“We have it in our power to change the world again,” Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry declared last Thursday in Boston, “but only if we’re true to our ideals — and that starts by telling the truth to the American people.”
On one level, this is classic motherhood-and-apple-pie campaigning. After all, who can be against truth-telling? On another level, it’s a jibe at his rival. Promising change by being “true to our ideals,” Kerry implicitly accuses President George W. Bush of failures in that department.
On a still deeper level, however, his comment taps a concern far larger than his campaign. How do voters in twenty-first-century America come to know “the truth”?
The problem is that our perception of truth is not direct but mediated. The mediator is called (appropriately enough) the media. In an ideal world, this mediation is nearly invisible. But journalists, like campaigns, don’t operate in an ideal world. So it’s worth asking not only whether candidates are telling the truth, but whether today’s media is able to deliver the truth.
A report released in May by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an initiative based at Columbia University and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides some disturbing answers that go far beyond the much-discussed supposed “liberal bias” among journalists.
Start with the fact that the media faces serious economic pressures. “A growing number of news outlets are chasing a relatively static or even shrinking audience for news,” say the authors of “The State of the New Media 2004.” So media outlets increasingly focus on new ways to disseminate news, rather than on the more expensive process of gathering it. That leads to an increased workload for journalists, who must now cover more stories with less backstopping from researchers and fact checkers.
The effects are clearly visible even to the nonprofessional. Particularly in the relentless 24-hour cycle of cable news, the public is increasingly “getting the raw elements of news as end products … without much synthesis or even the ordering of information,” according to the report. The public also is getting little new news: more than two-thirds of cable news stories are repeats of earlier stories.
No wonder, then, that viewers wanting the immediacy of cable news but frustrated by its quality are turning to the newest form of news dissemination: the Web. But that trend, although broadening a reader’s access and immediacy, “may lead to a general decline in the scope and quality of American journalism, not because the [Web] isn’t suited for news, but because it isn’t suited to the kind of profits that underwrite newsgathering.”
Not surprisingly, these pressures open the media to growing dangers of manipulation, not only by owners, advertisers, and politicians, but by celebrity subjects demanding payment — so-called “checkbook journalism” — for doing interviews. Result: declining public trust.
- In 1985, 80 percent of the public trusted newspapers — a figure that slipped to 59 percent last year.
- Network news was found believable by 74 percent of viewers in 1996 but only by 65 percent in 2002.
- In cable news, the highest believability rating, held by CNN, stands at a paltry 32 percent.
- Local television news fares even worse, with only 26 percent of its viewers giving it high marks for believability.
Does the public still care about serious news? Yes indeed. Subscriptions to the Economist and audiences for National Public Radio have both doubled in the last fifteen years. Apart from this growth and from an upsurge in alternative and ethnic journalism, however, the general picture is of decline.
So as John Kerry and John Edwards set out on their cross-country bus trip, voters should be aware that organizational issues within the media are helping determine campaign strategy. Consider, for example, the choice of a bus. While the Bush campaign is gearing up to spend $30 million advertising in the major media markets during August, Kerry and Edwards will be calling on smaller communities. Credit them not only with reaching out to America’s heartland voters but also with a canny use of the media. Remember that local television (unlike the networks) loves news, spending only 16 of its budget on it but earning 40 percent of its revenue from it. And remember that three-fifths of local television stories that involve controversy, says the report, tell “mostly or only one side of the story.”
Does this bus trip, then, have anything to do with the huge amount of free and uncritical coverage they’ll get from local television news? Probably. Yet when they’re out there “telling the truth to the American people,” shouldn’t they worry that only a quarter of the viewers will believe the media that covers them? Certainly.
So is the media reporting the news, or influencing the way candidates choose to create it? Yes.
©2004 Institute for Global Ethics