Tabloid magazines and newspapers rely on cycles of outrageous, shocking headlines and eye-catching cover photos of celebrities and politicians to sell.
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Key Idea: News is not a simple reflection of actual events; instead, it is a construction by news workers who are subjected to many influences and constraints.
· Dynamic Nature of News
o Rise and Fall of “Big News”
o Shift to Online Sources of News
o Changes in the Need for News
o Changes in News Content
§ More Immediate
§ More Local
§ Shorter News Stories
§ Multimedia Stories
· Different Perspectives on News
o Political Philosophy Perspective
o Professional Journalism Perspective
o Economic Perspective
o Marketing Perspective
· Standards for Evaluating News
o By Type of Producer
o By News Criteria
o By Accuracy
o By News Perspective
· How Can We Become More Media Literate with News?
o Exposure Matters
o Quality Matters
§ Be Analytical
§ Evaluate Facts
§ Evaluate the News Story
o Be Skeptical
· Summary
· Further Reading
· Keeping Up to Date
· Exercises
Kristen was shopping at the mall when a person holding a clipboard came up to her and said, “I’m taking a survey. Could you answer a few questions for me?”
“Okay, what are they about?”
“This is a survey about news. First question: What newspapers do you read?”
“I don’t read any newspapers,” said Kristen.
The interviewer made a mark on her form, then asked, “What news magazines do you read?”
“None.”
“Do you listen to newscasts on the radio?”
“No.”
“How about the evening news on television?”
“No.”
The interviewer glanced over her form, then looked up at Kristen, “So you avoid all news?”
“No. I love news and watch about two hours of it every night on television. I always watch The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Then I watch The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“But those aren’t news shows. They’re comedy shows.”
“They present lots of news. I always learn a lot more about what is going on in the world by watching those shows than when I used to watch the evening news programs. And they’re fun to watch.”
“Those shows make stuff up to be funny!”
“Yes, they do. But I can always tell when they are making something up. With the so-called real news shows, I am never sure what they are making up.”
The news industry has undergone significant changes over the past few decades with the rise of the digital media and their various platforms for presenting news. McCaffrey (2010) explains, “The news industry is in the midst of a period of profound transition. The advent of the Internet Age has rendered obsolete long-standing models of how to gather and communicate the news” (p. 3). Johnson (2012) adds, “The overarching system of news is transitioning . . . from a small set of hierarchical organizations to a distributed network of smaller and more diverse entities” (p. 79).
These changes have stimulated critics to be pessimistic about the future of news. McCaffrey (2010) argues that given “the breakneck pace at which change has occurred over the past two decades, it’s likely that we are in for an era of perpetual transformation, one with few certainties and no fixed outcome” (p. 3). Johnson (2012) is even more pessimistic when he writes,
Because this transition involves the failure or downsizing of many of those older organizations, and because those organizations have, for the past few centuries at least, been our primary conduits of reported news and commentary, many thoughtful observers have seen that transition as a crisis and a potential threat. (p. 79)
In his classic book, The Sociology of News, Schudson (2003) argued that journalists have been trivializing the news in order to satisfy what the news industry perceives as what the public now wants, which led Schudson to ask, can journalism continue to be publicly important?
Are the concerns expressed by critics of news valid? Are the trends of journalists trivializing news and the fragmentation of the audience forces that will destroy the news industry? To answer these questions, let’s examine the way the news industry has evolved over time with the rise of the traditional media and the transition into digital media.
DYNAMIC NATURE OF NEWS
Changes in the conception of news are not new; journalists, social critics, and the public have all been experiencing transformations in the way they think about news for centuries. In order to understand the meaning of the current transformations, we need to draw some context from history.
The desire for news goes back to preliterate culture; humans have always expressed an interest in the events surrounding them (Harrison, 2006). News was personal and local; that is, people were most concerned about events that impacted their daily lives (e.g., threats from invaders, impact of weather on their crops, changes in local regulations) as well as the lives of their families and friends. News was transmitted almost exclusively through interpersonal conversations, so it was composed largely of gossip and rumors.
Newspapers have played an important role in American life from the very beginning. The first newspaper to print the Declaration of Independence was the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, 1776.
Library of Congress
Newspapers did not begin until the 16th century, when a group of men in Italy collected information and sold it to their clients in news pamphlets. By the 17th century, these news pamphlets evolved into daily newspapers first in Germany and then throughout Europe. These early newspapers presented a simple listing of facts, which made them hard to read because the facts were not presented as a story with any context or flow. The audiences for these early newspapers were elites; that is, people who could read and who could afford to pay for information. “Merchants, in particular, had a keen awareness of the value of information, and the dangers of acting on false rumour” (Pettegree, 2014, p. 3). Therefore, these early journalists were most concerned with the accuracy of their information, so they worked to corroborate their facts to give them greater credibility.
The early settlers in America clustered into colonies, each with its own local problems and challenges. People in each colony wanted to be kept up to date about shipping schedules, changes in regulations from England, and their own local politics. Within each colony, entrepreneurs created newspapers, each with a different political point of view. These entrepreneurs were primarily motivated by a desire to express their personal opinions and to report news in a way that supported those opinions. Therefore, each newspaper had its own set of readers who followed the editor’s political point of view.
Rise and Fall of “Big News”
After the American civil war in the mid-19th century, the audience for news and the need for news were changing. The United States had instituted a compulsory education requirement, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of people who could read. Also, the population was developing a greater sense of nationhood and wanted information about America’s place in the world. Some entrepreneurs (e.g., William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) saw this as a chance to develop newspapers with very large circulations in the growing population centers. These entrepreneurs realized that in order to attract a large readership, they needed to avoid presenting obvious political partisanship in their stories, because this would alienate readers who did not hold those political views. So, in order to grow their subscriber base as large as possible, newspapers shifted away from presenting stories with a political bias. The growth of these vastly circulating newspapers ushered in an era of “big news.” Editors of these newspapers regarded the population as hungry for news, but this audience needed to be told what was most important, so they assumed the role of expert gatekeepers. When radio became a mass medium in the 1920s, networks created national news broadcast using this idea of big news, in which expert journalists decided what events should be covered. When broadcast television became a mass medium in the 1950s, it followed the big news model.
This idea of big news reached a peak in the 1980s, then circulation began declining for newspapers and audiences began eroding for radio and television news. This erosion was slow at first but increased with the rise of the internet and the news alternatives it offered in the form of news blogs and bulletin boards.
These declines in circulation were dramatic for newspapers. The number of daily newspapers decreased from 1,748 in 1970 to 1,279 in 2018 (Watson, 2020). In 1984, the circulation for daily newspapers in the United States was 63.3 million and that declined to 28.6 million by 2018 (Barthel, 2018). Employment at daily newspapers shrank from a peak of 74,410 employees in newsrooms in 2006 down to only 37,900 by 2018 (Barthel, 2018).
As for television news, exposure to local television newscasts has been decreasing. Local newscasts in the morning have decreased from 12.3 million in 2007 to 10.8 million in 2016, early evening newscasts have dropped from 25.7 million to 20.7 million, and late-night news has decreased from 29.2 to 20.3 million (Matsa, 2017b). However, it appears that the audience for national news on television has stabilized. In 2008, the combined viewership of evening network-produced news (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was 22.8 million and it increased slightly to 23.8 million by 2016 (Matsa, 2017a).
Shift to Online Sources of News
The dramatic erosion of audiences for big news should not be interpreted as Americans losing interest in being informed; instead, there has been a shift in exposure to online news sources, which indicates that Americans are still interested in keeping up with the events of the day. For example, the loss of circulation of daily newspapers should not be interpreted as people losing interest in local news, because many of these “lost” subscribers shifted to online sources of news. In 2006, there were 8.2 million unique visitors each month to a daily newspaper website; this had increased to 11.5 million by 2017 (Barthel, 2018).
This trend of news exposure away from traditional media to online media was initially driven by younger people. The Kaiser Family Foundation (2010) conducted a survey of young Americans from 8 to 18 and found that from 2005 to 2010, time spent reading magazines and newspapers dropped (from 14 minutes to nine minutes for magazines and from six minutes to three minutes for newspapers). The proportion of young people who read a newspaper in a typical day dropped from 42% in 1999 to 23% in 2009 (Pew Research Center, 2012). A few years later, the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project (2014) reported that 48% of 18- to 29-year-olds watch online news videos, while only 27% of 50- to 64-year-olds and 11% of those 65 and older who do the same. By 2017, 43% of all adults were saying they got their news from online sources and 67% of people 65 and older were getting their news on a mobile device; furthermore, 67% of Americans were saying that they get at least some of their news on social media sites, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat (Bialik & Matsa, 2017).
Gone are the days of most people reading a printed newspaper over the morning. Today’s youth get most of their news from online sources.
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Changes in the Need for News
This shift from traditional news sources to online sources illustrates that people’s need for news has been changing. First, it indicates that Americans want more efficient access to news. They do not want to wait for a newspaper to be delivered or for a broadcast news site to deliver the news of the day; instead, they want continuous access at any time and anywhere. Online news sites offer this convenience, especially when people access those online sites with their mobile devices. By 2014, 36% of all adults were watching online news videos; 82% of Americans said they got news on a desktop or laptop and 54% said they got news on a mobile device (Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project Staff, 2014). And by 2017, 85% of U.S. adults said they were getting their news on a mobile device (Bialik & Matsa, 2017).
Second, the shift from traditional sources to online sources also illustrates that people want a different kind of news. By moving away from traditional news sources that are staffed by professional journalists who use their expertise to select what they regard as the most important events of each day and use their professionalism to search out credible information to tell their stories in a balanced manner, people are indicating that they prefer news stories that are much more local, in the sense that those stories are about what their friends are doing or the things that users—not journalists—think are the most important (Lee et al., 2014; Moon & Hadley, 2014; Revers, 2014; Xu & Feng, 2014). Evidence for this is seen in the rise of social networking sites being used to access news. Over the past decade, surveys show that 30% of the general population says it gets its news from Facebook, 10% says it gets its news from YouTube, and 8% says it gets its news from Twitter. Furthermore, 26% of the population gets its news from two social networking sites, and 9% get news from at least three (Holcomb et al., 2013). Donsbach (2010) writes, “Younger people are increasingly using blogs, chatrooms or community networks such as Facebook and MySpace to receive what they think is ‘news’” (p. 43). Facebook founder and chief operating officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg brags that Facebook may be the biggest source of news in the entire world; in 2007, he said, “We’re actually producing more news in a single day for our 19 million users than any other media outlet in its entire existence” (Pariser, 2011). And by 2019, 55% of Americans said they were getting their daily news from social media sites (Khalid, 2019).
Changes in News Content
As people’s need for news has been changing, the digital media have responded by developing a different model for the content of news that users find very attractive. While the content of digital news originally followed the model established by the analog media, the digital content has evolved away from that model as it takes advantage of the characteristics that distinguish the digital media from analog media. Compared to news content from the analog media, news content from the digital media is more immediate, more local, shorter, and offers multimedia features.
More Immediate
Digital media give people quicker access to news. People do not have to wait for an analog newspaper to be delivered or for a broadcast news site to present the news of the day at fixed times; instead, audiences can get continuous access at any time as well as anywhere by using their mobile devices. A key factor that explains why the digital media are more immediate with its news is that it allows for user-contributed content. There are now billions of people with smartphones all over the world, and whenever these people see something that might be newsworthy, they can take a picture or record the action in video on their phone and quickly upload it to the internet, where everyone else has immediate access to it.
Furthermore, journalists now rely on Twitter to provide them with valuable information about what is happening in the world. And it is now apparent that Twitter has a stronger influence on determining the news agenda than do the traditional media. In a research study that compared the agenda-setting power of Twitter with that of the analog media, researchers found that the Twitter news agenda influenced the television news agenda more than the television news agenda influenced the Twitter news agenda (Valenzuela et al., 2017).
While journalists often monitor content on Twitter to get leads for stories and sources of information, journalists have also used the internet in a more proactive way with crowdsourcing, which is a technique that journalists use to generate leads and information. When using crowdsourcing, journalists begin by designing an internet platform to put out a call for information and then manage the data that are uploaded to the site. A good example of the use of crowdsourcing by journalists occurred in 2012, when D. Brian Burghart, an editor at the Reno News and Review, started writing an article on police killings and found no comprehensive data on the topic (Gates, 2019). There were bits and pieces on internet sites where local police departments had reported data and where journalists had written stories about individuals killed by police, but there was no centralized agency (similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]) that collected and reported such data nationwide. Burghart designed a self-financed web-based platform that asked users to submit information on police killings. For two years, he fact-checked the data that were submitted and finally published an article in 2014 that focused on patterns of police killings that he could not have developed without the help from hundreds of contributors through crowdsourcing.
More Local
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, explains that a person’s interest in a subject is inversely proportion to its distance from that person in terms of geography and emotions. The closer an event is to us, the more we find it interesting or newsworthy (cited in Johnson, 2012). This explains why so many people have been abandoning traditional journalism as provided by analog media and instead have increased their reliance on specialized digital platforms that can satisfy their needs for news better. The focus of most traditional news organizations is on the aggregate level (where stories are selected that would seem to appeal to the greatest number of people) rather than at the individual level (where stories would have a special appeal to the particular needs of each individual). Because people vary so widely on their emotional attachment to any given topic, the news audience is fragmenting, and traditional news organizations cannot satisfy the range of needs for news across any large group of diverse people.
The digital media are able to present news that is hyper-local, which means they are able to personalize news stories to satisfy the particular needs of each niche audience. People want news about those things that interest them personally; that is, things that are most proximate to them not only geographically but also psychologically. They care less about what professional journalists think are most newsworthy.
The customizing effect of the internet feed allows consumers to seek out specialized news sources that cater to their preferences, in contrast to when news providers exercised much more control in determining a standard set of stories that were presented to all consumers.
iStock.com/ymgerman
Shorter News Stories
All else being equal, news organizations generate more traffic with lots of little stories, rather than fewer medium-sized ones. Data from Chartbeat shows less than 10 percent of users scroll down to the end of a typical news article—most users, in fact, scroll only to the halfway point. This suggests that reporters often spend lots of time writing words that barely get read. (Hindman, 2018, p. 149)
Hindman continues, “Increasingly, these findings are shaping newsroom policies. On May 6, 2014, both the Associate [sic] Press and Reuters . . . issued separate memos asking reporters to keep most news stories under five hundred words” (p. 149).
Related to the shortness of news stories is the degree to which stories report issues and events in depth. A recent study of news organizations found not only that news organizations that emphasize the use of audience metric data publish fewer in-depth stories but also that the use of metrics influences the selection of events that get covered (Arenberg & Lowrey, 2019). This means that some news organizations are being guided in their selection of news much more by audience metrics than by journalistic expertise to determine what gets covered as news.
Multimedia Stories
Multimedia content attracts more traffic than plain-vanilla text articles. This includes interactive elements and graphics, which have long been associated with high levels of reader engagement. But text stories that include videos or even simple slide shows typically outperform text alone. Some digital news sites already aggressively exploit this finding. Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, for example, have both invested heavily in slideshows (HuffPo) and scrollable image galleries (Buzzfeed). (Hindman, 2018, p. 151)
As you can now see, the idea of what is news has always been in a state of dynamic change. Until the rise of news pamphlets and newspapers in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, people’s idea of news was limited to the current events taking place in their immediate vicinity in their everyday lives. Then the idea of news shifted to pamphlets presenting daily listings of facts. Then there was a shift to newspapers presenting stories from a particular political point of view to audiences that wanted up-to-date information to support their political orientation. Then there was a shift to newspapers telling readers that they were presenting objective facts rather than editorializing particular political positions. Then there was a shift to offering a wide variety of platforms—many interactive—to offer every kind of niche audience a different kind of up-to-date information.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON NEWS
There are many perspectives on what constitutes this thing we refer to as news. Some of these perspectives are complementary and work together while others are in conflict with one another. Let’s examine four of these perspectives in some detail (see Table 11.1).
Table 11.1
Political Philosophy Perspective
The political philosophy perspective conceptualizes news as the daily flow of information from expert journalists to the general public for the purposes of educating the population so they can make well-informed choices in a democracy. Editors are experts who determine what the most important events and issues are each day. Editors assign reporters the task of covering these events and issues by collecting all the relevant facts and assembling those facts into an objective presentation that is free from bias and inaccuracies. Thus, news stories should be constructed from accurate facts rather than journalists’ opinions so that people can become educated about what is really happening and make up their own minds about what positions to take on issues and which candidates to vote for when electing their leaders.
This perspective is held by philosophers and social critics who view the purpose of the press as educating the public every day about their world, thus creating and maintaining an informed public that would make the best decisions possible in electing their leaders and supporting issues in a democratic society. These people believe that the press should not be an instrument used by powerful elites (such as the government or powerful businesses) to achieve their own goals. The press should be independent from political or economic pressures so that it can present the public with an objective representation of major events every day. Kaplan (2010) argues that the quest for objectivity is “American journalism’s proudest, if most difficult to sustain, achievement. Considered a crucial tool for democracy, objectivity supposedly secures a space for neutral, factual information and public deliberation outside the corruption, rancor, and partisan spin that normally characterizes public discourse” (p. 25).
Professional Journalism Perspective
The professional journalistic perspective encapsulates what journalists believe to be the purpose and nature of news and presents this encapsulation as a template for what news should be. Their conception of news is reflected in seven criteria that journalists use as guidelines about what should be covered as news each day. These seven criteria are timeliness, significance, proximity, prominence, conflict, human interest, and deviance.
Timeliness is the most obvious criterion for newsworthiness. An event has to be current in order to be considered news. Significance refers to the magnitude of the consequences of an event. Thus, a shooting resulting in the death of five people is more newsworthy than a shooting that results in only one death. Proximity refers to how close the event is to the news audience. Thus, a shooting that takes place in a news outlet’s hometown is more newsworthy in that town compared to a shooting that takes place a thousand miles away. Prominence refers to how well-known people and institutions are in the event being considered as newsworthy. Thus, if the mayor of a town is shot, that is more newsworthy than if a vagrant is shot. Conflict refers to the degree to which the parties in an event disagree. Human interest refers to how strongly the event would appeal to human emotions. Deviance refers to the degree to which an event is out of the ordinary—If a dog bites a man, that is not newsworthy; but if a man bites a dog, that is newsworthy. The irony is that we depend on the news to tell us what the norm is. To be well informed, we need to know how things typically work, what is likely to happen tomorrow, and what the relative risks of harm are. But the news media focus our attention on the deviant. Because we see so many portrayals of the deviant, we come to believe that the deviant is the norm.
Economic Perspective
The economic perspective on news focuses on how news organizations operate as businesses. The focus is on how they allocate their resources as they manufacture their product—news stories. Their stories must attract readers who will pay for their exposures. News businesses must also attract advertisers who will pay for access to the audience constructed by these news organizations. The success of a news organization is determined by the size of its profit. In order to maximize their profit, news producers need to keep increasing their revenue while decreasing their expenses. The commercial nature of news businesses is a strong influence on how they manufacture and distribute the news (Altheide, 1976).
Commercialization is not new. The commercialization of newspapers in the United States dates back to about the 1830s, when newspapers shifted away from financial dependence on political parties to dependence upon circulation and advertising revenues (Hampton et al., 2010). Pettegree (2014) argues, “If ever there was a time when news first became a commercial commodity, it occurred not . . . with the invention of the newspaper, but much earlier: in the eighty years between 1450 and 1530 following the invention of printing.” He says that printers turned the existing appetite for news into a mass market.
The economic perspective has been criticized for several reasons. One reason is that when news decisions are guided more by profit for the news provider rather than the education of the general public, then only businesses benefit.
Another criticism of the economic perspective is that it tends to change the content of news in a way that is somehow harmful to the public. For example, journalists operating under the economic perspective are more likely to present stories that grab the attention of large audiences by highlighting the unusual so as to arouse and shock people while being less likely to present less arousing—but much more important—stories to educate people about the nature of government, the economy, and other public institutions. Evidence for this criticism was found by a content analysis of 13,000 items in 12 daily newspapers; researchers found that newspapers with an economic orientation published fewer items about government and public affairs and more items about lifestyle and sports (Beam, 2003).
Marketing Perspective
Related to the economic perspective is the marketing perspective, which begins with the premise that news organizations are businesses that need to generate enough revenue to stay in business, so they must attract a large audience. Figuring out what will attract users is a risky endeavor because if they guess wrong about what a large number of people want in their news coverage, then they will not be able attract enough users and they will quickly go out of business. Many news organizations take a marketing approach in which they first identify what the needs of their potential readers are and then manufacture the kinds of stories that will satisfy those existing needs.
Today, the newsrooms of hundreds of U.S. newspapers, magazines, and television stations have embraced, to greater or lesser extents, this approach to making news. Typically, a market-driven organization selects target markets for its product, identifies the wants and needs of potential customers in its target markets, and seeks to satisfy those wants and needs as efficiently as possible. (Beam, 2003, p. 368)
One of the widespread needs in any population is the need for information that confirms one’s beliefs rather than challenges them (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009). This is known as the psychological principle of selective exposure, which has been well documented by media researchers for many decades. Selective exposure means that people seek out information that conforms to their existing belief systems and avoid information that challenges their beliefs. Therefore, news organizations know that it is a difficult challenge to force-feed the public what philosophers think is good for the public; instead, they prefer to take the less-risky strategy of trying to satisfy the needs that are demonstrated by the public. If the public demonstrates a need for in-depth reporting of complicated social issues, then news organizations would provide those products. But if the public demonstrates a need for short, easy-to-digest stories that conform to what they already know and trigger emotions of delight (from good news) and vicarious horror (from bad news) rather than stories that require more work to read and understand, then the news organizations would provide those products. The public has been demonstrating much more of the later need than the former need. This explains why news stories have been getting shorter and simpler.
Compare & Contrast Political Philosophy Perspective and Marketing Perspective
Compare: The political philosophy perspective and the marketing perspective are the same in the following ways:
· Both are ways of thinking about what news stories should be.
· Both are standards for judging the quality and usefulness of news.
Contrast: The political philosophy perspective and the marketing perspective are different in the following ways:
· The political philosophy perspective focuses on how news can serve the needs of everyone in a democracy whereas the marketing perspective focuses on how news can serve the needs of individuals who differ substantially from one another.
· The political philosophy perspective relies on expert journalists to determine what is news each day whereas the marketing perspective relies on businesspeople to determine which news products to produce each day for each news audience niche.
STANDARDS FOR EVALUATING NEWS
A term that has recently become popular as a criticism is fake news. At the most general level, the phrase fake news implies a judgment that a person makes that there is something wrong with the news. But what is that “something” that is wrong? What makes a news story fake in the judgment of critics? There appear to be many answers to this question. Some critics suggest that stories are fake when they are presented as news when they are really more about persuading us than informing us. Some critics suggest that stories are fake when they are superficial puff pieces that are designed to entertain us rather than providing rigorous, in-depth reporting of the most important issues of the day. And other critics complain that stories are fake because they contain inaccurate facts presented as truth.
In this section, we will analyze why critics are referring to news as fake. This indicates an evaluative judgment where people look at the characteristics of news and make a judgment that those stories do not meet their criterion of what news should be. Therefore, to understand how they arrive at this judgment, we need to examine what they are using as standards for news. In this section, we will analyze the use of four standards: type of producer, news criteria, accuracy, and news perspective.
By Type of Producer
Arguably, the simplest criterion to use in determining whether something is legitimate news or not is to look at who has produced the story. When applying this evaluative criterion, the reasoning is as follows: If the producer is a professional journalist, then the story is news, but if the producer is not a journalist, then the story cannot be considered as news—that is, it is fake news.
On the surface, this appears to be a simple standard to use in determining what is news. But this simplicity is deceptive because it raises a serious question about who should be considered a journalist. This standard assumes that there is a profession known as journalism that has a certification process, much like the professions of medicine, law, accounting, counseling, plumbing, or cosmetology. But there is no test that people must pass in order to be certified as a journalist. Journalists do not need a license to practice. In fact, the field of journalism has actively avoided the idea of licensing in the United States since the founding of the country. Journalists have fought against having any regulatory body—especially governmental—that establishes criteria for what they should do because of a fear of governmental control. They used the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prevent the government from establishing criteria for journalism and controlling who is able to work as a news provider. Over time, journalists could have established their own certification process but have not done so because they could not agree on what the criteria should be. Some people have suggested criteria, but those criteria are hard to apply.
For example, Ornebring (2010) suggested that journalism could use three general criteria of professionalism: knowledge, organization, and autonomy. Ornebring defines the knowledge criterion as being composed of a cognitive base and particular skills. But he doesn’t say what specific knowledge or skills journalists should all possess. There is no agreed-upon set of facts that journalists must share nor is it possible to think of what such a set of facts might be, given the wide variety of stories that journalists cover daily. A reporter working on crime stories would need a different set of knowledge than reporters covering government, sports, entertainment, religion, and so on. It is difficult to conceive of a test that would assess whether any kind of a journalist possessed enough knowledge to be considered a professional journalist. Thus, no such test exists.
![Katie Couric and John Oliver both dressed in formal evening wear, pose together against a backdrop with logos of Chivas Regal, Time[one hundred], and Citibank on it.](media-literacy.files/image052.jpg)
Late-night news-centric comedy shows such as John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight have risen as a primary source of news for many, competing with traditional news journalists and presenters such as Katie Couric. Which format do you think is more reliable?
Bennett Raglin/Getty Images
Ornebring (2010) explains that organization refers to
how a profession may require membership of professional associations that legitimately represent the profession . . . how practitioners must be able to earn a living from engaging full-time in their profession, and how formal codes of ethics organize the profession. (p. 569)
Journalists do have professional organizations, such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), which was founded in 1909 and now has nearly 300 chapters and 9,000 members in the United States. Both of these professional societies have a code of ethics for their members. For example, the SPJ code of ethics states that professional journalists “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough.” (SPJ, 2014). An ethical journalist acts with integrity as defined by four principles: (1) seek truth and report it, (2) minimize harm, (3) act independently, and (4) be accountable and transparent. Notice that the four criteria are very open-ended; that is, the definition does not specify the meaning of its key terms such as truth, harm, acting independently, and transparent. Nor does the definition specify who journalists are accountable to; that is, who their constituents are. Should journalists be accountable to their news organizations, society at large, or some constituent within the general public, such as readers who desire a particular point of view in their news coverage? These are all important constituents, but each has different expectations for journalists.
Ornebring defines autonomy as referring to how professionals are able to do their jobs with a great deal of individual discretion and that external influence over the work process itself should be nonexistent or minimal. Journalists have always sought to be independent from outside pressures in a quest to report the news accurately. But this autonomy has focused on political influence; that is, protecting their independence from governmental interference with rights to obtain information and to report freely and openly. Journalists have been less vigilant about protecting their autonomy from economic influences. This has led Ornebring (2010) to argue that journalism is currently undergoing a reverse professionalization; it is “becoming less of a coherent and autonomous occupation” and this is “thought to have negative effects on the status of journalism in society, the quality of journalism available to audiences, and, perhaps most importantly, the role of journalism as an institution of democracy” (p. 569).
As you can see from the analysis of type of producer, there is no professional organization that certifies who is a journalist and who is not. While there are professional societies that encourage journalists to adhere to particular guidelines, those societies have no power to require compliance. Therefore, we cannot rely on an authority to tell us who we should trust as presenting real news and who we should regard as presenting fake news.
By News Criteria
A second way to determine whether something qualifies as news or not is to use the news criteria of timeliness, significance, proximity, prominence, conflict, human interest, and deviance. Journalists are trained to believe that when something meets these criteria, it should be considered as newsworthy. Thus, it is possible to use these criteria to distinguish between real news (stories that meet these criteria) and fake news (stories that do not meet these criteria). Again, this sounds simple, but that simplicity is deceptive.
The problem with applying these criteria is that each suggests a continuum whereas decision requires a categorization—that is, either something should be considered news or not. Thus, translating something from a continuum to a category requires us to consider a question: How much of the characteristic needs to be exhibited in order for it to be considered news? For example, with the criterion of timeliness, how recent does an event need to be? If the event occurred two days ago, that is likely not recent enough to be considered news at a cable news service (such as CNN) or a news website, but it would be considered news by a weekly news magazine. Likewise, the other news criteria (significance, proximity, prominence, conflict, human interest, and deviance) also have sliding scales where there could be a legitimate difference of opinion about whether an event is news or not even though the journalists were using the same criteria. Therefore, these six criteria have much less value as standards than as suggestions. With any one of these criteria, one person might judge something as being newsworthy while another person might regard it as not being newsworthy. And when we ask people to make trade-offs across all six fuzzy criteria, there is likely to be a wide range of judgments about what should be considered real news and what is rejected as fake.
By Accuracy
Arguably, when many people label something as fake news, they are likely to be focusing on the standard of accuracy. In the simplest sense, the judgment of accuracy of a news story is keyed to whether the facts reported are true. Thus, the process of judging whether a fact reported in a news story is accurate requires that the fact be compared to a truth standard. For many facts, this is a simple process that results in a clear decision about a fact’s accuracy. For example, it is easy to verify that Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president of the United States in January 2017.
What if there is more than one truth standard for a fact? This occurs more than you realize. For example, let’s say you see a news story that reports that Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States. Is that accurate? The answer is yes and no, depending on what you use as a truth standard. Including Trump, only 44 people—not 45 people—have been sworn in as president of the United States. Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms in office: He was sworn in as the nation’s 22nd president in March 1885, Benjamin Harrison was sworn in as the nation’s 23rd president in March of 1889, and Cleveland was sworn in as the nation’s 24th president in March 1893. Is it accurate to call Trump the 44th or 45th president? A case could be made for either. If we are counting the number of individuals who have served as president, then Trump is the 44th. But if we are counting the number of changes in leadership, then Trump is the 45th. This is an example where there are two truth standards for a single fact.
What Is the Unemployment Rate in the United States?
Fact: In May 2018, the unemployment rate was 50.8%.
Rationale
· The United States population was 327,988,000 people.
· The number of working people was 161,539,000; 166,449,000 were not working.
· Therefore, 50.8% were unemployed.
Fact: In May 2018, the unemployment rate was 3.8%.
Rationale
· The U. S. Department of Labor does not use the total population figure to compute the unemployment rate; instead, it uses a figure called the labor force to compute the percentage of people unemployed.
· The labor force begins with the total U.S. population, then reduces that number by excluding the following people:
o all people who are not at least 16 years old
o all people serving in the military
o all people who are institutionalized (prison, hospitals, etc.)
o all people who cannot work due to some kind of handicap
o all people who are retired
o all people who do not want to work for some reason
· Using the rules laid out above, the U. S. Department of Labor computed that in May 2018, the U. S. labor force was 167,877,000 people, so the unemployment rate was 3.8%.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018)
There are facts that have many truth standards. The rate of unemployment is one example of a fact that has many truth standards. In May 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate had dipped to 3.8%, with 161,539,000 people currently working (U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018). However, in May 2018, the United States population was 327,988,000 people. If we subtract the number of employed people from the number of people in the total population, we get 166,449,000 unemployed people, which is 50.8% of the U.S. population. Which figure is the accurate indicator of unemployment rate—3.8% or 50.8%? The answer is that both figures are accurate, depending on how they are calculated. Notice at the bottom of above box that there are six groups of people that the federal government excludes from its calculation of the labor force; if we were to remove any of these rules from the calculation (or added any more rules), the result of the calculation would change, thus creating another truth standard. Many figures reported in news stories are derived from complicated formulas, so there are likely to be multiple truth standards for those figures. This does not mean that figures derived from complicated formulas cannot be tested for accuracy; there are many figures that could be reported that would be wrong. To determine if the figures reported in the news are accurate, we need to be careful about understanding what the truth standard really is. People who want to argue that the unemployment rate is low will select the 3.8% figure, while people who want to argue that the unemployment rate is too high or misleading will select a higher figure.
Making a judgment about whether a news story is fake or not is not as simple as comparing reported figures to one’s belief about what those figures should be. It is much more complex because many facts have multiple truth standards. Also, judging the accuracy of a news story is more complex than simply judging the accuracy of individual facts because the way those facts are reported in a story creates a context that can either lead readers toward a complete, unbiased understanding of the event being covered or it can lead readers toward an inaccurate understanding because of the facts that were left out or because of the tone or structure of the story. Context is what helps audiences understand the meaning of the event in the news stories. Without context, the story has ambiguous meaning. For example, look at the box below to see an illustration about how two news stories can be written about the same event but convey different meanings, depending on the context.
This raises the important question: Can a news story be accurate if the journalist provides no context? Most scholars would answer no. For example, Bagdikian (1992) argues that the most significant form of bias in journalism appears when a story is reported with a lack of context. The fear is that context is only the journalist’s opinion, and opinion must be avoided in objective reporting. Bagdikian continues, “But there is a difference between partisanship and placing facts in a reasonably informed context of history and social circumstance. American journalism has not made a workable distinction between them” (p. 214). He says that “there are powerful commercial pressures to remove social significance from standard American news. Informed social-economic context has unavoidable political implications which may disturb some in the audience whose world view differs” (p. 214). So, the media report undisputed facts about things but ignore the meaning behind the facts and, in so doing, severely limit our ability to see that underlying meaning.
Context in News Stories
SIMPLE LISTING OF FACTS
John J. Smith was arrested last night in his office at City Hall.
NEGATIVE CONTEXT FOR SMITH
Mayor John J. Smith was arrested for the third time on charges of embezzlement; he was taken to the city jail, where he spent the night locked up and was then released on a $100,000 bail early this morning.
Smith was charged with diverting more than one million dollars of taxpayer funds away from city-approved projects and into areas that the indictment said benefited him personally.
“Smith continues to misappropriate public funds,” said Horace T. Resnick, a city council member. “We on the city council have approved funding for some very worthy projects, but the mayor continually refuses to transfer funds to these projects. This is an egregious abuse of power and he needs to be held accountable.”
If Smith is convicted of the felony charge of embezzlement, he will immediately be removed from office.
POSITIVE CONTEXT FOR SMITH
Political opponents of John J. Smith swore out an arrest warrant for the mayor last night. This is the third time this year that his opponents have tried to have him removed from office on charges of embezzlement. The funds in question were approved by the city council last year to build the Resnick Athletic Complex.
“Our city already has many athletic facilities,” said Mayor Smith. “I cannot justify spending the money on something we do not need when we could spend it instead on something we desperately need, like sidewalks in neighborhoods around elementary schools. Children’s safety is more important than the pet projects of a few council members.”
Although contextual material is very important, many stories have been found to present very little context (Parenti, 1986), and this trend has continued as news stories become shorter. For example, the many stories about crimes that we see reported everyday are each limited to the facts of that one crime. Rarely is there any context about crime rates or how the particular crime reported in the story matches some kind of a pattern—historical, social, economic, and so forth. Crime stories are like popcorn for the mind. Each story is small, simple, and relatively similar. They give our mind the sense that it is consuming information, but those stories have little nutritional value. After years of munching on this information, we come to believe that most crime is violent street crime and that it is increasing all around us. But the real-world figures indicate that most crime is white collar (embezzlement, fraud, forgery, identity theft, etc.) and property crimes (larceny, shoplifting, etc.) rather than violent crime (murder, rape, armed robbery, etc.). But it is the violent crime that gets reported because it is rarer and more deviant and thus more likely to capture the attention of the news audience.
Asking journalists to build more context into their stories, however, presents two problems. First, journalists vary widely in talent, and it takes a very talented and experienced journalist to be able to dig out a great deal of relevant contextual information on a deadline. Second, when journalists have the responsibility of constructing the context, they may be manifesting a lot of power to define the meaning of the event for the readers. Journalists can substantially change the meaning if they leave out a contextual element (whether intentionally or through an oversight).
Let’s examine a story that reports facts that are accurate but lead readers to a wrong conclusion because the reporter does not provide an adequate context for those facts. In 2004, Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Stewart wrote a story based on a report by a group calling itself the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. In his newspaper story, Stewart (2004) stated that the report said that it found six of the schools in the 2004 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Sweet 16 basketball tournament had graduation rates no higher than 50%. This left the reader with the impression that universities (at least six) were exploiting their athletes. But what the reporter did not put in the story is that nationwide, only about 50% of students who enter a four-year program as a freshman end up graduating with a bachelor’s degree. Therefore, the problem is not with basketball teams having unusually low graduation rates, which is what the story implied. The real issue is the relatively large dropout rate of all college students in general. Also, Stewart said that the report complained that only three of the 16 teams had an African American head coach. Why is this number bad? What should the number be? If the number should be proportional to the number of African Americans in the United States, then we should expect 12% of coaches to be African American, and that would make that total two coaches. Or instead, should the number of African American coaches be proportional to the number of African American players on NCAA basketball teams? This would be a much larger percentage, but this then begs the question, are African Americans overrepresented on these basketball teams? Perhaps the problem is that there needs to be better representation from non–African Americans on NCAA basketball teams—Why are there not many more Hispanic or Asian American players? The determination of adequate representation is a complex issue. If news organizations see themselves as having the function of informing their audiences so those people can make good decisions, then journalists must provide more detailed contexts. If, instead, a journalist writes a superficial story that features only a controversy, then this serves to stir up negative emotions instead of educating audiences.
Context gives readers more information to interpret the meaning of a story. But when journalists add context to their stories, they often reveal their own personal biases, even if unconsciously. They, like all human beings, have personal biases and limited perspectives; none of us can completely avoid the influence of these things, no matter how careful we are. This has led many critics of news organizations to complain that news providers have a liberal or a conservative news bias or critics say that there is too much negativism. In an analysis of Gallup public opinion data, it was found that more than half of Americans felt that the media were influenced by advertisers, business corporations, Democrats, the federal government, liberals, the military, and Republicans (Becker et al., 1992). The newspaper industry itself has found the same thing in its own surveys. For example, a survey by the ASNE found that most people believe the media have political leanings (Jeffres, 1994).
Perceptions of news bias has been explained by in-group/out-group differences. Citizens’ political leanings influence how much variation they perceive; politically dissimilar media are seen as having a more uniform partisan bias and politically similar media are seen as having more diverse partisan biases (Stroud et al., 2014).
What is interesting is that conservatives feel that the media have a generally liberal leaning, whereas liberals feel that the media are conservative. Conservatives complain that most news reporters are liberal in their own views and that these liberal journalists show their bias when they present their stories. In contrast, liberals feel that conservative commentators have too much power and have redefined the American agenda to stigmatize liberals.
In summary, it is possible to make good judgments about the accuracy of facts in news stories, but this requires a careful consideration of which truth standards you use. Even if we could determine that all the facts reported in a news story are accurate, we need to be concerned about the accuracy of the story itself, which is much more difficult to judge because it requires us to understand how completely all the relevant facts were reported and the degree to which the journalists were able to avoid being influenced by their personal biases.
By News Perspective
As you have seen from the analyses above, it is not a simple task to make a good judgment about whether a news story is an accurate representation of actual events or whether it is fake. Each of the criteria analyzed above are fuzzy, which limits their ability to provide a crisp, clear standard that can be used to make a judgment about the value of a news s tory.
The typical criticisms of the news today are that it is trivial, superficial, biased, and too commercial. This criticism makes sense if we use the standards from the political philosophy perspective but not if we use the standards from the economic or marketing perspectives. For example, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) argue that a foundational issue about the news is “whether journalists supply the news that citizens need and whether citizens want such information or prefer information on sports, crime, and entertainment—subjects that are interesting but don’t contribute to the health of a democratic society” (p. 6). Perhaps there is a gap between the stories that professional journalists think are the most newsworthy (i.e., politics, economics, and international matters) and those that attract audiences most strongly. Gans (2003) observes that journalists expect to provide stories that are most newsworthy rather than most attractive as an integral part of their professional identities. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) conducted a major two-year study in which they interviewed dozens of news editors and analyzed the content of 40,000 news stories and audience attractions to 20 news sites across seven countries. They found a large and growing gap between the supply of what they called public affairs stories (stories thought by journalists to be the most important and newsworthy) and public demand for nonpublic affairs (sports and entertainment).
There was a gap despite the presence of substantive differences in the media systems among the countries in which the sites are located and in the sites’ ideological orientations. Moreover, the lack of major geographic variation persists at the regional level. (p. 17)
Over time, news organizations have shifted into a marketing perspective. Decisions about what news to produce and disseminate are driven by a recognition that different people have different needs for the news. While some people still want a daily presentation of the most important events provided by experts, many people want a flow of information that is more specific to their daily experiences. Thus, news has become more hyper-local, which means it is fragmenting so that it provides specialized news tailored to meet the different needs of each niche audience. Thus, if we use the marketing perspective to evaluate news, we would conclude that news providers are doing a good job by keeping up with the varied needs of many different kinds of people.
HOW CAN WE BECOME MORE MEDIA LITERATE WITH NEWS?
The information we acquire every day from what we consider news providers molds our view of the world. The gradual accumulation of information about what we think is important shapes our beliefs about how things work and about how things should work. These beliefs become the standards we use when evaluating people, events, and places. Thus, over the long run, our exposure patterns to news is about more than acquiring information about current occurrences; it is more fundamentally an unavoidable process of constructing knowledge structures, beliefs, and attitudes. Therefore, the more we think about our exposure patterns and the implications of those patterns, the more we can gain control over the process and make it work in our favor. Becoming more media literate involves the periodic assessment of exposure and quality as well as maintaining a skeptical relationship with the news.
Exposure Matters
The traditional news media cover the same events and present their stories in a very similar way. Thus, if you wanted to be informed about national or international events every day, it doesn’t matter whether you watch the ABC, CBS, or NBC evening news or read a daily newspaper—you would be exposed to the same stories. This pattern led scholars to observe that the traditional media set the agenda each day by deciding what to cover and what to ignore. Agenda setting theory explains that the media are selective in what they present as news and what they emphasize as being the most important news (see McCombs & Reynolds, 2009; McCombs & Shaw, 1972).
In the past, we could control whether we exposed ourselves to traditional news media or not, but if we did, then the control shifted to the traditional news media, which told us what was important. Now with the rise of nontraditional news media, we have many alternative sources of news. Thus, the control of what we are exposed to shifts to us. Our exposure decisions are likely to be shaped by what we consider to be news. To think of this choice, consider the dimension of global to personal. At one pole of this dimension is global, which consists of patterns of events worldwide; this exposure takes you to countries, cultures, and historical periods of which you have little or no direct contact. The next “neighborhood” along this dimension is national, which consists of events taking place in your home country, where you are likely to know the language, culture, and history and want to be kept up to date with current happenings. The next neighborhood is your region, which is likely the geographical area that you frequently visit on a regular basis. At the other end of this dimension is the personal pole. The news here is not limited by geography but by your sense of personal contacts; that is, you desire to know what is happening to people with whom you have a personal relationship. Where you focus your news exposure experiences along this dimension is determined in large part with your perspective on the news. If your perspective is outwardly directed, then you are likely to be highly curious about things that are foreign to you. In contrast, if your perspective is inwardly directed, then you are likely driven to search for exposures that involve personal contact with individuals. Media literacy is not associated with either pole of this dimension; instead, media literacy is reflected in the scope of your perspective; that is, the more neighborhoods that generate curiosity in you, the more broad your exposure will be. Thus, media literacy warns against a narrow focus. If we limit ourselves to a narrow perspective that focuses only on our personal social networks, then we become blind to how governments work, the shape of the economy, and what is happening in other parts of the world.
Let’s see where you are in your exposure patterns (see Exercise 11.1). First, rate how your news exposure is divided among the four neighborhoods. Then move on to the questions about your curiosity and knowledge to see how those differences are related to your exposure patterns.
Culture is becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller interest groups, and the people within each group seem to have a different need for news. Thus, over time, the common experience is evaporating; that is, there is a diminishing knowledge base that we all share. Instead, we each have a different set of facts about the world, which leads to a multitude of beliefs and attitudes. When the public must make a choice about electing political leaders or supporting issues, there are many groups to choose from, each with a different approach shouting at each other that they are right and all others are wrong. Thus, the political discourse gets more diverse, louder, more polarized, and less tolerant or understanding of other points of view.
It is more difficult to see commonalities. However, one likely commonality is the movement toward a culture of fear. This is because news outlets, regardless of niche audience, use the tool of triggering emotions to attract audiences and hold their attention. Fear is an easy emotion to trigger. News outlets focus on deviance and this triggers a fear in audiences that their well-being and lifestyle may be threatened by criminal activity, higher taxes and fewer services, a faltering economy leading to layoffs, selfish or incompetent leaders making bad decisions, and even bad weather. Rarely does any one of these individual messages paralyze us with fear, but over time, the gradual reminder of risks and threats builds in each of us an uneasy fear that things are somehow getting worse.
Quality Matters
If we don’t periodically evaluate the quality of our news sources, we run the risk of believing that we are well informed when in reality we are not. Check out Table 11.2. Notice that most of the items in the table are concerned with accuracy and credibility, which can be evaluated by assessing the veracity of individual facts. But quality also refers to context (see the fifth item), which refers to whether the number of facts reported is complete enough to provide audiences with the context they need to accurately interpret the meaning underlying the pattern of facts. Because of selective exposure, we are likely to gravitate to stories that confirm our existing beliefs, so we are likely to be less vigilant in judging the value of news stories in terms of context. Instead, we are too quickly satisfied with news stories that only present information that reminds us that other people think the same way we do. We prefer to avoid the dissonance that typically arises when we are presented with evidence that our beliefs may be wrong.
Table 11.2
Interactivity with news has created a paradox. On the one hand, interactivity makes features available that draw people into news and make it more useful to them; these features include searchable archives, hyperlinks, discussion forums, and easy downloading of information. These things bring people closer to the news (Brown, 2000). But on the other hand, the interactive features require considerable cognitive and emotional costs by demanding more patience, expertise, and cognitive resources, which are likely to increase the likelihood of confusion and frustration (Bucy, 2004). Because we often get involved in interactive experiences with news, we think of the information we experience in these interactions as highly accurate, but this is not always the case.
Now, let’s see how well you can apply the insights you learned in this chapter. Begin with Exercise 11.2 and think about the skills and knowledge structures that help you process the meaning of news stories. Then move on to Exercise 11.3, which asks you to use those skills and knowledge structures to analyze and evaluate a news story. Then, if you are ready for a more advanced experience of analyzing the news, do Exercise 11.4 to see how well you can see beyond the elements of a news story and picture the practices used by the journalists to work around constraints.
Be Analytical
When you feel uncomfortable about a story, the next step is to analyze it to figure out what is bothering you. There are five analytical dimensions to use in trying to identify what might be wrong with the story (see Table 11.2). Keep certain questions foremost in your mind as you are exposed to news stories. When you have difficulty answering these questions to your satisfaction or if the story makes you feel uncomfortable emotionally, red flag it. Once you’ve tagged a story as raising concerns for you, you need to check the facts as well as the way the facts are presented.
Evaluate Facts
The next step is to confirm that your feelings that something is wrong with the story are legitimate. The simplest of these tasks is to check the accuracy of a fact. Did the journalist identify all the sources of information? Did the journalist reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution, or other harm and who have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere? When sources were identified, did the journalist explain why audience members should regard the source as credible? If the journalist presented two facts that seemed to oppose one another, did the journalist try to resolve the difference? Did the journalist label illustrations and reenactments?
Evaluate the News Story
Does the journalist simply list facts or does the journalist try to provide context? When journalists provide context, do they take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing, or summarizing a story? Are all instances of advocacy and commentary labeled?
More difficult is confirming the intention of the journalist; that is, was the journalist trying to be neutral and present the event as clearly and neutrally as possible? Or does the way the story is told lead you to be concerned that the journalist was trying to persuade you to a particular point of view?
If you have confirmed that a story is faulty in some way to regard it as fake news, then you need to discount it. Also, you need to think about whether this story is a one-off for this journalist or whether they should never be trusted. This will require you to analyze other stories written by the journalist. You will need to determine if the problem is bigger than any one journalist and is systemic to the entire news organization.
Table 11.3
Be Skeptical
The simplest way to summarize what it takes to increase media literacy about news is to be skeptical. Stay alert to the possibility that any news story can be faulty in several ways. Rely on your emotional reactions to signal that something might not be right about a news story.
The challenge here is for you to set a proper level of sensitivity to your news radar. If your radar is not sensitive enough, many false or misleading stories will not be detected; if your radar is too sensitive, you will be too compulsive and you will waste time being concerned about perfectly good news stories. Achieving a proper level of sensitivity will develop from experience with particular news organizations and journalists. To test your news radar and practice your skills in dealing with news content, complete Exercises 11.5 and 11.6.
SUMMARY
The idea of what is news has undergone many changes over time and has influenced different perspectives, particularly the perspectives of political philosophy, professional journalism, economic, and marketing. These changes are regarded as reducing the quality of news by people who operate from certain perspectives, especially political philosophy. However, these changes are regarded by others as increasing the usefulness of news.
Regardless of your perspective about what news should be, we all face the challenge of continually evaluating the news. This task is challenging because there is no simple way to judge the quality of news; instead, it requires some effort to select appropriate standards. The more we understand what our standards are, the more benefit we will accrue from our evaluation of the news.
Further Reading
Henry, N. (2007). American carnival: Journalism under siege in an age of new media. Berkeley: University of California Press. (326 pages, including index)
This book is written by a journalist who is concerned about how traditional journalism can survive in the new media environment. While the book is now a bit dated, the arguments the author makes are still important and interesting.
Kurtz, H. (2018). Media madness: Donald Trump, the press, and the war over the truth. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. (288 pages, including index)
This is a journalist’s analysis of the press coverage of Trump’s first year in office. Kurtz argues that the press’s coverage of Trump was largely negative because of a bias among journalists to avoid normalizing his presidency. Rather than provide balanced coverage of his actions and words, the press amplified the negatives and downplayed the positives, which led Trump to criticize the press for continually presenting false news, which in turn angered journalists and created a destructive cycle.
Levitin, D. J. (2016). A field guide to lies: Critical thinking in the information age. New York: Dutton. (292 pages, including glossary and index)
The academic and best-selling author shows how facts presented in the media can be misleading or outright lies. The book is organized into three sections. In the first section, he presents six chapters that show many ways that numbers can be used to mislead audiences. The second section (four chapters) shows how words can be used to distort meaning. And in the third section, he presents five chapters about how people can be misled by “facts” if they have insufficient background knowledge about science, logic, and statistics.
Mindich, T. Z. (2005). Tuned out: Why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. New York: Oxford University Press. (172 pages, including index)
The author clearly documents that the last two generations of Americans have exhibited drastic declines in attention to news from the traditional media. Furthermore, only 11% of young people even attend to the news on the internet. He develops some explanations for why news has become so irrelevant to the younger generations and speculates about how this will impact the political system and society in general.
Nichol, T. (2017). The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press. (252 pages, including index and endnotes)
This is an extended essay about how the culture has changed so that people no longer recognize expertise or care about it. With the rise of the internet, information is so readily available on any topic that people can quickly access what look like facts. But because anyone can post anything on the internet, most of that information is faulty because it is unchecked and unedited. And because people cannot tell the difference between good and bad information, the bad information carries as much weight as the good in shaping public opinion.
Paul, R. P., & Elder, L. (2006). How to detect media bias & propaganda (3rd ed.). Dillon, Beach: Foundation for Critical Thinking. (46 pages, including glossary)
This is a short book that focuses on critical thinking and the news. It presents a lot of practical advice on how to think about news stories critically and thereby protect oneself from bias, especially from novelty and sensationalism.
Schudson, M. (2003). The sociology of news. New York: Norton. (261 pages, including endnotes and index)
Schudson sharpens and clarifies many points in the argument that journalists “not only report reality but create it” (p. 2). He digs deep into the issue and offers explanations about how the news construction occurs and the effect those constructions have on the public. After providing a brief history of journalism, he identifies two criticisms as being especially salient today. The first is that news coverage of politics is critical and this promotes cynicism in the public. Second, news itself has gone soft; that is, it is a mix of information with entertainment rather than a legitimate effort to explain complex situations.
Keeping Up to Date
· Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media
· Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
These are scholarly journals that publish research examining how news is presented in the content of the mass media, particularly newspapers and television.
· WikiLeaks (https://wikileaks.org/)
Founded in 2007, WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organization that provides a secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to the public. It relies on a network of volunteers from around the world. Leakers are typically whistleblowers who work in private businesses and government agencies. If they feel their organization is doing something harmful to the public, they steal the private information of that organization and make it available for the public to view.
· News Blogs
There are thousands of news blogs. Many are owned by major news organizations such as CNN (http://news.blogs.cnn.com) and The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/blogs/directory.html). The most popular news blog is the Huffington Post (https://www.huffpost.com/), which was started by Arianna Huffington and was independent of any news organization but was bought by AOL in 2011.
EXERCISE 11.1
ASSESSING YOUR NEWS EXPOSURE
1. What percentage of your time each day is spend searching out news in each of these areas?
o ____ % searching for news on international events
o ____ % searching for news on national events
o ____ % searching for news on regional events
o ____ % searching for news on personal events
2. Rate your curiosity about each of these four areas. How interested are you typically every day in finding out more detail about what is happening in each of these four areas? A rating of 10 means you are driven to find out everything; a rating of zero means you have absolutely no interest in anything in that area.
o Degree of curiosity about news on international events: ____
o Degree of curiosity about news on national events: ____
o Degree of curiosity about news on regional events: ____
o Degree of curiosity about news on personal events: ____
3. Rate your existing knowledge base about each of these four areas. How much information do you feel you have attained about the people and history of events in each of these four areas? A rating of 10 means you feel that you are an expert in your knowledge; a rating of zero means you know absolutely nothing about the people and events in that area.
o Existing knowledge about news on international events: ____
o Existing knowledge about news on national events: ____
o Existing knowledge about news on regional events: ____
o Existing knowledge about news on personal events: ____
EXERCISE 11.2
PREPARING TO ANALYZE A NEWS STORY
1. Take a blank sheet of paper and draw the structure of Table 11.3 on it. That is, create two columns: Label one column Skills and the other column Knowledge. Now create four rows, labeling them Cognitive, Emotional, Aesthetic, and Moral. Your table should have eight blocks.
2. Think about an important issue that is triggering current events. For now, don’t worry about seeking out any news stories on this issue or the events currently taking place. Instead, this is about the issue itself and what kinds of skills and knowledge you would need to get the most out of news coverage.
3. Write down the skills and knowledge you would need to achieve a basic minimal understanding of a story on this topic. Think in terms of your everyday viewing of news (when you want to monitor the surface facts to keep up with the day’s major events).
4. Think about the skills and knowledge you would need to achieve a much more complete understanding about the meaning of the event in the news story. Think in terms of what it would take for you to be an expert on the event.
5. Look at what you have written in response to Question 4. Does it differ much from what you have written in response to Question 3? How much detail do you have in each of the eight blocks? With which blocks did you struggle the most? Why do you think you struggled there?
6. Compare the results of your tables with those of a friend. Did your friend have more details in certain blocks compared to yours? If so, did that additional detail extend your thinking? The more people’s work you compare your work to, the more you can see a range of differences.
EXERCISE 11.3
ANALYZING AND EVALUATING A NEWS STORY
After you have completed Exercise 11.2, find a news story on the topic you analyzed. It would be good to record the story so that you can look at it more than once.
1. How accurate are the individual facts in a story?
2. How complete is the set of facts? Are there obvious facts missing (who, what, when, where, why, and how)?
3. Are the facts presented in a meaningful context? Is there a historical context? Are events in this story compared/contrasted to other similar events?
4. Is the presentation of facts descriptive or persuasive? Does the journalist’s voice come through in the story or does it appear that the facts speak for themselves? Do you feel like you are being led to a particular conclusion rather than left to make up your own mind? Do you feel that the journalist has an agenda?
5. Sources of information: Do you feel that the journalist used enough sources of information? Do you feel that the journalist used the best sources of information possible?
6. Do all the facts in the story confirm what you already knew or were you surprised by something? Does this story challenge you to think about things in a different way? Or does the story reinforce your existing beliefs and attitudes?
EXERCISE 11.4
INFERRING NEWS WORKERS’ DECISIONS
Gather together three or four newspapers for the same day—the more the better.
1. Look at the composition of the first page across those newspapers and think about the differences and similarities of news perspectives.
1. What are the major stories in terms of placement and size?
2. What pictures and graphics are used? Are they used to present substance or are they used merely to make the page more appealing to the eye?
3. How much of the front page is composed of non-news matter?
2. Read the major news stories.
1. What criteria must have been used to select them?
2. What types of elements are emphasized in the stories? What are the facts that make this story news? What facts provide background context?
3. Is the story balanced or are obvious viewpoints ignored?
3. Look at the sections of the newspapers.
1. Which sections are there (such as sports, women, business, etc.)?
2. Look at how the space is allocated. How much space is given to ads? How much is given to hard news? How much is given to soft, entertainment-type news?
4. What happened within the last 24 hours that did not get covered?
5. In summary, which of these newspapers do you think is the best and why?
6. Later today, listen to some news on the radio and watch some on television. How is the news different in these media compared to newspapers?
EXERCISE 11.5
EXERCISING YOUR SKILLS
Think of some current event that is of interest to you. Now pretend you are an editor of an online newspaper. What elements would you want to have in the story?
1. What sources would you want to access? For people as sources, how will you go about getting access? For other sources (such as the records of government agencies and businesses), are these sources considered private? If so, how can you get access to them?
2. What facts and figures would you want to gather? List the questions you would ask. Does the order of the questions matter?
3. What historical contextual factors would you want? How far back should your coverage go? During that time period, what are the key events that your readers should know in order to appreciate the event that is currently happening that makes this news?
4. Would you want to include visuals (such as graphics, photographs, or video) in your story?
o If not, why? If so, which visuals do you consider important? If these visuals already exist, how will you get permission to use them? If these visuals do not already exist, how will you go about producing them?
EXERCISE 11.6
APPLYING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS TO THE ISSUE OF FAKE NEWS
I. ANALYZE AN UNFAMILIAR PRINT SOURCE OF NEWS
Select a newspaper, magazine, or online news source that you have never accessed before.
1. Analysis for newsworthiness
o Do you think the story contains enough newsworthy elements to warrant its presentation as news?
· If so, which news criteria were most influential in your decision?
· If not, what is missing? That is, what did this story need to exhibit more of in order for you to consider it newsworthy?
2. Analysis by type of producer
o What can you find out about the person who wrote the story?
· Are they a professional journalist? What kind of education do they have? What kind of experience do they have?
o What can you find out about the news organization?
· What is its reputation in the journalistic community? What is its reputation among audiences?
o Ownership: Is it owned by a large conglomerate or is it independent?
3. Analysis by intention of producer
· Do you sense that the story is more informative or more persuasive?
· What elements in the story led you to this conclusion?
4. Analysis by accuracy
o Do you judge any of the facts in the story as appearing to be inaccurate?
· If so, why do you think they may be inaccurate? What are the sources of those facts?
· If not, why do you feel all the facts are accurate?
o Do you judge the overall story to be accurate?
5. Analysis of context
o Do you think the story is a simple listing of facts or is it a construction with context?
· If the former, do you think the story would have been better with context?
· If the latter, do you think the context was fair or manipulative?
II. ANALYZE AN UNFAMILIAR AUDIO–VISUAL SOURCE OF NEWS
Select a news story from television, radio, or a website. If a website, find a story that has audio, video, and photos.
Do the same five-step analysis as above. Pay special attention to the audio and visual elements.
III. ANALYZE A NEWS STORY FROM A SOURCE OF NEWS FAMILIAR TO YOU
Do the same five-step analysis as above. Pay special attention to your past experience with this source of news.
· In what ways does your past experience make this analysis easier?
· In what ways does your past experience potentially hinder you from conducting the analysis with a fresh perspective?