One gentleman sent me a provocative e-mail this week:
“Why do so many Americans mistrust the news?
“In Media Power: Who is Shaping Your Picture of the World? Robert Stein ascribes journalists’ loss of credibility less to political polarization than the ‘raw flood of facts, factoids and fake news’ from cable, computers and the proliferation of print.
“A former chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, instructor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and media critic for New York Magazine, Stein asserts that readers and viewers are being ‘stuffed with information but starved for understanding,’ a ‘deprivation by surfeit’ that fuels charges of media bias.
” ‘As news outlets multiply,’ he writes, ‘we are bombarded with repetitive and fragmentary reports that compete for our attention at the expense of comprehension and coherence. Reporters and editors are under more pressure to break a story rather than help us understand it.’
“Originally published in 1972, Media Power foretold social, political and cultural chaos from a 24/7 news environment. The new edition, just published in paperback by Universe, highlights its current relevance.
” ‘How,’ Stein asks, ‘did we get to be so suspicious of news people while being governed by hypocrites, besieged by zealots and engulfed by celebrity criminals?
” ‘Journalists and historians may find some answers here. Concerned citizens may rue the loss of a time when Woodward and Bernstein were heroes, Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and we did not depend on Comedy Central’s Daily Show for more insight than daily White House briefings. This is how and why it all began to change.’ ”
Well, tell me how you really feel.
Kidding aside, the e-mail raises some salient points – especially based as it is on the work of a man like Stein who has the credentials to back up his opinions.
Probably the most critical point for newspaper journalists is the “stuffed with information but starved for understanding” criticism. Lets’ face it, not even the most remarkable TV journalist can create much nuance or slip in much context in 120 seconds – or, in extraordinary circumstances, 180 seconds.
That kind of explanatory journalism requires many column inches of space (plus photos and graphics and sidebar stories) and a bit of time from readers who want to know how the events reported today fit together with the facts reported on previous days to create a mosaic that makes sense in the context of today’s world.
I am not talking about the kind of opinion journalism you will find on the op-ed pages of newspapers across the country. Those columns are penned by people who want the public to believe they have all the answers. Overall, they tend to reinforce the opinions of their fans.
Great explanatory journalism is something else altogether. Let’s take the situation with the catastrophe left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Day by day, bits of news trickle out of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama – and, of course, out of Washington, D.C. But the press owes a hungry public more than simply reporting the trickles. It must regularly gather up all of the trickles and make a pond of news reporting to put the situation in context, make understandable a disaster of this magnitude, set out a timetable of what will come in the next months, begin to ask and answer the question: Will America rebuild residential areas and a city in as precarious a position as that of New Orleans?
Despite the bloviating out of Washington, certain government officials know the answers to those questions. And the public, which is footing the bill for this disaster through public funds and private contributions, deserves the answers.
