One might expect journalism majors to emerge from school
determined to call a fact a fact, a non-fact a lie, and a fool a fool. But that is not what seems to happen. Objectivity seems to be what they are taught to
seek. This objectivity, at its best, is
what was just described, at its worst, it is merely reporting on contrasting
opinions. Balance in reporting opposing
views is seen as a path to “fairness.” But
not all views are of equal value, so presenting two sides of an issue is not
necessarily fair. In fact, it can be
decidedly unfair when an acknowledged expert on one side is contrasted with a
crackpot on the other as if both were equals.
This is the easiest path for a reporter or editor to take, and they too
often take it.
Paul Starr wrote a review of a couple of books on the
health of journalism in this country, both as a business and as a public
service. It appeared in the New York Review of Books as Fall from Grace. One of the books reviewed was Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation,
and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris,
and Hal Roberts. These authors studied news
media over the past few years to assess how political news was treated and how
it was propagated.
“In Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts
illuminate this new “media ecosystem” through an analysis of how political news
was linked, liked, and shared from 2015 to 2018 and how the news media either
amplified or checked the diffusion of falsehoods. The study is based on four
million political stories from 40,000 online sources, as well as case studies
of conspiracy stories, rumors, and outright disinformation.”
Their study concluded that the left and the right were
two different beasts in how news was created and propagated, making balance and
“fairness” something quite problematic as a concept.
“The pattern that emerges from
the data contradicts the idea that there are two symmetrical echo chambers on
the right and left. On the right, Benkler and his colleagues find an insular
echo chamber skewed toward the extreme, where even the major news organizations
(Fox and Breitbart) do not observe norms of truth-seeking. But from the
center-right (for example, The Wall
Street Journal) through the center to the left, they find an interconnected
network of news organizations that operate under the constraint of established
journalistic norms.”
Fake news tends to be suppressed and not propagated by
organizations that actually check facts before printing things. That is the way it works on the left according
to the study. But on the right, there is
an industry focused on creating and propagating fake news.
“On the right, major news
organizations amplified stories concocted in the right’s nether reaches, such
as Pizzagate (Democrats were purportedly operating a child-trafficking ring out
of a pizza shop in Washington) and the Seth Rich murder conspiracy (an aide at
the Democratic National Committee was killed supposedly because he divulged its
e-mails to WikiLeaks). False stories originated on the left as well, but they
were generally not relayed to a wider public. The right-wing media failed to
correct falsehoods or to hold their journalists accountable for spreading them,
whereas the rest of the media checked one another, corrected mistakes when they
made them, and in several cases disciplined or fired those responsible for
errors.”
“These differences contributed
to the greater susceptibility on the right not only to home-grown propaganda
but also to Russian disinformation and commercially fabricated clickbait
whenever these were consistent with what the authors call the ‘tribal narrative’.”
Although most of the media had good intentions, their interest
in “fairness” led them to foolishly highlight many of the outrageous claims
emerging from the far-right.
“In 2016, Benkler and his
colleagues argue, the right was able to ‘harness’ the press to its cause
because of journalists’ preoccupation with ‘balance’ and eagerness for scoops.
They note that the press had an institutional problem: How would it maintain balance
if reporters did hard-hitting stories about Trump? Borrowing from a study by
Thomas E. Patterson, they conclude that the solution was to run equally
hard-hitting stories about Hillary Clinton. Journalists ‘performed’ neutrality
with harshly negative coverage of both candidates.”
The media countered many articles about real Trump
misbehaviors with even more articles about “alleged” Clinton misbehaviors. The net result was that Hillary Clinton was
accorded more negative coverage than Donald Trump.
“In fact, according to
Patterson’s analysis, negative coverage of Clinton outpaced positive coverage
62 percent to 38 percent, while coverage of Trump was 56 percent negative to 44
percent positive.”
Even the New York
Times comes under criticism for its treatment of Clinton.
“A clear instance of this
pattern is the coverage of the Clinton Foundation. The Times entered into an arrangement
that gave it advance access to Clinton
Cash, a book by a Breitbart editor, Peter Schweizer, sponsored by a project
founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer. The
resulting Times article
insinuated that in exchange for money for the Clinton Foundation, Hillary
Clinton had enabled a Russian firm to acquire control of American uranium
assets, even though the Times had no evidence that she had intervened
in the decision to approve the deal, which a committee representing nine
government agencies had made. The Times article
and other overwrought and often misleading pieces in the mainstream press about
the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton and DNC e-mails became some of
the most widely shared news items in 2016, thus helping the Republican effort
to depict Clinton and the Democrats as corrupt.”
The book provides this conclusion about the 2016 election.
“The negative mainstream
coverage of Clinton, according to Network
Propaganda, mattered far more than Russian disinformation to the outcome of
the 2016 election.”
Paul Starr provides his own conclusion about the current state
of journalism.
“But when so much of journalism
is at risk of disappearing and so many Americans inhabit a right-wing echo
chamber, we ought to recognize that our country is in a crisis that strikes at
its foundations.”
The interested
reader might find the following articles informative:
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