What readers want is surprising
It’s not what journalists thought
The Front Page
Morning update
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
By Ken Tingley
Most of the people I worked with over four decades in newspapers considered it a higher calling. They came to work each day trying to make a difference, tell the stories of their community and, once in awhile, expose some corruption.
We believed we were different.
I saw the dedication, the arguments over punctuation, the play of photos, the accuracy of headlines and the regular challenges from readers who thought we could be better. Even on an average day, we were keeping the community informed and making them a little smarter.
Yet, over the course of my lifetime, the public trust in journalists has continued to drop. I certainly found this perplexing because I knew how hard my colleagues worked to get their stories right and be fair.
Between 1972 and 2000, public trust in journalists dropped from 68% to 51%. Since 2000 and the beginning of the internet age, it has dropped from 51% to 40%.
When I took over as managing editor of The Post-Star in 1999, I was determined to have a conversation with our readers. Every two weeks I wrote a column “From the Managing Editor” that explained why we did what we did. It explained news judgements, mistakes, reader complaints and even the comics lineup.
I hope our readers learned a lot about their newspaper, but it sounds like I needed to learn more about what they wanted.
But a new study - the Media Insight Project - that was released last week was startling.
Its premise was that readers often did not have the same core values as the journalists that wrote about their communities. The list of those core journalism values is a good one:
Oversight or monitoring powerful people.
Transparency because society works better when information is open and out in the public.
Factualism or the more facts the public has the closer it gets to the truth.
Giving voice to the less powerful.
Casting a spotlight on community problems.
The study found many people believed there was a flip side to those values.
- Oversight - Many believed that people needed to trust leaders to do their jobs and that people in authority need privacy to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.
- Transparency - Not all information can be released without the right context. Too much information can hinder progress and leave room for gross misinterpretation.
- Factualism - More facts will only get you so far in understanding any situation.
- Giving voice to the less powerful - Many believe this is overdone and favoring the less fortunate does not help them.
- Casting a spotlight on community problems - Other felt strongly that more coverage should be of what is right to make it stronger.
What the study found was that just 1 in 10 people agreed with all five of those journalism values. How could our values, my own values, be so different than the people we served?
Two out of three believed more facts got you closer to the truth. That means 1 out of 3 did not believe that.
Half those polled believed giving voice to the less powerful was appropriate. Half did not.
Three in 10 believed focusing on community problems was a good way to make things better.
Less than half believed in holding leaders accountable.
Less than half believed in transparency from our institutions.
Just 1 in 4 agreed with casting a spotlight on community problems.
These principles were the reason so many of us came to work every day. This was our mission, our reason for being, yet the people we were writing were apparently seeing things more differently.
Many did not want someone rocking the boat.
Many were sick of the bad news on their doorsteps.
Many believed in their elected officials and institutions and wanted them supported.
If these results truly reflect our society, I find it to be a shocking chasm. The authors of the research said this:
“We did find a strong relationship between people’s moral values and their views toward core journalism principles. At the risk of oversimplifying, those who most valued care or fairness tended to embrace journalism principles more strongly. Those who put more value on loyalty and authority, by contrast, tended to be more skeptical of journalism values such as giving voice to the less powerful. This connection between people’s moral values and views of journalism principles exists regardless of people’s age, race/ethnicity, education, gender, or political affiliation or ideology. These people did not completely reject journalistic values; they are also not absolutists. For example, they saw some value in spotlighting problems but also supported the idea of celebrating what’s right.”
It’s a complex subject that needs more discussion and thought, but it certainly would explain why so many people hold journalists in such low regard.
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Tweet of the Day
Quote of the Day
“We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.”
-Former Vice President Walter Monday on the Carter administration.
I share your concerns about the general publics view of "journalism." Today I think many view the news sources as one large conglomeration of print and television making no real distinction any more. They don't differentiate. I see most of the negative views of "news providers," if you will, beginning when the papers like the New York Times, consciously decided to allow opinion pieces to be among the "news stories" on the front page. That and the decision by the likes of CBS, NBC, ABC to incorporate their news departments into their entertainment divisions. With the birth of cable news the process of co-mingling reporting the news with presenting opinion became truly blurred, be it on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and sadly in my opinion PBS. Having served as the citizen representative on the editorial board of the Post-Star twice over the years, I know just how hard the journalists work to get the facts, and when sharing opinions keep it separate, but perception does matter, and I do think the views of the general public have been shaped more by the television news media than print journalism. And rightly or wrongly, trust in traditional media has declined to an all-time low.