Journalism's trust problem
It's an editorial and a business challenge
It’s weird taking a week off when you don’t have a job to take off from. And it’s also weird when taking a vacation means going to your parents’ house for a few days while they were away because they have a pool and you need a change of scenery. Anyway, I’m back. Hope you all are well and had a good week.
Let’s dive in.
This past Saturday I turned 42, the number that is ‘the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.’ After some dinner and dessert, I fired up the old Twitter box to see what was happening and I saw this tweet from Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton all over my feed:
Journalism is often a follow-the-herd environment. And this one was a doozy. Why? Simply because the frame of this story, via notification, focuses on the actions of the President and not the substance (that the EOs can’t work, oh, and he wants to gut Social Security, a legislative branch thing).
Framing is important, as it’s how the public reads both the text and subtext. Remember this every time the political press talks about the President’s tone:
Putting Benton’s masochistic notification behavior aside, the point he makes in less than 280 characters succinctly tells the story of why journalism the craft and journalism the business model are, at the moment, on shaky ground.
The systemic challenges of structural racism have been under the Klieg lights the last few months in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The lights have also been shining on the media industry, showing everything from racism to classism. Which makes sense since we’re the ones telling these stories.
But that’s an important point, the fact that we tell the stories also means that the errors we make are out in the open. And while we don’t like to get facts wrong (any journalist will tell you the most frightening thing is to make a correction to a story) those errors can be devastating (think about the role the media played in the lead up to the Iraq War; or Clinton’s emails, to name a couple examples from this century).
This ultimately leads to a public that distrusts the professionals whose jobs it is to ask the government why they do a thing; ask business leaders why they do a thing; ask the most influential people of our society why they do a thing. And with that distrust, a vacuum is created.
It used to be a small vacuum, filled on the margins of society. We’d call them cults. Now, it IS society and we call them QAnon and anti-vaxxers and any other conspiracy-spreading group. QAnon, for example, has become so prevalent the president of the United States shares this group’s messages to his 85 million followers on Twitter. This is not ‘aliens live among us’ or ‘the moon landing was staged’ conspiracies; these are conspiracies that put people’s lives in danger.
Last week Gallup and the Knight Foundation looked at the rapid rise of Americans’ distrust of media and found
The low levels of public trust in the nation’s polarized media environment have left open the possibility for dangerous false narratives to take root in all segments of society during these emergent crises. At a time when factual, trustworthy information is especially critical to public health and the future of our democracy, the striking trends documented in these pages are cause for concern.
The report is a sobering one. Highlighting how partisanship breeds distrust, John Sands, the director for learning and impact at Knight Foundation, writes on Medium:
Many feel the media’s traditional roles, such as holding leaders accountable, is compromised by bias, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans who say they see too much bias in the reporting of news that is supposed to be objective as “a major problem,” up from 65% in the 2017 Knight/Gallup study. They see it in their own news sources (56%), and 7 in 10 are concerned about bias in the news other people are getting, the survey finds. Some 3 in 4 Americans worry that owners of media companies are influencing coverage.
There’s an ideological component, too, as 70 percent of Republicans have a “very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of news media,” while only 22 percent of Democrats believe the same.
Interestingly, a separate report released last week from two professors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign found that reporters covering the Hill tend to talk to themselves. A lot.
Their interactions on Twitter, however, show them congregating in even smaller “microbubbles,” says a recent study. The journalists within each communicate more among themselves than with journalists outside the group.
That means Beltway journalism “may be even more insular than previously thought,” say study authors Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng, “raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.”
Which makes this data point in the Gallup/Knight report that much more interesting:
Americans want more newsroom diversity. But they differ on what kind.. This breakdown is along party and racial lines. Democrats (49%) and blacks (60%) prioritize racial/ethnic diversity in hiring, while Republicans (51%) and whites (35%) prioritize ideological diversity in journalists’ political views.
The questions we should be asking ourselves, in addition to how do we make the industry more equitable, with more diverse thinking, is how can we not make the mistakes like those Benton highlighted.
Perhaps the reason we make these mistakes is because we lay off old people (hi, says this laid off 42 year old!) because they typically earn more than the 22 year old fresh out of college who will work nights and weekends for a little more than minimum wage. And who will pump out 10 stories a week (more on that in a moment). The knowledge and experience gets boxed up with every layoff. Of course, that’s just one avenue.
Another (and perhaps less self-serving one) has been the collision of editing and managing reporters. Both are hard on their own, but when the pressures of a business model force newsrooms to make decisions based on varying incentives (e.g., get the scoop even if unsubstantiated or wait a day to do more reporting and worry that another outlet publishes, to flooding the zone with content because dumb executives fall into a trap in thinking that more content equals more pageviews which equals more ad impressions), the profession, and more important, the reader, loses.
In a way, it seems as if we’re kinda like the modern NBA, where reporters, editors and managers are stronger and faster than previous eras, but instead of boxing out and following up a shot for an offensive rebound, we’re running up and down the court, chucking up three pointers all day long. The fundamentals have evolved. Newsrooms, in some respects, have lost that fundamental aspect of our jobs. (Yes, I know. Get off my lawn.)
We still ask the 5Ws, but our follow-ups are non-existent (or arguably worse, we ask 5 questions at once, giving the subject the ability to choose which question they want to answer), and we make lots of unforced errors. Part of that is because, as we’ve said, the industry has been hollowed out, as it is not financially viable, nor stable, to be a journalist. There are 6 PR people for every reporter.
But another reason we make mistakes is a business factor, one that has been 20ish years in the making, and one might argue the direct result of the outsized imprint Gawker had on the media landscape.
While the very good website brought blogging to the masses with smart opinion writing, perhaps Gawker’s lasting legacy is its scoreboard, the giant screens that showed writers how well (or not) their stories were performing. Gawker didn’t introduce the pageview rat race, it just sped it up with amphetamines.
Around the same time, Chartbeat entered the fray and now every publisher checks metrics, those bullshit numbers to say how effective a story was, on a minute-by-minute basis. And publishers put pressure on newsroom leaders to hit these arbitrary numbers, sometimes by any means necessary (which ultimately leads to clickbait of the worst kind).
And while we will continue to have conversations about pageviews and unique visitors because we are nothing if not a sclerotic industry that refuses to use any common sense, we still have publications that put the onus on the reporter/writer to attract eyeballs.
The new game, however, is membership-via-story. Reporters at several outlets are now judged not on the quality of the journalism but on how many subscribers they attract. (This seems madness to me, but that’s a different story.)
The point is: the incentives of committing acts of journalism have changed for the majority of reporters and newsrooms, predicated on converging factors from the business side to the staff of a newsroom to the role of the platforms.
All of which has now changed how Americans view and respond to the news media. I often think about the kicker to this Ben Smith piece about how the news media could get the election wrong and why trust in media is vital to our national interests (bolded emphasis mine):
But conveniently, a group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania. For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.
But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.
In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.
Getting the story is important (and yes, there is great journalism happening every day), but for many newsrooms, so is hitting ‘publish’ quicker than sometimes should be. This is also, true, by the way, of newsletters.
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Thin Lizzy, “The Boys Are Back”
Some interesting links:
The Trump Pandemic (Slate)
Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong media tycoon arrested under security law (BBC)
McDonald’s sues former CEO Easterbrook, alleges he lied about relationships he had with workers (CNBC)
WarnerMedia Layoffs Expected to Hit Warner Bros., HBO (Variety)
Exclusive: Microsoft faces complex technical challenges in TikTok carveout (Reuters)