journalists adopt an attitude of professional detachment, blocking out their opinions and following where the facts lead.
Unnamed sources: News accounts are more authoritative when sources are identified. When journalists use anonymous sources, they are asking their audience – proved in the surveys to be skeptical – to trust their judgment that the sources know what they are talking about. Without the source’s name and position, the public has no way to assess the validity of the information or its possible bias. Thus the use of an anonymous source places a special burden on the reporter, because the news organization effectively is vouching for the accuracy of what is attributed to the source. Anonymity is legitimately granted to protect a whistleblower – someone with inside knowledge of wrongdoing who is willing to come forward but would be in jeopardy if identified. Protecting such a source enables journalists to give the public information that it otherwise would not receive.
Too many mistakes: The Gallup-Knight survey also showed that Americans were troubled by inaccuracies in reporting. In a horrifying verdict for the journalism profession, many news consumers suspected that those inaccuracies are intentional and an effort to promote an agenda. Though criticism like that is off the mark, journalists need to recognize the danger of making up their minds about a story before they finish their reporting. In her Point of View essay accompanying this chapter, Jane Shoemaker warns about approaching an assignment with preconceived notions or coaxing an interview subject to provide exactly the quotes the reporter is looking for. Also, it’s worth noting that news organizations get criticism not just for factual errors but for sloppiness in grammar and punctuation as well. The public is saying that if journalists can’t get the little things right, how can they be trusted on the larger issues?
Insensitivity: Although news consumers may be interested in how victims of tragedy are coping with their ordeals, they are disgusted when reporters, especially those on television, appear to trample on the victims’ feelings. Unlike public officials and business executives who are accustomed to media questioning, these ordinary citizens are thrust involuntarily into the news. They are vulnerable to exploitation and have a right to be left alone. In Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists, Robert J. Haiman quoted an editor as telling his staff: “The mayor, the police chief, the people who run the big companies in town … they deal with us all of the time and they are all big boys and girls who can take care of themselves. But let’s not treat somebody’s old Uncle Harry or Aunt Millie the same way we treat the pols and the pros.”20
Sensationalism: The public thinks journalists chase stories about sex, scandal, and celebrities not because they are important but because they think they will attract a bigger audience. A classic example of the genre was the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death in a Florida hotel‐casino on February 8, 2007. For two days, the cable networks devoted 50 percent of their news coverage to the saga of the Playboy centerfold model who had become a rich widow and then a star on reality TV.21 The Smith story was a media creation that dominated cable television for nearly a month, absorbing nearly one‐fourth of the available news time.22 The phenomenon illustrated by the Smith coverage is a blending of entertainment and information to yield “infotainment.” Infotainment has ethical implications for journalism, whose primary purpose is to give citizens the information they need to be free and self‐governing.23 If lighter fare gets more of the news media’s resources, important civic topics get less.
Journalists’ ethics: As a journalism ethicist for the Poynter Institute, Kelly McBride is used to being gibed by nonjournalists who view her job description as a contradiction in terms. On an airliner, when a row neighbor finds out what she does for a living, the response is often: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”24 In contrast to the surveys that show little public respect for journalists’ ethics, a study of moral development by two professors showed that journalists are skilled at working through the ethical dimensions of problems in their profession. The professors, Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University, reported that their study of 249 journalists placed them fourth among 20 groups that had taken the Defined Issues Test, designed to assess moral development.25
Advertisers’ influence: As mentioned above, the dual nature of news websites, broadcast stations, and newspapers creates an unavoidable appearance of a conflict of interest. The media perform a quasi‐civic function of providing information to the public, but they cannot survive in the marketplace if they can’t pay their bills. So they sell advertisements to businesses that want their messages to reach the news organization’s audience. Even though advertising is declining (and digital subscriptions are increasing) as a source of revenue for news organizations, its mere presence makes it easy for a skeptical consumer to assume that the news organization will slant the news to cater to the wishes of an advertiser. This has happened, but journalists are zealous about guarding against such occurrences or blowing the whistle on them if they do occur. Time and again, news organizations have rebuffed advertisers’ pressure at great financial sacrifice.
Applying Perspective
It is well to conclude this chapter by trying to put the public criticism in perspective. Despite the complaints, people do say good things about the news media in the surveys. They are more likely to praise the news source they depend on – the newspaper that brings them local news, or the cable channel that connects them to the larger world. Their negative assessment of “the media” may be based on what they’ve heard, not their personal experience.
For that matter, “the media” is a nebulous, inaccurate term that contributes to public misunderstanding about journalism. The New York Times and the New York Post have little in common. Partisan blogs differ from the websites of the mainstream newspapers and broadcast networks. Fox News and MSNBC are polar opposites.
Although it is true that credibility has fallen sharply since the 1980s, you should bear in mind that complaints about journalists are nothing new.
Consider these complaints: “News is distorted. Some newspapers invade privacy. Scandal and ‘sex’ stories are printed solely to sell papers. Innocent persons are made to suffer needlessly by publicity. The real interest of the press is money‐grubbing.”
Those appeared in Leon Nelson Flynt’s book, The Conscience of the Newspaper.
It came out in 1925.26
Notes
1 1 Mike Jacobs, editor of the Grand Forks Herald, in remarks made publicly at the 2003 convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
2 2 Jay Black, Bob Steele, and Ralph Barney, Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook with Case Studies, 3rd edn. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), 245–246.
3 3 “Angel appears in GF, EGF; Angel’s wings registered to Kroc,” Grand Forks Herald, May 19, 1997.
4 4 “Flood of complaints follows newspaper’s disclosure of donor” and “On the radio waves,” Grand Forks Herald, May 20, 1997.
5 5 Black, Steele, and Barney, Doing Ethics in Journalism, 246.
6 6 “The Herald’s first commandment: never hold the news,” Grand Forks Herald, May 20, 1997.
7 7 Jacobs, remarks at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention, 2003.
8 8 Megan Brenan, “Americans’ trust in mass media edges down to 41%,” Gallup, Sept. 26, 2019. Telephone survey of a random sample of 1,525 US adults Sept. 3-15, 2019.
9 9 Ibid.
10 10 Jeffrey Gottfried,
