Readers “hate us again,” a respected trade publication of the media lamented one year after Sept. 11 and an ensuing, brief courtship with the press. Focusing on a public opinion poll that showed widespread dissatisfaction with journalists, the Editor & Publisher opinion article analyzed the most recent flareup in the love-hate relationship between the press and the public.
Only 49 percent, of the respondents in the Pew Research Center survey said they think news organizations are highly professional. Another one-half of the respondents thought journalists “don’t stand up for America.” A full 59 percent of the public believes news organizations are politically biased; 67 percent think the press tries to cover up mistakes; and 56 percent think news reports are inaccurate.
The Pew survey isn’t the only one that impugns journalists’ credibility. Other polls, year after year, reflect the same general opinion: Americans don’t respect journalists.
Even the citadel of journalistic principles, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, reported that its poll “Perspectives of the public and the press: examining our credibility” in 1999 identified numerous perceived lapses in journalistic competence. ASNE’s poll found: 78 percent of U.S. adults believe there is bias in the media; 78 percent believe that powerful people can get stories into the newspaper; 50 percent believe there are particular people or groups that get a “special break” in news coverage; 77 percent believe that newspapers pay much more attention to stories that support their own point of view; and 79 percent of the American public believes that “it’s pretty easy for special interest groups to manipulate the press.”
North Carolina’s journalists are just as guilty as their brethren around the nation. Unscientific reports and studies conducted by various special-interest groups are reported as gospel in the state’s daily newspapers. Opportunistic politicians, eager to glorify themselves, stage specious press conferences that will be dutifully attended and reported by the gullible press. Environmentalists, especially, know their messages will fall upon sympathetic ears at North Carolina’s metro papers, whose editors appear to be napping or blatantly obliging while junk scientists steal their news space.
Many of the state’s newspapers gave prominent coverage in October to a “smart growth” study released by Professors Reid Ewing of Rutgers University and Rolf Pendall of Cornell University. Hailed by The News & Observer of Raleigh as “the first detailed measure of sprawl,” the study ranked 83 metropolitan areas nationwide according to a definition of urban development that aligned snugly with the authors’ environmental affiliations.
The study ranked the Triangle as the third most-sprawling region. An eye-opener to the study’s invalidity was a statement that it omitted 56 metropolitan areas around the nation “because Ewing and Pendall couldn’t get complete information.” Aside from the obvious subjective criteria used to measure sprawl, such a high rate of error in any statistical analysis should set off alarm bells all across the newsroom. On the political front, the N&O appears to be more than glad to help Sen. John Edwards primp for his upcoming presidential campaign. Almost daily the newspaper seems to invent coverage or to report on staged events that give the liberal Edwards positive exposure.
About a year ago, Gov. Mike Easley and Senate Pro Tempore Marc Basnight conducted a workshop on how to manipulate the press. Announced as a “press conference,” the event afforded the state’s leaders an opportunity to proclaim the coming of a miracle: They can put a fiber optic conduit in a ditch and bring the wonders of the Internet to the economic backwater of eastern North Carolina. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that many utility companies already provided ample high-speed access in that region, newspapers around the state dutifully reported on the politicians’ dubious achievement.
Vacuous stories such as these fill newspapers around the land every day. And year after year, surveys show that readers notice. It’s evident that journalists have failed miserably at fulfilling their prime mission, as defined by hundreds of journalists themselves on the Committee of Concerned Journalists: “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.” According to the surveys, citizens consider journalists’ work neither accurate nor reliable.
Editors have no one else to blame but themselves. One of their prime responsibilities, as dictated by the committee of journalists, is to practice “a discipline of verification” to filter fiction from fact. The committee counsels that, “This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment.”
As one journalist responded in ASNE’s survey: “Joe Six-Pack thinks we are elitist, liberal socialists with nothing nice to say about anyone. We are part of the problem.”
It’s high time for all journalists to accept that fact, to enforce the core principles of their profession — and pray they can save what’s left of their credibility.
Wagner is the editor of Carolina Journal, monthly newspaper of the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.