The crucifixion should be fair
I feel I kissed off 11 years teaching the modern equivalent of buggy whip production.
There are few openings for buggy whip workers and the same is true for good newspaper reporters today. I blame television for distorting the industry. Still there is hope.
My college teaching career centered on encouraging fair and aggressive news reporting. My students and I even won a national award. Yet those skills appear to be held in low regard today as the news business has fragmented into partisan camps, including some that even question the existence of truth.
Fairness and truth-seeking were long in coming.
The few newspapers in the British colonies mostly served as house organs for the government. As revolutionary fervor grew, most colonial newspapers prodded readers to adopt anti-royal beliefs. The Revolution would not have been possible without newspapers publishing and reprinting incitement.
Newspapering carried on the subjective tradition in the new republic. The newspaper was clearly partisan, and everyone knew that. That was learned from the name or perhaps the motto carried under the nameplate.
By the 20th century U.S. journalism seemed to have emerged from its subjective phase and opinions were said to be confined to the editorial page and columns. Appealing to all sectors of society seemed to be good business.
Today the business model seems to be to give the readers what they want instead of what they need. That always has been a struggle for editors, and many have been timid in challenging political power. The rise and fall of the newspaper action columns in the 1960s and 70s showed that editors and publishers also were hesitant about tweaking the financial establishment with pro-consumer advocacy.
Yet the high point of 20th century journalism was when newspaper reporting helped run Richard Nixon from the White House. Editors and reporters patted themselves on the back. A skeptic might says that these stories never would have been written if the president had been named Kennedy or Roosevelt. Kennedy was a womanizer and Roosevelt had a serious physical disability. Reporters deep sixed negative information on both earlier presidents.
Still the theory persisted that newspeople were supposed to be neutral and give equal treatment to all sectors of the public regardless of their beliefs. Clearly there still was room for subjectivity. Reporters and editors sought out negative material on politicians, entertainers and, later, sports figures. Edward R. Murrow applied this thinking when he took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954. The very decision to pursue a news story is subjective.
Still there should be a sense of fairness even in the manner of the crucifixion. As the reporter says to the parking commissioner, who complained about bad press, in “The Paper,” a 1994 movie: “It was your turn!”
The legacy of the Nixon era came to full flower when Donald Trump announced for the presidency. Reporters and editors jostled each other in an effort to get him. That was strange because the press usually has feelings for the outsider, the non-political politician. Perhaps there was jealousy over his wealth or his lifestyle. The media quickly divided into one camp in opposition to the candidate and later the president.
Economics was a major factor as the online outlets were competing with traditional newspapers and television viewership was on the decline. Newspapers had lost much of the lucrative classified market to online sources. National advertisers had many more options. Reporters, producers and editors vied with professional spin doctors to fan reader and viewer outrage.
Even the venerable Associated Press began to interject negative adjectives and phrases into Trump stories. On egregious line in a news story said Trump hated immigrants. I complained to The AP, noting that the man was married to an immigrant. A reply said that the story had been changed online. After a series of such reporting gaffs I stopped writing The AP.
In my classes I always urged basic fairness. What I saw during the Trump presidency was far from fair. Maybe that was because a lot of national level reporters, presenters and producers did not have strong journalism training. New York University, for example, has a quickie master’s degree program to turn liberal arts grads into metro staffers. Few of these grads have had to work in conditions where they were close to the subjects of their reporting. Nothing encourages reflection quicker than an angry news figure barging into the city room waving evidence of faulty reporting. Today we face difficulty even in locating the email of a news writer or presenter.
There also is the problem of finances. Most of my students chose other employment because the job market in Colorado offered poverty wages except in the few major cities. There are lawyers, teachers and even bar owners who would have been great reporters. Those who stayed the course did so for a few years, perhaps a decade, and then moved on to unrelated jobs.
I hope that none chose the lucrative path to gotcha stories for publications where trust, honor and ethics are just words in the dictionary.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times “1619” figure, told an NPR interviewer the other day that she envisions a new way of journalism. She criticized reliance on official statements, such as those from the police. She said reporters need to develop new areas of coverage, such as poverty. She is involved in a dispute with the University of North Carolina because the institution only offered her a five-year contract and not immediate tenure.
Her words clashed with the primary concept that the purpose of newspapering is to hold public officials, including police, accountable. And poverty has been a beat on many newspapers since Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society initiative.
Personally, I was a little put out because it took me more than five years to win academic tenure despite 20-some years as a reporter and editor.
My hope is that among mushrooming online outlets others will continue supporting basic fairness in news reporting and stifle the alluring urge to be a player instead of an observer. Newspeople must trust the public to make the correct decisions when presented with all the relevant facts.
Note: News reports July 1, 2021, say that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been offered tenure by the North Carolina trustees.
