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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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| Day Of The Knights Templar | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Probity — A Definition | |
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Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University Of Pennsylvania
Fidelity to fact is so central to responsible journalism that it transcends and stands above all other considerations.
Robert Butche
For physicians, the sacred Hippocratic oath underlying their profession is first do no harm. If there were a similar oath for journalists it would be first tell the truth. The reporters we depend on to inform us about the acts and deeds of an all powerful government don’t take such an oath, but maybe they ought to. Fidelity to truth is the very foundation upon which rests our Honorable Profession.
Truth, unfortunately is not always an absolute — which means that a great deal of what is said and reported in the nation’s newspapers and what passes for broadcast news today is likely to be colorized by the views and intentions of reporters or producers. The problem is not contextual, but one of perspective, viewpoint and aspirations.
Thus two otherwise well trained and honest reporters, on opposite sides of a military conflict may portray the same facts in different contexts based on opposing frames of reference. That’s to be understood, but the central truth as to whether there was, or was not a battle is an invariant truth — meaning that the event itself is a variable fact based on sources of information unrelated to what is reported by journalists.
Experienced journalists well understand the difference between simple truth and fidelity to fact. Fidelity to fact is so central to responsible journalism that it transcends and stands above all other considerations. Thus two very different newspapers, as for example The Washington Times and The Washington Post may see their own truth in some governmental action very differently what they report about the vote, event or decision is based a absolute fidelity to fact.
Wolf Blitzer, CNN Situation Room Anchor
For broadcast news, where the pressures of 24 hour a day coverage combine with money-driven need to be competitive, truth is inconvenient. To drive audience demographics, today’s cable news channels openly promote artificial conflict to stimulate viewer interest. Thus only two, polarized views of simple truth are tolerated. When what’s really happening isn’t all that interesting, broadcasters hype everything in sight and openly promote the less insignificant, but most attractive and entertaining story to keep viewers on channel. In the doing, truth becomes increasingly flexible as big media managers seek to more fully monetize their air time.
In the doing today’s broadcast news operations confuse their audience at best, and openly misinform them at times. Polarization and hysteria-driving content is profitable while what’s real, insightful, probative or relevant is not. The result is an ongoing diminution of public trust of journalists in general and broadcast news in particular.
The failures of broadcast news are widespread. No station, network or news channel is immune from the pressures to monetize in preference to being responsible. Rarely are their misdeeds cited, researched and exposed. This is largely because doing so is not a profit centered activity — so the inward collapse of journalism at the hands of those who proselytize it for personal gain continues.
There are exceptions, of course, and one of the most outspoken and most respected institutions to undertake study and analysis of today’s journalism is the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Kathleen Hall Jamieson serves as director of The Annenberg Public Policy Center and its related research facility known as FactCheck, a nonprofit organization devoted to research and analysis on matters of public policy and journalistic activity.
For most journalists, the notion of being bound to fidelity to fact guides everything written or said. This was once the foundation of broadcast news as well — not just in the long ago era of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, but more recently in the work of journalists such as Peter Jennings, John Chancellor and Roger Mudd who were critical and demanding editors who demanded multiple sources and internal fact checking.
But today’s broadcasters increasingly find fidelity to fact too constraining and uncompetitive. One such incident happened last week during the Republican Convention in Saint Paul. Here’s what Kathleen Hall Jamieson had to say about it on a segment of Bill Moyers Journal aired last Friday on PBS.
PBS Transcript
Bill Moyers Journal Broadcast
September 5th, 2008KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: On CNN earlier this week Soledad O’Brien picks up something apparently from e-mails, although perhaps from bloggers because it’s circulating in both places, and takes as fact that Governor Palin has cut special needs funding. Now, if she has, that evocative moment in the speech in which she promised to be the advocate for special needs children is an act of hypocrisy. So very important moment. However, it’s raised on the assumption that it’s true. It’s asserted as true by Soledad O’Brien. When Soledad O’Brien raises it, the McCain spokesperson responds by defending what the governor will do in the future, the reasonable viewer watches and says, “Well, the McCain spokesperson isn’t defending and saying she didn’t do it. Perhaps she did.”
Soledad O'Brien, CNN Anchor
Now you have a moment in which journalism has deceived its audience because in the rush to make this point about possible hypocrisy, a major commentator on a major network has asserted as fact something which doesn’t hold up. It took the FactCheck.org researcher that I called on my staff about four hours to get back to the primary research documents.
BILL MOYERS: And it said?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: That Sarah Palin had increased funding for special needs children. There was a change in the category in the budget in which it was housed. And as a result, there was some confusion. And some people had generalized from the budget proposed by the predecessor that she defeated.
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: And so the problem I have with some of the press coverage is that in the rush to vet, they made the mistake they were accusing the McCain campaign of. But I don’t think that has anything to do with gender. I think that has something to do with the nature of 24-hour-a-day journalism.
BILL MOYERS: One that…
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: But I think it’s problematic. However, in all of this, the press did something very important because it took another key claim that Governor Palin had made, that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere. Well, as reporters quickly pointed out and accurately pointed out, she opposed it pretty much after she’d favored it and after it was all but gone anyway and the state did take the money. Now, there’s an instance in which reporting was quick, but the reporting was accurate and the press performed its function effectively. None of that has to do with gender.
BILL MOYERS: So what does the, what do voters do? What do ordinary people out there who are not sure whether Sarah Palin really cut said one thing in her speech and then at home cut aid for needy children? Or the press that gets it right and the politicians say it’s wrong? What does any ordinary viewer do?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, the ordinary viewer should be able to step back and trust that the media are looking carefully and offering a factual basis apart from the partisan spin.
BILL MOYERS: What media, though? Fox News? CNN? PBS? Bloggers on the left to the right, as you said? Rush Limbaugh? Rachel Maddow?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: That’s the problem. The problem is that one can’t trust anymore from some of these sources that there’s going to be a fidelity to fact in the presence of contest. One of the things that we showed in 2004, from the National Annenberg Election Survey, was that those who are reliant on Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News accepted the Republican view of the facts.
Those reliant on NPR and CNN were more likely to accept the Democratic view of the contested facts. Now sometimes there’s legitimate contest. Sometimes, however, what you essentially had was spin and distortion on each side. Those who are relying on newspapers and traditional forms of news were still more likely to hold a non-contested view of those facts.
That’s the answer to your question. Journalism that tries to balance, tries to have fidelity to fact, when it makes a mistake, corrects often enough that the public catches the correction, is still the place that one goes or one reads and watches both sides and tries to filter them through.
BILL MOYERS: After two weeks of conventions, what’s the main storyline this week now?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: The main storyline this week is not, for me, about either of the conventions. We get wrapped up in convention world, forgetting that the outside world is experiencing a real life translated into headlines.
If people woke up this morning and see tonight on the evening news “unemployment up, stock market down,” if they go to the gas pump and can’t afford what they need to put in the gas tank, if they’re facing crises at in foreclosures in homes, that kind of anxiety, that palpable of anxiety is the cast wrapped around these two conventions. And the question becomes not who gave what speech, what visual worked and what issues resonating but how are you going to address the anxiety in our lives? And how are you going to ensure that we’re safe here, secure domestically in our own families and lives economically as well as secure abroad?
I don’t think that either of the conventions did all that it needed to tie back to the kinds of concerns people are feeling now or the kinds of concerns that are being magnified out and the headlines they’re going to see today and in the coming days.
