In Defense of Journalism

I’ve had enough of this fake news bullshit. I’ve had enough of the finger pointing at journalists. I’ve had enough of the blame passing.

I’m going to speak to print journalism because I believe it is still where the best journalism is done. As to my bonafides, I have two degrees in journalism and mass communications.

So where to start?

When you’re in school learning to be a journalist, they teach you how to dispassionately examine your subject matter. They teach you to dig for the truth. They teach you to diligently record facts. They teach you to efficiently and clearly communicate those facts. They beat into you the difference between subjectivity and objectivity.

How about a lesson?

Were it just me describing the above truck, I would say it was a shitty looking blue Ford. That’s being subjective. Someone else, probably the owner, would not describe the truck as shitty. She’d say it was in the process of being restored, blah, blah, blah.

A journalist is trained to describe the truck as a 1960s-era blue Ford pick-up. Perhaps if it were relevant, the journalist would say the truck was missing hubcaps and featured various primered body panels. Which is to say, the journalist is trained to only say what is objectively true, the facts that two people standing side-by-side would agree as being “true.” (not getting into the whole existential question of whether or not we share the hallucinations of reality.)

With me so far?

So if you read an article in a newspaper, that’s what the reporter was trying to do. Communicate the facts of the moment (more facts can always come later as a story develops).

Oh, but those facts are interpreted! That’s what you’re thinking. Not if the journalist is worth a damn, they are not. If a journalist has an opinion about a fact, that goes on the op-ed page, and is labeled as such.

That’s what we’re taught. Our integrity is all we have. Our dedication to the truth is the viability of the profession.

And sometimes, we’re all you as a citizen have. You think the politicians and CEOs are going to tell you the truth? Who is more likely to tell you the truth about factory working conditions? A guy making seven figures with an eye on his company’s market rating, or a journalist? You know it’s not the guy with a vested interest in the bottom line.

You have to trust that there is someone out there working for you to deliver the truth. Journalist are your truth bringers. They are public servants (and not even paid as well). Most of us got into the profession because we believed in the nobility of the work, that it’s a cause.

But newspapers are biased!

Well, say you have two newspapers, and the editors-in-chief and publishers of those papers are ideologically opposed in every way. So say one paper is liberal, the other conservative, and the day after Trump got elected across their front pages the liberal one said, “OH SHIT,” and the conservative one said, “Hallelujah!”

And then you read the stories that accompany the headline. The facts about Trump being elected — that he lost the popular vote, but won comfortably in the electoral college — should be the same. You’ll see a difference in maybe in who the reporters of each paper interviewed. Does that make the story untrue? No. Quotes from people are their opinion, but if you see it in a story it should be word-for-word what the person quoted said.

Does the fact that the papers interviewed different people make the news fake? No. Does it show bias? Maybe, but a good reporter working on a news story is going to attempt to give you quotes from both sides of the issue. Again, that is what we’re taught to do.

This is where media literacy and social responsibility come in. It is your fucking responsibility to know who is producing the news you consume. It’s your job to know if the publisher of your local paper is a liberal or conservative. That will change how they write a headline or frame a story, but even that won’t make the facts of the story itself change.

If a reporter leaves out information so as to slant the story, then that reporter sucks. It’s like everything else. There are good ones and bad ones.

Still with me?

The profession has been fundamentally changed by the Internet. Any jackass with a keyboard can call themselves a journalist now. People read a Huffington Post article and think it’s news. People who like to write but didn’t learn about the profession, didn’t invest in the responsibility of the role of the journalist, can write whatever they want, publish it wherever and whenever they want, and consumers will read it thinking it’s legit …

It is your responsibility to know the difference. YOURS. You take an active role in what you consume. You decide every day what you read, what you don’t. If you sit in your echo chamber and only read … sorry, what am I thinking. No one reads anymore. If you only watch things that support what you already believe, you’re shirking your civic responsibility.

A journalist worth his salt will not ever want to be accused of reporting an untrue fact. Accuse me of getting your quote wrong? The hell I did. You need me to play it back for you?

We had ethics classes in school, classes about the legalities of defamation and pedaling in falsities. We know our business.

As a consumer, do you know yours?