If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.  If you do, you’re misinformed.

Attributed to Mark Twain

“A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.”

Glenn Greenwald

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today.  Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

Hunter S. Thompson

“The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism.” 

Carl Bernstein

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of journalism lately because of how much it affects the way we see the world.  People who get their news from different sources have more diametrically opposing views than ever before while displaying significantly less interest in truth.  When we consistently expose ourselves to a narrow range of information coming from journalists who vociferously express a particular narrative, it can be easy to mistake their opinions for our own and difficult to identify with anyone who holds views outside of this narrative.

And journalism has changed quite a bit as a result of so many fewer journalists coming from working class backgrounds.  To illustrate, a 2018 study conducted by the Journal of Expertise looked at a sample of 1,979 New York Times and Wall Street Journal employees and found nearly half attended an elite school, resulting in a disproportionate focus on those with connections and cognitive ability.  Now those with different attitudes, experiences, and abilities who don’t come from a wealthy background face far greater obstacles when trying to enter into the field. 

So I wanted to create a discussion focused on these questions I’ve thought about.  If you are interested in participating, definitely let me know.  This will be an online discussion.  Hopefully we can resume in person events soon. 

What sources do you get your news from?
How do you determine the credibility of these sources?
Do you seek out information from particular journalists or are you more likely to assess credibility based on the organization disseminating the information? 
To what extent do independent journalists pose a threat to traditional media?  Do these independent journalists serve as a danger for the reasons this professor claims?
Do you look to news more for entertainment or to achieve a greater understand of what’s happening in the world?  If the former, are you willing to sacrifice accuracy for entertainment?
Would you ever consider new sources to gain a more well-rounded worldview?
What qualities do journalists need to do their job effectively?  Are they different now than in the previous generation, and if so, how? 
What should a journalist’s role be?  Should it be confined to objectively giving information?  Or should they present information through a political lens in order to generate what they believe is the right outcome?
To what extent does cognitive ability determine expertise in journalism?  What other skills and qualities might play a role? 
How might those journalists who came from elite universities see the world differently than those who came from working class backgrounds? 
Would journalism benefit more from people who view themselves as gatekeepers of truth who believe they have a responsibility to protect the public from “misinformation” or truth-seekers who look to put forth controversial ideas that challenge the status quo?

Matt Taibbi elaborates on where journalism is at in his book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another.  Here is an excerpt:

“News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow?

The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.

The American Napoleon generated controversies at such a fantastic rate that stations like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox too) were able to keep ratings high by moving from mania to mania, hyping stories on the way up but not always following them down. The moment the narrative premise of any bombshell started to fray, the next story in line was bumped to the front.

News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism.

This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.

This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.

A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting ones.

Moreover, if after publication another shoe dropped in the form of mitigating information, audiences were disinterested, even angry. Those updates were betrayals of the entertainment contract, like continuity errors. Companies soon learned there was a downside to once-mandatory ethical practices. Silent edits at newspapers became common, and old standards like the italicized editor’s note at the bottom of the page letting you know this or that story had been “updated” began to disappear.

The political impact of all this was that the news watcher in the Trump years became more addicted to the experience of being outraged, while retaining less about specific reasons for outrage. Audiences remembered some big stories and big themes, but stopped digesting each story on its own, rarely bothering to look back at the meaning of various manias after they’d died down.

As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history. In the Trump era, news audiences volunteered to stop the disobedient act of remembering.

They brought a pure, virginal belief to watching news, and agreed to unquestioningly accept any new versions of the past put forward. This was Hate Inc. brought to its logical conclusion. Fox and MSNBC already knew how to monetize anger by setting audiences against one another. The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.

Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.”