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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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| Democracy At The Brink | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Rather v. CBS: Probative Issues | |
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Critical, Skeptical Editors Transform Information Into Credible, Relevant, Probative News
We are faithful to our profession in telling the truth. That’s the only faith to which journalists need adhere.
Walter Cronkite
Managing Editor, The CBS Evening News [1962-1981]
Our world is filled with people who act or present themselves journalists, or editors, but who clearly are not. In the last two decades, pseudo-journalists have largely taken over broadcast and online news. Their usurpation of a once honorable profession has come a great cost to practitioners and news consumers alike by way of turning once legitimate news organizations into sources of titillation and entertainment. They have been aided and abetted in their destruction of professional journalism by turning out thousands of aspiring young journalists absent adequate educational foundation ( science and humanities ). Far too many of today’s journalism workers are people with good communications skills who are journalistically inadequate, morally deficient, and absent ethical commitment.
One of the best broadcast news executives in history, Richard Salant, who served as president of CBS News from 1952 to 1979, backed up Walter Cronkite’s news judgment, explaining:
“I strongly believe that responsible journalism cannot have as its central objective giving people what they want, or avoiding displeasing them. The objective must not be merely to interest and titillate to grab an audience, but to provide the information they need.”
Richard S. Salant
Being a professional journalist requires a serious commitment every bit the equal of that required of physicians, lawyers and other professionals. Where physicians are required to live by the Hippocratic Oath and Lawyers required to pursue Equal Justice Under The Law, being a professional journalist demands fidelity-to-fact. The journalist’s job is neither to entertain, or titillate, or to disseminate information absent relevance or merit.
Journalistic values and standards have survived the test of time. They are neither temporal nor trendy for they are rooted in the realities of an imperfect world and a complex society. The job of a professional journalist is to know what matters and what doesn’t, ferreting out truth when revealing it comes with risk, and challenging all ideas and information — especially that offered by government, institutions or those in power.
Journalism is not about knowing everything, but knowing what matters. One need only look at the damage to legitimate journalism by today’s pseudo journalists to see why professionalism, ethics, standards and integrity are essential to the news gathering and reporting process. What’s largely missing in electronic journalism today ( radio, television, Internet ) is critical editing. This article is about the role critical and skeptical editing plays in credible news collection and publishing.
In some ways the job of an editor is to filter out what’s not relevant or important, much like a composer, based on intuition, knowledge, and understanding of how new information relates to previously known information. If this sounds easy, it clearly is not — for editorial filtering requires application of standards ( what’s acceptable, worthy, or meritorious ), and testing against principles ( ethics, integrity, credibility ).
The world cannot long endure without probative and credible sources of information. While making money is valued more highly today than being honest, probative or credible, that was not always the case. Historically, journalism and democracy both succeeded when it was easiest for large numbers of people to know about the things that matter most in their lives.
In the last century the men and women who put the Honorable House Of The Fourth Estate above their own best interests created and maintained high standards. Together they gave journalism a good name, earned high esteem by in the eye of the private citizen, and established a tradition of credibility.
Some of these people ( see legendary editors list below ) became immensely famous while others served the journalist profession from managerial, publisher, or ownership roles. Ben Bradlee, the managing editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal achieved legendary greatness in part due to being employed by an immensely strong and deeply committed publisher ( Katharine Graham ).
| News Journalism Functions | ||
|---|---|---|
| Activity | Function | Job |
| Information Collection | Reportorial | News Production |
| Sourcing-Verification | Fidelity-To-Fact | Fact Checking |
| Story Selection | Editor | Content Management |
| Standards Conformance | Copy Editor | Spelling, Grammar, Style |
Journalism is comprised of four fundamental activities whose purpose is to collect and filter information based on historical, institutional, personal or traditional standards and practices. The output of such filtering is presented or published as relevant, probative and credible news.
News is information that has context, relevancy and timeliness. Unlike reportorial work, fact-checking and copy editing, a (managing) editor makes his or her selection of the most newsworthy information based on standards, experience, knowledge, insight and intuition. Experience is an important ingredient in editorial decision-making because the value of news is determined as much by its relationship to other information as to its intrinsic quality, factual underpinnings, clarity of presentation and timeliness.
While the theoretical foundations of editing are covered in nearly every J-school, the standards and practices common found in today’s newsrooms vary considerably from the ideal model. In general, newspapers, non-fiction publishers, responsible online news services, and some broadcast news operations practice standards based editing. Elsewhere, especially in electronic media, critical, standards based editing is largely ignored.
Some Of America’s Legendary Editors
Ben Bradlee
Washington PostWalter Cronkite
CBS NewsDavid Brinkley
ABC NewsChet Huntley
NBC NewsPeter Jennings
ABC NewsJohn Chancellor
NBC NewsDan Rather
CBS News
An editor’s job is akin to that of a composer. A favorite analogy relates information flow into a newsroom to the 88 keys on a piano. Some information is rough and powerful while other may be soft, sparkling or even shrill. Played indiscriminately the sounds of a piano are raucous and discordant, but when played according to a set of standards that define scales, chords, rhythm and the order of notes, cacophony is replaced by melody, counterpoint and harmony.
In a sense, a composer filters out what best remain silent while highlighting what needs to be heard. To some degree, news stories are like the keys of a piano and news editors are like composers — masters of what information ought to be published from what is less important, irrelevant, or untimely.
The point of this analogy is that too much information is the equal of no information. Look around the Internet, listed to any of the Cable news channels, or watch the network morning programs and you’ll see how information overload obscures what matters most by failing to filter out what matters least.
Comparing today’s flaccid electronic news content to the historical norm reveals an absence of critical or skeptical editing. It has become fashionable among today’s well paid pseudo journalists to deliver entertainment, manufactured conflict and trivia in place of relevant news, meaningful commentary or investigative revelation.
Not too long ago, Richard Salant, then president of CBS News explained, “I strongly believe that responsible journalism cannot have as its central objective giving people what they want, or avoiding displeasing them. The objective must not be merely to interest and titillate to grab an audience, but to provide the information they need.”
Music Man Elton John: In Music As In All Else, Knowing What Belongs And What Doesn't Defines Success
In journalism, the job of the editor is to choose what information to publish from an endless flow of information beyond the ability of anyone to absorb or understand.
Separating what matters from what doesn’t is a skill whether it’s practiced by a composer, a merchant, lawyer, editor, physician or thousands of other fields where persons trained to filter what matters from what doesn’t provide services, focus and structure to our lives.
There are few good editors remaining today. Most of them are found at newspapers, wire services and probative broadcast news organizations such as Canada’s CBC, PBS, or Britain’s BBC. Good editing is not about attracting an audience, or making money, or being entertaining. To the contrary it is based on a separate but immensely important values system called relevancy.
Failed journalism and the absence of skeptical and critical editing has contributed to the immense ignorance that threatens American values and freedoms and the future of western civilization.
