There’s a widespread belief that media bias is running rampant these days, more than ever before. Who do we blame? Well, the news media, of course, and social media. But we’re largely overlooking a third culprit in the confusion: We The People.
One of the first newspapers in Colonial American history was the Boston News-Letter, published in 1704. It was highly political and heavily subsidized by the British government. Opposing publications appeared soon after. By 1900, major newspapers had become profitable powerhouses of advocacy, muckraking, and sensationalism.
Media bias is nothing new, folks. It is human nature rooted in beliefs and motivated by a desire to make our world a better place. And, to turn a profit.
This week the Christian Science Monitor reported: “Overall trust in the news media has been falling for decades, along with a broader loss of trust in other public institutions. Four in 10 Americans say they have ‘no confidence’ in the media’s news reporting, while only 32% have a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence. Back in 2003, when Gallup asked the same question, only 1 in 10 expressed “no confidence” while more than half expressed confidence.”
No doubt about it, social media has shaken the information landscape, but are social media and other new technology platforms to blame for the decline of newspapers, TV, and radio?
Charlie Meyerson is a radio/print/internet journalist for more than half a century, sometime adjunct professor at Roosevelt and Northwestern Universities and Columbia College Chicago, and publisher of Chicago Public Square:
“’Blame’ isn’t the word I’d use, but it’s all connected. Forty years ago, if you were away from home—and the then-nascent CNN—and you wanted fresh news in the middle of the day, you had one choice: Radio. Now, of course, it’s a phone, a tablet or a laptop—which can give you radio news, yes, but also all the TV stations, all the newspapers, all the wire services, all the blogs, all the email newsletters, all of YouTube, all the movies, all the podcasts, Spotify, TikTok, Facebook. In a media world where everything competes with everything, how can those old media expect to continue to dominate?”
Charlie’s right, of course. We’ve seen the print news media forced to battle the free digital onslaught of online news, blogs, memes, and hearsay by throwing up paywalls just to stay in business, effectively reducing the number of potential readers who want their reporting expertise and perspectives.
Now, we’re starting to see some evidence that declining trust in traditional major media is inspiring those organizations to do some soul-searching. Earlier this week in The Hill:
The executive editor of The New York Times (Joe Kahn) is saying it’s not up to the news organization he runs, or any other, to stop former President Trump from winning a second term in office this fall.
“So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of [President] Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
Kahn’s statement has elicited much criticism and some agreement from the media establishment, divided largely along political lines, as you might expect. Historians have told us for decades that the idea of fair and balanced news reporting has never been as noble as it is practical.
The U.S. press didn’t always have such a fussy code of ethics about Opinion Journalism vs. News Reporting… The New York Post was started in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton as a platform from which the Federalist Party proclaimed its views, including attacks on Thomas Jefferson.
And that was not the exception. The early U.S. press was filled with opinion and partisan attacks and newspapers were often subsidized by political parties until early in the 19th Century.
The U.S. press didn’t adopt the idea of Neutrality as a noble step in our common search for truth and meaning. It was a business decision.
– Stony Brook University School of Journalism
Again, bias, it seems, is part of human nature. The bigger problem today is how we perceive it. Again, Charlie Meyerson:
“I’m far more worried about reporting by journalists who (incredibly and impossibly) pretend to have no opinions than by those who are open about their position and let an audience decide, story by story, which reporting is fair and which isn’t.”
Many journalists agree but ironically are either keeping it to themselves or not being heard. So, here’s the first step: traditional news media need to be transparent about views and tireless in unbiased sourcing.
We also need to take a bold step in explaining to Americans that they have the bigger responsibility, to learn about issues and think before posting.
Somewhere in the past forty or fifty years – I suspect it was Vietnam – we started to believe in the sanctity of self to the exclusion of the outside world. We embraced the bumper sticker philosophy which allowed us to be caring people without taking the time needed to invest any effort in the issues we choose to attack or support. For five or six bucks these days I can make a public proclamation of caring about the environment or celebrating LGBTQ “awareness” by displaying a magnetized car ribbon and doing nothing else.
And now we have social media platforms that empower us to spend our days expressing ill-informed, half-baked opinions without bothering to think for ourselves.
As citizens, we have a responsibility to learn history and civics and to think and discuss these things dispassionately, especially with our kids. If we don’t, our opinions are less than meaningless, damaging our society and threatening American democracy.
Broadcast and print news organizations need to be more transparent, as we like to say. It’s time to bring this conversation to the front porch of every American and tell them bluntly: We’ll do our part but you have to learn and think before you muddy the water. You need to teach your kids why and how it all matters.
In my senior year of high school, 1968-69, I took a required Civics class. It gave me the most important and enduring lessons of my life. There is a current movement to return history and civics mandates in public schools but it takes a lot longer to re-install something than it did to remove it.
Long before I got into the radio news business my father told me something I’ve never forgotten: “People say you have a right to your opinion. That’s only half true. You have a right to an informed opinion. If you don’t know what you’re talking about you should shut the hell up.”
