#ENEMY TO NONE OR #ENEMY OF TRUMP: US JOURNALISTS STRUGGLE TO DEFINE THEMSELVES IN NEW ERA
NEW YORK— A generation ago, the likes of Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer were the media icons who reported the news to the American public.
Now the biggest stars talk about the news, and occasionally make it. But you rarely doubt whether they are Republicans or Democrats.
Standards stripped away
With traditional standards stripped away by technology and new business models, the old lines between journalism and commentary are growing ever fuzzier especially with a president who persists in calling media and journalists as “enemies of the people.”
Newspapers from Maine to Hawaii pushed back against President Donald Trump with a coordinated series of editorials in defense of a free press.
The campaign was set in motion by an editor at the Boston Globe, which argued in its own editorial that Trump’s label of the media as the enemy of the people “is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries.”
Easy to detect
Is it any wonder that news consumers can easily detect bias in American media, which found it necessary on Thursday to pool an editorial hitting back at charges that they are unpatriotic.
About 30 years ago, television networks ABC, CBS and NBC gave straightforward accounts of the day’s events, and morning shows told you what happened while you slept.
Newspapers flourished, with sections clearly marked for news and editorial pages for opinion.
The one cable network, in its infancy, followed the play-itstraight rules of the big broadcasters.
Today, “no one can control the flow of information across social media and the internet media,” says George Campbell, a 53-year-old business consultant from Chicago.
“This has led to a confusion about fact vs fake. But mostly, it has resulted in a cash cow for conspiracy makers,” he said.
New profit centers
The internet’s emergence has made the media far more democratic with many more voices to hear, although the loudest frequently get the most attention.
Let’s not neglect the memorable journalism that the Trump era has produced all across the country.
Many newspapers are far from “failing,” as Trump often claims, as shown by the New York Times, whose number of digital subscribers jumped from below 1 million in 2015 to more than 2.4 million now.
The cable networks have profited from turning politics into prime-time entertainment: Fox News Channel (from the right) and MSNBC (from the left) are frequently the mostwatched cable networks in the country.
The Trump era has produced a journalism where shouting what you believe tends to “pop” more than facts and even if different sides are given, the air time is filled with opinionated people.
“I don’t blame the public for being confused,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
New experiences
In a heated news environment, journalists are left to find descriptions for things they haven’t seen before.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper called Trump’s performance in a joint news conference with Russia’s Vladimir Putin “disgraceful.”
For Cooper, it was a moment of truth-telling. For the president’s supporters, it was a brash embrace of bias.
Winnowing fact from fiction
“Overall, Americans have some ability to separate what is factual from what is opinion,” said Amy Mitchell, Pew’s director of journalism research at Pew Research Center.
Jamieson said another contributing factor is the way news articles often lose their context when spread on Twitter and other social media where opinion and news stories live in the same space.
For many people, the editors and news producers who were once media gatekeepers have been replaced by opinionated uncles and old high-school classmates who spend all their time online.
Russian trolls harnessed the power of these changes in news consumption before most people realized what was happening.
“The truth,” Ward says, “is no match for emotional untruths.”