Why we need the whole story

Could it be that people are finally starting to appreciate journalists?

I hear it a lot these days, and I suspect many of you do too: thank heavens for the hometown newspaper.

It’s a bit of a (welcome) switch from the refrain over the last few hundred years: “That hometown rag has gotta go.”

Once, mainstream media, and newspapers in particular, were assailed by many, especially politicians, and taken for granted by everyone.

Now, you hear many politicians say the slow death of journalism, and newspapers in particular, is the greatest threat to democracy today. Others, meanwhile, thank journalists for the work we do.

Not long ago, while attending social gatherings unrelated to my work, I would try to avoid telling people specifically what I did for a living. “I’m a writer,” I’d say, which is true but left out a few details. That was because once people found out I worked for a newspaper, or was the editor no less, all manner of complaints and criticisms would come my way, everything from “why is my paper late?” to “the crossword is too easy/difficult” to “you guys are so biased.”

Now, they tend to skip over all of that and say simply: “We really value the newspaper. We need more journalists. You have a tough job, caught in the middle like that.”

And in one of the more cruel ironies of this complicated era, the president-elect of the United States has done more to assault and damage institutional media than anyone before him, but is somehow a bigger consumer of the work they produce than any predecessor.

It turns out that in a post-truth, fake-news era, journalism is important after all, and in fact, more important than ever.

The sentiment just happens to coincide with a existential crisis facing most legacy news operations, from radio and television to newspapers and magazines. Advertisers are looking elsewhere (including fake news sites), and public institutions, such as police and politicians, are going directly to the public through social media.

The problem is, as you all know, there will soon be nobody left to ask questions and demand answers. Nobody left to look under rocks and behind filing cabinets. Nobody to uncover wrongdoing, fraud and incompetence.

The reason for such checks and balances (i.e. journalism) is to prevent mistakes and misbehaviour from being repeated. Public and private institutions want to get their message out. The police want to tell their story, not necessarily the story. The politicians wants to tell us what they did, not what they didn’t do, or what they should or shouldn’t have done. Businesses want us to say how great their widgets are, but not mention the product’s — or the company’s — drawbacks.

Those who are part of the story rarely want the rest of us to know the whole story.

It’s true journalists also often cannot or do not tell the entire story, but most try to make note of both the good and bad. There have always been bad players, and there has always been fake news. But it’s now, suddenly, reaching a crisis point. Others are stepping in to fill the void left by legacy media, and many do an excellent job, but it’s going to be a rocky road, and a continuing crisis for democracy, for some time yet.