End the Bias: We Need Newspapers
It is no secret that the newspaper business is in severe trouble. A big part of the problem is technological: The Internet has destroyed the classified sections, for example, and many younger people no longer read newspapers, causing circulation to decline.
But in my view, another huge issue is liberal bias, particularly about socially controversial issues involving stories that are part of what is known as the "culture war." I have been deeply involved in stories of that sort for many years and have seen the bias first hand over and over again--sometimes in the sneering attitude exhibited by the stories, but more often in the important facts not printed and the issues not pursued--as well as a decided scorn toward people of a certain moral persuasion. It has gotten so bad that many reporters are blinded by their own--or the notorious group-think narratives--and report it rather than the actual story at hand. This obvious and unremitting bias and disdain has permanently alienated about 1/3 of potential newspaper readers, which is suicidal in the current business atmosphere!
I take a back seat to no one in my desire to see reform in the journalism business, including concerted efforts to make it fairer and less condescending toward those with whom liberal reporters and editors disagree. But we need our newspapers (and I don't just say this because Secondhand Smokette is employed as a political columnist by the San Francisco Chronicle). Thus, I agree with Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star Ledger, when he writes in "All I Want for Christmas is a Newspaper," that bloggers "are no replacement for real journalists." Alas, and all too typically, he misses the bigger picture. From the column:
The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader--one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary." Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.Talk about myopic. If more reporters acted like real journalists instead of obvious ideological advocates, the problem with newspapers caused by technology would be far less acute because there would be tens of millions more people willing to shell out $1 for the local fish wrap.
This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they're under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.
Please, newspaper professionals, get a clue. Stop the bias and convince those you have alienated to give you another try. We need our newspapers!
Labels: Media Bias. We Need Newspapers.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:54 AM
22 Comments
22 Comments:
Bloggers aren't reporters! They're commentators!
My mother was a newspaper reporter,f then taught journalism and was a columnist. I grew up hearing about, and learning first-hand on the college newspaper, what is special about newspapers and why no other medium can replace them. There is something important, as well, about holding in one's hands a physical piece of paper and reading the information on it which no other medium can duplicate. The Gannett company is headquartered in my city, used to publish a morning paper and an afternoon paper, now we just have the morning paper, and the whole town knows it's, to put it kindly, not much of a newspaper, though it's considered #1 according to some study on circulation, saturation, or some such thing. It focuses a lot on blog and internet entries, but this commentary does not and cannot duplicate the paper itself. Part of what's destroyed it, at least in comparison to what it may have been before (it was never any Buffalo News, which people here read when they need an actual newspaper, or Boston Globe, put it that way, and it has always carried the tone of Gannett and the less positive energy (not that the city has an opposite to that) of the city. But what you've said about the bias aspect hits the nail on the head about what's wrong with (what's left of) the paper, which wasn't in the habit of including benefits with its salary package and recently let about a third of its staff go. It also, having offered to try to help save my mother's life, ended up doing much to help cause her death, and only began to report more objectively after I told it that if she died, I was going to sue it. Its behavior re blogs is rather, well, I'll leave that for another time. One of its young editors was astonished that I do not like the current mayor, whom the paper endorsed during the mayoral election saying that what the city needed was a cheerleader when what it had needed, when the same guy was police chief and abolished police precincts, was police precincts. Again, this is the newspaper at the head of the Gannett chain, and the best thing about it is that there's hardly anything left of it. The problems go back at least to Watergate, and what I've noticed is that journalism schools seem to turn out a certain style of descriptive reporting, but I don't now what happened to what they are supposed to be teaching about what a reporter's real job is. Some seem to get it anyway, but the bias crowd is running the show.
I might add that one aspect of the city's less positive nature, in terms of energy, attitude, tone seems to me to have come from that paper itself, which is as salient an example of what SHS has noted as any that could be imagined. I wonder also how much TV news style, which is more superficial, has had to do with the change in newspapers. The various media are supposed to do their jobs according to what they are and what no other medium can do in the same way, but seem to have forgotten this. I've worked in a several different print media, and people do move back and forth between them, carrying style with them, and in turn mindset spreads, but the real problem seems to me to be that people aren't trained to think from long before they get to journalism school (an institution that wasn't necessary to produce reporters back in the day, apparently). I remember being asked by my students years ago, in all sincerity, when the subject of ancient warfare would arise in the course of translating Caesar, for example, "Did they really do that? Did they really kill people?" These were college students, and not even freshmen! They had gone through the same educational system that leads to journalism school, and some of them were in undergraduate journalism programs, learning to stand in front of a microphone, but ask them to spell... The news writing course I took at the New School, taught by a network news veteran, included a very serious young woman who kept asking, "When are we going to read the news?" They want to be newscasters, they want to get their point across -- their point and point of view, not an objective reporting of the facts -- to the public -- that's what a fair number of them grow up thinking a journalist's job is, and why they enter the field. What with both parents working, divorce, etc., who has been around to teach them anything, and then they go to school where the history teacher's grand plan is as (I am not making this up) a college senior who'd chosen a career teaching history told me in 1974, "I'm going to teach history. And I'm not going to make them learn dates. Dates of when things happened aren't important. I'm going to teach them CONCEPTS." There wasn't anyone to slap her upside the head and keep her as far away as possible from a classroom; she and her ilk are out there right now, with their degrees in education, and have been for years. How surprising then is what's going on with newspapers?
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I agree that the bias is a big deal. I run into people all the time who are pretty passionate about pro-life issues, but who say they can't support the "drivel" of the local paper. They are not going to support the "liberal" bias. Whether or not they are biased, they are perceived to be. We need papers of record in our communities. We also need strong editorial and letters pages where we can hash things out in public. I think it's mandatory to have some sense of public unity and a public square. But if the papers don't quit spewing ideology over reporting the facts and the story, they are going to tank more. It's going to be their fault. They also need to recruit more balanced editorial boards too. I swear that most of the complaints I hear are not bad reporting, but the biased editorials. Whether they are or are not, they are perceived to be. If newspapers go down, I think it leads to the further erosion of societal unity/cohesion-as if we have much left after multiculturalism and identity politics-it will erode our sense of American identity, the ability of different groups communicating with each other. It's probably worse than that, but it's bad. There's only one group of people who can solve that. It's the press.
I suspect with the hostility of the educational system and universities to Christianity and conservative Christian values, or just plain traditional values, that we may someday see them going down in flames. I'm the drummer for the children's band at our church. I bet I see a couple hundred 5-10 year olds every weekend. I'm shocked by the number of kids who are homeschooled and how I can often tell who are homeschooled and who are not on a couple of levels-especially behavior. I'm not advocating home schooling because it's not an SHS topic, but I suspect we could see the same rebellion against the university and the educational system as we do with newspapers some day. People don't have to take it. I suspect they won't.
Yes. Bloggers are commentators. And we need content to comment upon, most of which comes from newspapers. One of our functions is to keep newspapers honest. That's a good thing. However, I would like it if I could spend less time pointing out bias and newspaper mistakes.
Journalists, heal thyselves. We need you.
"But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader."
It sure does. Too frequently I see that "comprehensible context" and due to my certain knowledge I know that the reporter missed the boat on comprehending it himself. Sometimes we'd be better off seeing that "incomprehensible" report.
Yes, newspaper and traditional print media is in big trouble. But I disagree that people do not read newspapers. As an adjunct professor I observe and interact with students that tell me they read newspapers more rather than less. What they do not do is buy a newspaper. Instead, they follow major issues in the news with a national viewpoint. They google stories and follow them but do not actually purchase any print resources, a habit that I too have fallen into.
My son (20) and a lot of his friends read our local gazette faithfully. There's still hope.
I agree.
I want the facts. Not opinion or slant or spin.
Facts.
I'll make my own decision.
For instance;
have you noticed that global warming isn't an opinion?
It's reported as a fact.
Just weird. (but that's just my opinion). ;)
william Peace: Thanks for that. It is a problem, no doubt. Still, I think subscriptions would go up if so many people weren't so furious at being dissed by dominant media bias and perspectives.
Laura: "Missed the boat," is a very tactful way of putting it! Sometimes, it is sinking the ship.
Local blogs constantly refer to bias as what's wrong with the paper here and the reason they no longer buy it. It seems to be easier for the paper to be that way than to do its job. Maybe it's all or which the current crop is capable.
They need to remember is that they're a business, and that THEY need US. Right now they seem to think that they have a captive audience whose opinions they can form, and since they're thinking backwards already, it's no surprise that they see the ground slipping from beneath their feet as their revenues shrink (from long before the current economic "crisis," which they've done their part to create by not performing their role in society properly) and are running around like chickens with their heads cut off blaming the Internet. They could save costs by dispensing with paper altogether and putting their entire publication enterprise, not just part of it as they're doing now, on the internet with charge for advertising there and even for for access to "news," and they still wouldn't be able to do any better than they're doing now, because they aren't doing their job in the first place any more; if they did that job right, they'd be more apt to be able to stay in business and retain circulation. The "internet" excuse is just an excuse; they don't have any more substantial, unbiased content to put on the internet than they do to put in their "papers." I blame Watergate for a lot of this syndrome; for every person like myself whom it turned off journalism, there were many more who went into it because they felt it was a way to get "politically correct" (now there's an oxymoron if ever there was one) views with which they felt, for the sake of "feeling good about themselves" (another new-left liberal shibboleth) and for the sake of being able to survive in journalism, they must identify, across. The result has been that, as sheep themselves, they consider it their mission to "lead" -- and create -- other sheep, and turn everyone into sheep. Sheep can't lead other sheep, but may be aware of the need for shepherds, the role of which they've arrogated unto themselves, which is totally illogical, but to be expected, as that's the point from which they started out. Thus, to an extent, it's like watching a bunch of sheep who have no idea where they are going but think they do, since "follow the leader" and "trust the leader" is part of their inherent make-up, along with the inability to tell that they're going in the wrong direction or that there is any other direction than the one they are following. Who started this?
To sheep, it's anathema not to follow the herd, and thus when someone doesn't, that person has to be regarded as outcast, and not to be recognized or listened to, let alone followed, because otherwise the herd couldn't survive and they'd all be in danger. It's based on fear and utilitarian survivalism, with no consideration for the value of the individual, and the many automatically devaluing whoever doesn't conform, like a ewe teaching her lamb that such behavior is not acceptable and feeling instinctively that she's done a good job by doing that. Which she has, as a sheep, but what is aberration to sheep is necessary in people. This is why liberals of the sheep variety behave the way they do, both in journalism and in general, including re the death culture. If the theory that people have bought into the death culture as a result of frustration over not having control, well, there you have it: Sheep don't know how to be in control, and they automatically suppress whatever leadership instincts they have in their genetic makeup (which also produces rams, and is imperfect in the rest of the species) in order to follow "pioneers" and "leaders" who by nature want and are able to control others; even when being led to slaughter, sheep believe that they are going where they are supposed to go.
When I'm job-hunting, or apartment-hunting, or looking for anything else via a "classified" section, I want to be able to hold that classified section in my hand, circle the entries that interest me, and pick up a phone with the other hand and call on it, or at least have it in front of me when responding via internet; I don't want to have to go back and forth to it, take notes from it, have to print it out which means I can no longer see the whole page, etc. It's a whole project just to get online for such purposes, speed and convenience are among the purposes of a classified section, the online process is tedious and time-consuming, and those who use them miss other ads than the one they are forced to focus on during online process, thus making it less worth the papers' ad customers' while place their ads and reducing the paper's revenues. So much for online classifieds being the problem. People would still use newspaper classified sections as placers and readers of ads in them if people found the paper itself worth buying. If newspapers can't figure this out, no wonder they are no longer newspapers. This excuse on their part is telling: They have placed revenues first in their list of priorities, and that's the symptom of nothing being able to get done right enough for the publication to be worth buying. It's utilitarianism in action. It reminds me of what the former editor of an astrology magazine published by a large publishing corporation once told me about the company's bean-counters actually having suggested that the magazine include predictions for only the first two signs of the zodiac because it would cost less than to print predictions for all 12, and of having been asked myself when I was hired to edit one run by a smaller company whether I would mind continuing to do what they'd been doing for several years, re-running previous predictions so that the company could save money by not having to pay for current ones to be written, at the same time as they were telling me that my job was to get circulation back up so that they could stop losing advertising revenue. They didn't seem to understand the connection between offering a product people find useful and people buying the product; the ignorance, arrogance, and greed inherent in their mindset, which is the dynamic under which newspapers are published, is astounding. People buy what's worth the price and what doesn't insult them, and advertisers advertise in publications people actually buy. If they can't figure that out, they're incompetent, which is the whole problem; those who can't think don't know what thinking is, and thus they don't know that they can't think and can't conceive of others being able to think, and thus they think that it is their job to tell everybody else how to think. Naturally they don't understand why they are going under, and the less they do their job, the closer we move to chaos and totalitarianism. When they were taught history, "concepts," not such tedious and unnecessary details as dates and facts, were the focus; when they were taught math, they used calculators and weren't required to use their brains to do addition, and the focus was on algebra more than on geometry; when they were taught science, logical reasoning was not part of the equation; when they were taught literature, the focus was on the contemporary; when they were taught foreign languages, if they were at all, the focus was not on how learning a grammar trains the mind, but on whether that language would be "useful" to them, and the only way to get them to be willing to study ancient languages was to spoonfeed the grammar in a such a way that the value of learning it was lost, and entertain them with the details of everyday life back then, rather than conveying the values of those civilizations on which our own is founded, and when they were taught to write, they had computers with spellcheck, which they use as "journalists" now, rather than a typewriter that allows no latitude for error, while meeting deadlines that are no longer as fixed in time. Which reminds me of the time I tried to buy a typewriter (no longer sold anywhere else) in an electronics store and turned down the most basic model it had because I didn't want the little screen windows telling one what one just typed, and the spellcheck, and said that the noise the machine made in order to perform these "helpfull functions" would interfere with being able to think while writing, and was told by the young salesperson, "But with this, you don't have to think!" as if that was what made it "better." The scary thing is that the kids raised on these things really believe that, and we've ended up with a society that considers it better not to have to think above the drone of the death culture, and not to have to do the tedious work of staying alive, because thinking, and living, aren't what counts, being able to evade and opt out of them and have automatic convenience in all things are entitlements.
The other scary thing is that newspapers etc. in their current state think that they ARE doing their job.
Reuters has a story on possible bailouts of newspapers. http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE4BU53T20081231?sp=true
It's a bad idea for several reasons. One that would infuriate me is that I'm a social conservative and the media is almost exclusively not and almost exclusively biased against us. The media is already a propaganda organ for the anti-social conservatives. A bailout would be giving my opponents funding and it would have the effect of advancing the views of my opponents at my expense. It would be an unfair and illegitmate use of taxpayer dollars.
I'm sure I'm not the only who'd like to read Smokette's columns, WJS...
bmmg39: Debra is syndicated. She can be read on-line at sfgate.com. Look up Debra J. Saunders and it will take you to her archives. She generally appears every Tues., Thurs, and Sunday in the Chronicle. Thanks.
I know that column -- it's great! It doesn't purport to be anything other than what it says it is, commentary, whereas much of what is presented in the media as news has taken it upon itself the role of having the effect of commentary and influencing opinion while purporting to be straight reporting. Yet -- and I've noticed this phenomenon when reading the columns of good commentators -- it provides more information than what masquerades as straight reporting does, and it does it in a straightforward manner. When I want facts that I cannot find where one ought to be able to find them in the media, and to know what's really going on, I read columns such as Smokette's, which are far more honest and direct in their presentation, and far more informative, than is much of what masquerades as news these days.
(That should have been, "has assumed the role." I'll never get used to typing in blog spaces. But it's wonderful that they exist!)
I have a question to SHS that is connected to the subject matter of this section only because of the mention of San Franscisco: Washington, Oregon, Montana -- what about Idaho, over whose panhandle the assisted-suicide law syndrome has skipped? I was surprised about Montana. Is there a different ethos in Idaho, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, California? At least thus far?
SHSmokette appears regularly at www.realclearpolitics.com
What we needed was not to feel entitled to have whatever we want. At the same time as the death culture and this media bias were taking hold, we destroyed our own economy with credit, greed via real estate, etc. Now there are going to be no newspapers because there is no money to put them out or to buy them and the whole country, literally, is going to fall apart. People wanted to be able to die -- well, they'll get their wish. Along with a lot of people whose wish it wasn't.
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