Clement: Blame credibility for media’s demise
Published: October 7, 2009
Long Island Business News
What if what’s ailing the news business has nothing to do with the Internet?
A new study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press shows public distrust of the news media has grown to an all-time high. Not only does 63 percent of the public doubt the accuracy of the news reported, 60 percent believe the news is laden with political bias.
Yet, the media fervently chronicles the rise of the Internet as the culprit behind traditional media’s demise. Technology is blamed for everything from speeding up news cycles to fractionalizing audience share to new competition from social media.
Sounds plausible, right? Not so fast: Interestingly enough, there’s yet to be a cause-and-effect story that ties together eroding credibility and diminishing audiences.
When credibility is your business and you’ve been diagnosed with a massive case of mistrust, it would stand to reason that technology is merely a symptom, not the disease.
Put another way: What business can get away with failing in its core mission and expect to survive?
News has strayed from its fundamental purpose. What once was a public necessity has morphed into meaningless filler and entertaining banter. In fact, the news business has knowingly and willfully exchanged currency, trading in its credibility for likeability. Now that the industry is no longer needful (read: credible) to the public, it needs to be wanted. After all, if people like you, they’ll make time for you.
The strategy became most transparent and best symbolized by taking the chair of Old Iron Pants and bequeathing it to America’s Sweetheart.
But likeability isn’t working. Let’s blame technology.
Ironically, technology actually could be the savior of the news industry – if it knew how to use it. Wrongfully, the industry decided technology equals faster reporting, less time to check facts and no time to put issues into perspective. That hasn’t worked out so well, as anemic print editions, shuttered publications and bleeding financials so attest.
The next cure-all attempt: Package and deliver news so fresh it hasn’t happened yet. Reporting on speculation frees the news to showcase its personality – and it absolves reporters of pesky fact checking.
Instead, the public is moving toward social media, the success of which relies heavily on the public’s ability to create their own circles of trust and share news, opinions and information from people they believe in.
This is the story you won’t see anywhere.
Jaci Clement is executive director of the Fair Media Council. You may reach her at jaci.clement@fairmediacouncil.org.
Jaci’s column archive, click here
Quotables
”I support the free press, let’s just get them out of the room.” – George W. Bush
“The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.” – Spiro Agnew
“The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.” -David Brinkley
“What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies and virtuous railroad contractors?” -Anton Chekhov
“If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press… They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds.”- Bill Moyers
“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast. ” -William Tecumseh Sherman
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”-Henry David Thoreau
“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’ ” -Lyndon B. Johnson
“As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.” – Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais
“Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.” -Liz Smith
“I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“The organization of our press has truly been a success. Our law concerning the press is such that divergences of opinion between members of the government are no longer an occasion for public exhibitions, which are not the newspapers’ business. We’ve eliminated that conception of political freedom which holds that everybody has the right to say whatever comes into his head.” - Adolf Hitler
“I am always in favor of the free press but sometimes they say quite nasty things.” -Winston Churchill
“Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” -G.K. Chesterton
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.” – Rep. Oscar Callaway (D-Texas), Congressional Record, Feb. 9, 1917
“The problem, if there is a problem in this country, is because we have a free press people have no idea what it’s like to live in a country that doesn’t.” -Art Buchwald
“It is well to remember that freedom through the press is the thing that comes first. Most of us probably feel we couldn’t be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free.” -Edward R. Murrow
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”- Thomas Jefferson
“The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness. ” -Eric Sevareid, “The Press and the People,”1959
“It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.” -Walter Cronkite
“Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts.”- Kahlil Gibran
“The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: – Concentrated Power of the Big Press. – Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. – Governmental control of the press. – Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. – Big Business mentality. – Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. – Social blindness.” -Max Lerner
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.” -Jim Morrison
“The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic – just one of those unfortunate things.” -G. Gordon Liddy
