The News Market
News collecting and reporting is a marketplace today, not an institution. The so-called “Fourth Estate” sold out and became just another peddler of specialty goods. It’s a fragmented market, with Brands X, Y and Z selling influence in the guise of news.
One news showroom pushes a chromium model of truth featuring soft-leather reassurance and polished disdain for competing values. Another is all-electric in its presentation of facts with windows that admit only friendly views. There are economy models that clatter and bang ineffectually. Old-fashioned news purveyors are rare.
There was a time, some will remember, when media had industry-wide values that were public-facing. That was only generally true, of course. Rogues did their thing. Typically, though, standards were professional, meaning news and opinion were not conflated, so readers and viewers received mostly unvarnished information. Political narratives were not insinuated into coverage.
Journalists generally were public watchdogs, sniffing around for mishandled public funds and malfeasance. The journalist’s long-standing mantra was “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” which was to say, protect ordinary people from abuse by people of inordinate influence. Today, influencers reign supreme.
To push back against corruption, members of the traditional “press” sometimes were obnoxious, pushy and embarrassing. They still are. The difference is that whereas pushiness used to be calibrated to encourage transparency, it now seems calculated to stir up, or to cover up, or to win plaudits from peers—informing the public is not the end game.
I freely admit there never was a golden era of journalism. All eras were tainted by deficient reporters, bad editors, and greedy publishers. In Scoop, a 1938 satire of news-gatherers, Evelyn Waugh has a character saying: “I read the news with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth…”
The difference between then and now is willfulness. Bias is by design today. Editors proudly announce they will not be even-handed in reporting because a candidate is deemed unworthy of it. Narratives are encouraged if not demanded. Open alignment with political factions is considered a virtue.
Widespread enmity toward media is the consequence, general distrust of news coverage a self-inflicted wound. A recent Gallup survey of confidence in public organizations tells the story: Americans with a “a great deal or some” confidence in television news and newspapers total 14 percent and 18 percent, respectively.
So, here we are. Citizens in the habit of wanting to know what’s going on can either ignore media and move forward in semi-ignorance—that is, without rudimentary facts to ground their decisions—or follow media in a cursory way, in utter distrust and with great misgivings.
Sounds like a precursor to a public uprising. A character in the 1976 movie “Network” famously declared, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this anymore.” How long before a disgruntled America feels the same? And all for lack of a trustworthy media.