The thing that would restore trust in the news media
Survey: Americans want every side to get equal coverage
American news media have a big problem.
People don’t trust them. They don’t trust mainstream newspapers and TV networks to deliver information honestly and without political agendas.
A Gallup poll published in October 2021 shows that trust in media has fallen to its second-lowest ebb since the polling firm began tracking in 1972.
Only 36% of Americans surveyed have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. That’s a significant fall from 72% in the 1970s. Today, only 7% express “a great deal” of trust.
Something has gone terribly wrong in the news business, and the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism has an audacious plan to solve it.
In a Jan. 30 op-ed in his old newspaper, journalism professor and former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. announced that he and his Cronkite colleague, research professor Andrew Heyward, have authored a report to help American media gain the trust of the American people. They plan to take their playbook to “working newsrooms around the United States.”
“The mission to produce trustworthy news will never end,” they wrote. “But it has to start somewhere.” So they begin by naming the culprit that plagues American newsrooms:
Objectivity.
One can almost hear the cackling of media critics and conservatives. Why would American news media abandon objectivity before they’ve even tried it?
As Downie defines the word in his op-ed, objectivity is “expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”
Based on surveys, most Americans would likely find that definition unobjectionable. But Downie and Heyward argue that “when misunderstood, journalistic ‘objectivity’ or ‘balance’ can lead to so-called ‘both-sides-ism’ – a dangerous trap when covering issues like climate change or the intensifying assault on democracy.”
Seventy-six percent of Americans beg to differ, and in a 2022 Pew Research survey said they believe “Journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage,” where as only 44% of journalists believe that is true.
Americans aren’t simpletons. They
understand there are moments when greater truths are obvious. As was oft-expressed by the legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, you don’t give equal weight to Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot. Nor would you give equal weight to the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan. That goes without saying.
But the greater part of news is not that obvious. It is gray. And truth is exceedingly elusive, as we just learned in the COVID-19 pandemic. Why would Downie and Heyward argue against a journalism ideal that calls for reporters to exercise detachment from the news they’re covering?
During the roiling 1960s and the many protests against racial prejudice, the Vietnam War and sexism, young journalists argued that “objectivity” was being used by editors to prevent challenges to “power, privilege and inequity,” according to the Cronkite report.
For instance, some reporters uncritically quoted Gen. William Westmoreland’s sunny assessments of the War in Southeast Asia when, in fact, they knew the U.S. military was caught in the meatgrinder.
As newsrooms have become more diverse, “A growing number of journalists of color and younger white reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, believe that objectivity has become an increasingly outdated and divisive concept that prevents truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view,” the report says.
If there is major theme to the Cronkite report it is that white heterosexual male editors misused their authority and the standard of “objectivity” to rigorously impose a narrow vision of the country. The Cronkite report fairly drips with contempt for straight, white male editors, amply quoting their critics:
Wesley Lowery, a 32-year-old Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist: “(Mainstream media) has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers.”
Former Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll.: “Objective by whose standards? That standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys. And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t meet that definition.”
Emily Ramshaw, 40-year-old cofounder of The 19th national news: “Objectivity” is news coverage “through the lens of largely white, straight men.”
Fine. These are all informed opinions that Downie and Heyward use to amplify their larger point. But if that’s how you view the world, it begs the question: Why is Cronkite’s blueprint to build the more trusted newsroom of the future authored by two, older white males?
Downie may have been conscious of this inconsistency when he explained in his Post op-ed that he was already doing things differently when he supervised Post coverage from 1984 to 2008.
For instance, he never really “understood” the word “objectivity,” he explained, and thus never employed it. His guiding principles were “accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.”
He also noted that his “generation of young journalists moved away from mostly unquestioning news coverage of institutional power” and that he had “worked to make The Post newsroom more diverse, and encouraged everyone to have a voice in our decision-making.”
I’m one of the rare conservatives working in a mostly liberal field, but let me defend the progressive white editors and reporters who come in for a thrashing in the Cronkite report.
It’s simply not true that they were hard focused on white readership and the needs of white people. Most of the white journalists I’ve worked with over the years (men and women) have challenged white audiences to move beyond their racial prejudices and homophobia and to treat people with dignity. They believe to their core that all Americans should participate in the nation’s decision-making and prosperity. They worked to build more diverse newsrooms but did not enjoy the diverse supply chain modern editors do. Even today, newspapers struggle with minority retention, such is the competition for their services.
Where my progressive friends and colleagues have failed has been their unwillingness to challenge minority political and cultural movements that have gone astray. Journalism is often at its best when it focuses on what’s broken in our society. That should apply to all parts of our society - white, Black, brown, LGBTQ+, etc. This progressive impulse to shield minorities from critical coverage is denying minorities one of the greatest benefits of professional journalism, the illumination of what’s broken so it can be fixed. Perhaps the new wave of minority journalists will do that work.
Will greater racial and ethnic diversity change the way we cover the news? Or course. And for the good. How could it not? But it won’t solve our biggest problem.
Our biggest problem is intellectual group think. The far greater part of our white and minority journalists view the world through a liberal lens. But more Americans, according to Gallup, selfidentify as conservative (36%) and moderate (35%) than they do liberal (25%).
The Cronkite report unwittingly demonstrates the problem when it identifies issues that are confounding American society – “discrimination against and abuse of women, abortion rights, persistent racism and white nationalism, police brutality and killings, the rights and treatment of LGBTQ+ people, income inequality and social problems, immigration and the treatment of immigrants, the causes and impact of climate change, voting rights and election integrity – and even the survival of our democracy.”
Those are our national challenges as defined by blue America. Virtually every one can be found in the Democratic Party platform. These are not the problems Republicans describe when they’re asked what ails the country.
This newsroom mono-culture shows up in the polling. When you parse the data by political affiliation, only Democrats express high trust in newspapers, television and radio news reporting. Sixtyeight percent of Democrats express “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence. Only 11% of Republicans and 31% of independents express the same.
A good many Americans see mainstream journalists as tub-thumpers for the Democratic Party. If newspapers address racial-ethnic diversity without addressing intellectual diversity, they will continue to promote distrust.
To its credit the Cronkite report follows the admonition of Jeff Zucker, former president of CNN Worldwide. “We’ve always talked about diversity in terms of skin color. And I’m not diminishing that in any way. But there really is a lack of diversity of where people went to school: there’s a lack of geographic diversity.”
The Cronkite report calls for hiring that reflects “not just ethnic and gender diversity, but people with different economic, educational, religious, geographic and social backgrounds.”
There’s the key right there.
The newsroom needs to be a place where many ideas and perspectives compete against one another. The best ideas then need to be executed with a professionalism that allows reporters to provide special insights based on life experiences while not pushing an agenda, not turning into activists.
American journalism doesn’t need to “move beyond objectivity,” as Cronkite puts it. It needs to move beyond the bubble. Because it desperately needs a debate.