Inform thyself
Bret Stephens wrote an interesting editorial today in the NY Times, calling his colleagues to account for the profession’s biases and sloppy standards. “If the American news media wants to regain trust, we could stand to get off our high horse and be a bit more self-aware about our privileged and often troubling role in society,” he wrote. He’s right, as far as he goes. But he doesn’t go far enough — because he leaves the duty of the reader of news out of the formula.
Some of you know that I was a news reporter with Newsweek for a half-dozen years in the late 70s/early 80s, primarily in science, but also in business, politics, and once in a while, other sections. In the end I became disenchanted and left, largely because the weekly newsmagazine seemed to be dying as hard-news journalists moved to broadcast and cable tv. Given what finally happened to Newsweek, I feel I was right.
Being a science reporter, I was intimately involved in the early days of the small computing revolution — I actually filed the first story by computer to the magazine, and wrote regularly on the emerging computer technologies. That meant that I was quite familiar with the early bulletin board services and interactive services like AOL, Delphi, CompuServe, eWorld, etc. and could see that the voice of individual consumers was being amplified through them. It has been no surprise to me that as social media crystallized as a communications tool for users, it has replaced news programming as a first-source for many people.
This trend undermined the utility of traditional news platforms: they are often no longer the first to announce news, and often their presentation of stories are lost in the din of thousands of competing serious, not-so-serious, and outright nonsensical sources. The mistake of many of these platforms was to treat some of these new competing voices as though they, too, were serious sources: CNN used to quote tweets as though the individual opinions of ignorant readers had meaningful value, much like man-in-the-street interviews did. But that only weakened the authority of traditional platforms even more: after all, why go to CNN to get tweets when you can go to Twitter to begin with?
Most of what we think of as news today is really opinion, some informed, some not. This has been forced on traditional news platforms partly because so much of social media reportage is itself opinion-with-facts; but it has been accelerated by the success of advocacy journalism during the MeToo movement, the Trump/Russia saga, etc. Journalists increasingly see themselves as public servants because of their advocacy, rather than seeing advocacy as compromising their objectivity.
In effect, this has created a gray zone of advocacy journalism in between straightforward factual reporting and the opinion section. Now, this isn’t a new thing: advocacy journalism is the norm for British papers and American tabloids, and yellow journalism is as old as printing itself. But it is a significant change for American mainstream news, and its arrival has confused the public’s understanding of what news is and isn’t.
We tend to refer to news publications as if they are all equivalent in some notional way: we expect that they should be objective, accurate, check their facts and speak to sources, wait to publish until confirmation, etc. But they have never been all the same; and in fact, they are inconsistent even within their own publications. Editorial bias is implicit in practices as basic as choosing what stories to run, how much to promote them, and whom to have write them. Business bias causes publishers to avoid controversial subjects and focus on feel-good (or, nowadays, feel-angry) stories. Reporter bias leads reporters to avoid upsetting valuable sources in order to preserve them.
On the other hand, computing and the universal use of phone cameras and social media posts means that stories increasingly come from ordinary citizens. But this usually is information without knowledge or context. Citizen reportage is almost always either dramatic eyewitness video or photos, or anecdotal “facts” devoid of context chosen selectively to support an opinion, usually accompanied by outrage and accusation. This is more gossip or rumor than news.
Where does this lead?
It’s clear that traditional news — dependent on a centralized processing of information, sourced by multiple reporters over a period of time, checked for accuracy and significance, and packaged in context with other information to turn fact into knowledge — is a dying business model. There is no value in a large business pretending to be an authoritative and comprehensive information source when the internet provides thousands of alternatives, often free, more dramatic, and faster.
At the same time, news gatherers like Google News and Apple News are excellent at collecting headlines across the digital news universe. But they fail to provide context, and much worse, because they curate stories individually based on preference, they reinforce reader bias and thus fail in the fundamental duty to inform.
They are no obvious answers, but the professional news community has started to move in the direction of acting like a subscription library, where teams of journalists form small, self-sustaining collectives around specialties. In effect, it’s similar to what streaming services have done to movie studios and broadcasters: fractionalized the distribution of news, driven the business side down closer to the journalists themselves, encouraging them to form guild-like entities rather than corporate titans. It’s the reverse of the consolidation in the newspaper and broadcast world that so concerned people just a dozen years ago. Substack, Medium, Post, and others are the emerging mainstream media. This makes perfect sense: like iTunes to the world of music publishing, there is no longer a need for a distributor to package up an album when you can go straight to the artist song by song. Who needs the NY Times when Julia Ioffe and her colleagues will send subscribers a daily email?
And this means that reading news is like food shopping. With a thousand sources, amateur and professional, it becomes the reader’s duty to choose the informed from the ignorant. Which, in the end, has been the glaring, missing part of all the conversation about news and bias: There has always been bias. Bias is inherent in communication. It is the consumer’s obligation to shop intellectually just like they shop for clothing and food. Choosing one news source and then complaining that it doesn’t meet your own preference is intellectual laziness, as lazy as expecting to eat in one restaurant for the rest of your life or never changing the shoes you wear. Shop for news, compare it, inform yourself, and don’t expect truth to be presented in a neatly wrapped package of paper. Being a citizen requires work. The Greeks knew it. We should too.