assuming an obligation as public witness. A public witness who clearly and without distortion describes the actions and behavior of those who shape and direct public life. To enter into the life of a journalist is to accept personal responsibility for the credibility of your work and to serve the interests of the consumer of the information. You can do that only if you fully understand how the system works.
Here is how James D. The inability to be represented. The inability to convey to the people in authority what it is they think. The inability to have a searchlight put on the conditions of inequality. Freedom of the press is not a luxury. It is not an extra. It is absolutely at the core of equitable development. First let me discuss the problem of unlimited producers of information that itself conceals two challenges for journalism in the public interest-an economic challenge and content challenge.
The economic challenge affects even the largest and most powerful news organizations. As these organizations compete in a worldwide market the pressure to maximize profit and minimize costs has led to short-term decisions that threaten to undermine their ability to do quality work. At the same time new producers in the form of individual bloggers—the pamphleteers of our time—many of whom are tempted to use their perceived stature as independent journalists to sell the content of their journalism as we have just witnessed in recent weeks in the U.
One result of these changes in the U. Challenges which, left unaddressed, will destroy the vital link between the people and its press on which democracy depends. Each of those failures of journalism was the result of a thinning out of the professional staff in the newsrooms, and a failure of the top leadership to develop a newsroom culture that encourages openness, that rewards critical thinking and an acceptance by each journalist of personal responsibility for the credibility of their work.
The second aspect of the new world of producers is a new sophistication in information control by people and institutions of power. Sometime early in the 20th century those with their hands on the levers of economic and political power in democratic societies realized they are, at bottom, in the business of communications.
The realization that the success of their economic plan or their political program depends on their ability to get the majority of the people to see the world in their terms. As a result they have been involved in carefully focused and well-financed efforts to develop ever more subtle and effective ways to manipulate public behavior and understanding of the issues in which they have a vested interest.
In the meanwhile we in the newsrooms of the world have done little if anything to sharpen our understanding of how words are being used to manipulate our reports; how we react to events that are staged to determine what we deem important to cover. One of the reasons journalists in the United States now support the Committee of Concerned Journalists is the frustration they feel that news organizations in our country traditionally invest less money in the on-going training and education of their workers than almost any other industry.
As people and institutions we cover work diligently to learn new and better ways to control or avoid our scrutiny we seem content to plod along in the reporting and editing ruts we formed in the 19th century.
It is this problem on news production that bleeds over into the problem of consumers that journalism in the public interest faces. For many of our newsrooms too often work by rote, letting others decide what is important to cover and how it should be covered-letting judgments produced by vested interests be given, at best, equal display with documented, verified information produced by their own dis-interested staff—or, at worse, become the only judgment presented. Journalists can meet this new challenge only by applying our own enduring values as aggressively to expose these artificial worlds for what they are-self-serving propaganda.
The public whose well being as citizens depends on how well we do our work are becoming disillusioned. The public—all of us—are ignorant of many things.
But not stupid. Journalism preceded reporting, but from the s on, reporting became the center of American journalism. Only in the 20th century would the European press begin to borrow U. That everything is relative, it just depends on the standpoint you start from? But none of those students truly believes everything is relative.
If their computer malfunctions, they do not pray that it be fixed by divine intervention, nor do they normally kick the computer. Instead, they call tech support — they turn to experts. If one of the students, in the middle of class, feels a powerful and distressing pain in his chest, he can ask the philosophy professor for her guidance or he can ask the student at the next desk for her advice or he could ask someone else to call for emergency medical assistance.
Will he choose A, B, or C? He will choose C. He will seek medical assistance. Relativist or modernist or postmodernist, left or right — all will seek out experts. When people want to know on an everyday basis what is going on in the world, most turn to professional news gatherers who have earned reputations for reliability. But how is a person to know which of the news providers and purveyors around us can be trusted?
Expertise in reporting is not certified by many years of study and training as in medicine, or by easily measured results, as with the computer tech expert who either fixes or fails to fix the computer. But there are, nevertheless, some earmarks of evidentiary quality in journalism:. Professional news reporting is not easy. Its place in the world is still young—it really cannot be said to have existed in a full-bodied way for much more than a century.
But at its best, it has proved itself a bulwark of accountable democratic government and a thorn in the side of autocrats around the world. The economic fragility of the news media these days is troubling, and it sometimes leads venerable news organizations to prefer clicks to conscience, but reporters can and often do maintain a fierce allegiance to its highest ideals, and this is a force to reckon with. Part of the magical allure of news reading, headlines play a crucial role in turning news into a story.
Professional journalism is often a quick study. But it is the enemy of pride and pomposity and ignorance. When the president of the United States is a walking, talking, tweeting example of pride, pomposity, and ignorance, we need professional journalism more than ever.
We need a professional civil service loyal to its own standards of integrity, not loyal to whichever party or person happens to occupy the White House. We need an independent judiciary that, likewise, is dedicated first to enforcing the law, not to pleasing the occupant of the White House.
We need the whole energy of civil society — partisan and nonpartisan organizations across the political spectrum that seek to hold government accountable. His recent work shows how the order of candidate names on ballots influences election results. Why is the link between communications and democracy particularly relevant this year? Hamilton : Journalism is said to be the first rough draft of history.
As legislators this year debated impeachment and conviction, they turned to The Federalist Papers to understand how our institutions were designed to operate.
The Federalist Papers were first published in newspapers in New York in to promote the ratification of the United States Constitution. The fact that policy debates today are informed by the public forum offered by newspapers in the past is a reminder that the media have been intertwined with and integral to democracy since the founding. Krosnick: Democracy cannot function without communication.
This happens with the exchange of information from informants to voters. The most important informants have traditionally been the news media, but now communication can happen directly through social media from the candidates to voters and between voters, as well.
Decades ago, the messages communicated to voters by the media were relatively consistent across information providers; however, with the rise of MSNBC and Fox News, we increasingly see different messages being conveyed by different news outlets.
This means that the electorate is not homogeneous in their understandings of the candidates. Hamilton : Objectivity was a commercial product that only evolved in the late s with the high costs of printing presses. Each person is better able to find an outlet that reflects their worldview, which can also reinforce their political views and affect their electoral choices.
Criticisms of the media can also have political dividends. Historically, attacks by politicians on the credibility of the media have been part of a conscious strategy to weaken the accountability function of reporters. Krosnick: In recent years, we have seen a collapse of the notion that politically relevant facts can be discerned by news professionals, leaving voters uncertain about whether the messages communicated by those professionals can be trusted.
President Trump has played a major role in raising doubts about the veracity of information conveyed by major news organizations.
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