Tag Archives: media

Watchdog? What Watchdog?

A recent Gallup poll finds that public confidence in the media is at an all-time low. Interestingly, confidence was lowest among those who reported following the news most closely. In other words, the people who arguably know the most are the people most skeptical of what they are–and are not–being told.

In my Media and Public Policy class last Wednesday, students voiced their dismay over the Indianapolis Star, which has abandoned any pretense of investigative reporting on city and state government. If someone brings an issue to the attention of the paper, they may run it, but any visible effort to actually monitor local government, or to act as the eyes and ears of the voters, is long gone.

Local television news is equally superficial, although in fairness, it is often better than the current Star. Historically, the local channels have taken their cues from print media; in the absence of anything resembling meaningful local news from newspapers, they are floundering.

So we have lots of sports coverage. And at the Star, which has continued to “downsize” its investigative reporting capacity, a new reporter for the all-important “beer and entertainment beat.”

The national networks aren’t appreciably better . In fact, their credibility may be worse.

Politifact has a new rating system, which is using scorecards to track the accuracy–or lack thereof–of network pundits and “on-air personalities.”

Right now, you can look at the NBC/MSNBC file and see how that network’s pundits and on-air talent stand. For instance, 46 percent of the claims made by NBC and MSNBC pundits and on-air personalities have been rated Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire.

At FOX and Fox News Channel, that same number is 60 percent. At CNN, it’s 18 percent.

(Forgive the snark, but I can’t help attributing CNN’s better rating to the fact that it provides less news. I mean, how much misdirection can you work into weeks spent tracking a missing plane?)

So–we can’t rely on the veracity of the national news networks, and there is no local general interest journalism left.

No wonder no one trusts anyone anymore.

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Balancing Act

Leave it to the British to accurately diagnose what is terribly wrong with the American media.

It’s the mindless elevation of “balance” over accuracy. Somewhere along the line, members of the American news media (I’m hesitant to call them journalists) decided that “he said, she said” was reporting. It isn’t. It’s stenography.

This emphasis on “balance” at the expense of accuracy and the old-style journalism of verification is abetted by the media’s genuine bias, which is neither conservative nor liberal  but rather a bias for conflict. If it bleeds, it leads.

So we get “balanced” coverage of things like climate change.  More than 99% of climate scientists agree that the earth is warming, but our intrepid media will find that one crank who insists otherwise, and give us a “balanced” story by quoting “both sides.” Left unreported is the fact that the science is overwhelmingly on one “side” and the “debate” is virtually non-existent.

Or we get political coverage that has been dubbed “false equivalence.” There’s a reason for that. Over the past couple of decades, the right wing has employed a brilliant strategy: labeling the media “liberal.” (Has a factual report cast you in an unfavorable light? Scream immediately about the liberal, “lame stream” media.)  In response, most traditional media outlets have been cowed into reporting a phony equivalence whenever possible, a “plague on both your houses” approach that often distorts the reality of a situation and even more often encourages lazy reporting. How much easier it is to quote a Republican and a Democrat and then go home–without ever bothering to tell the audience who is telling the truth.

No wonder so many people don’t trust the media. Very few are still trustworthy.

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Just the Facts

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to harp a lot on the inadequacies of the media and the importance of accurate and complete information. My (frequently unarticulated) assumption is that if people agree about the facts of a matter, they are more likely to agree upon what those facts mean. So facts matter. A lot.

Case in point: yesterday, I shared my frustration about Fox News and its incessant drumbeat about a ‘Benghazi scandal’ the details of which the network neglects to specify. One of the commenters purported to fill in the blanks by asserting that the administration had refused to deploy troops that were within range and might have saved lives.

That would indeed be scandalous, if true. But as most other media outlets have reported, every military official in a position to know has emphatically denied the allegation. (Former Secretary of Defense Gates characterized the belief that the nearest troops could have gotten to Benghazi in time to defend the embassy as based upon “a cartoonish understanding” of military operations.) Unless every military expert from Gates on down is part of a conspiracy to protect the administration, the facts do not support the single concrete accusation being made.

I’ve been mulling over the role fact-finding plays in our political debates, because I’ve been reading a book that has been getting a lot of attention lately, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt’s scholarship is focused upon moral psychology, and the book is an excellent and very accessible exploration of evolutionary morality and the operation of culture on innate human tendencies.

One of the innate tendencies Haidt identifies is a belief in proportionality; that is, a belief that reward should be based upon contribution. Most of us have an innate “fairness” monitor that tells us that the member of the tribe who works hard should be entitled to a greater share of communal goods produced than the slacker.

I think both conservatives and liberals agree with this moral premise. Their dispute is with application—that is, with the facts. For example, if you believe that people are poor because they are lazy and conniving—that is, slackers, you will resent their dependence on public assistance. If you discover that the great majority of poor people work 40 or more hours a week at jobs that simply do not pay enough to allow them to get by, and that those who are “gaming the system” are a very small percentage, you are less likely to feel that you’ve been taken advantage of and more likely to support policies aimed at making the working poor self-sufficient.

There are lots of other examples, but the basic point is: facts matter. Conservatives and liberals (terms that have lost much clarity in any event) share many more moral premises than the pundits and pontificators assume.

What we increasingly do not share is accurate and complete information–and a uniformly credible media.

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Media Malpractice

Who can Americans trust to report news accurately? Yesterday, I blogged about a recent survey that showed increasing skepticism about Fox News. Barely a half-hour after I posted, my husband mentioned that he’d been listening to a newscast on the radio in which the reporter interviewed lawmakers who are calling for the use of military tribunals for the Boston bombing suspects. According to my husband, the newscaster then reported–as fact–that such tribunals have proved to be more effective than the regular criminal courts. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

He didn’t know it, because that superior effectiveness is not even remotely a “fact.”

The facts are these: after 9-11, the Bush administration initiated prosecutions of 828 people on terrorism charges in civilian courts. Last year, according to a report from the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law, trials were still pending against 235 of them. That leaves 593 resolved cases. Of that number, 523 were convicted, for a conviction rate of 88%.

In addition, the Bush administration pursued 20 cases in military tribunals. So far, there have been exactly three convictions. The highest-profile was the case involving Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. Hamdan was convicted, but he was sentenced  by a military jury to a mere five and half years–and the tribunal judge, a US Navy captain, gave him credit for time served, which was five years. So Hamdan served only six months after conviction.

Furthermore, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld–the case that grew out of this particular trial–the Supreme Court held that the Military Tribunals as constituted at the time violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The propriety of using a Military Tribunal in any given case is, of course, open to debate. What is not debatable is the history of their past performance. It is perfectly legitimate to argue about the pros and cons of using such tribunals; I have my opinion, and others are entitled to theirs. But that debate needs to be grounded in fact, not propaganda.

If we cannot depend upon the media to provide accurate information and to separate opinion from fact– if we have lost what used to be called “the journalism of verification”– we are reduced to exchanging opinions anchored to nothing but our individual biases.

We live in a complicated world. We desperately need a competent and trustworthy media.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

At one time or another, those of us who teach despair of the whole educational enterprise. We entertain the dark suspicion that some people simply can’t make use of information–that their ability to reason is faulty, that they are unable to consider and evaluate evidence to reach sound conclusions.

Happily, I’m wrong.  At least, that’s the conclusion reached by researchers at Princeton,  When a wrong choice is made, the researchers found that it might be the information rather than the brain’s decision-making process that is to blame.

The results of the study were reported in Science Daily, and the experiment involved very simple types of information; nevertheless, if the conclusions are replicated, the importance of good education and accurate journalism increases.

If human decision-making depends upon the quality of the information available, those of us in the information-providing business have an ethical obligation to provide information that is sound and verified. In public school classrooms, that means teaching science in science class,not religion. It means teaching American and constitutional history in much more depth. It means introducing students to the world beyond America’s borders–the world they will increasingly interact with, and about which they will need solid information.

As important as education is, the information we are fed daily is even more consequential. In a country that celebrates free expression, we can’t mandate truth in journalism–and even a cursory trip around the internet will demonstrate how much  unreliable and delusional “information” is out there. In the age of the internet, it’s increasingly difficult to separate fact from opinion and both from outright propaganda. When we relied upon daily newspapers and the evening news–the “legacy” media–we missed a lot, but those journalists generally followed an ethical code that required independent verification of information before it was reported. In today’s news environment, with the 24-hour “news hole,” speed often trumps accuracy even for the more responsible media–and there are more and more irresponsible media outlets competing for our attention.

We can’t make good decisions if we don’t have trustworthy information.

The Princeton study validates a couple of old sayings: “it ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”   And the even pithier, “garbage in, garbage out.”

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