« More Spammers | Main | Sixty-One Years from Omaha and Utah »

June 6, 2005

Ed Murrow had a Child ...

Most Americans today don't trust the media as far as they can comfortably spit a rat. And there's good reason for that, as Eason Jordan, Linda Foley, Dan Rather, Jayson Blair and others have demonstrated their and their organizations' weaknesses while loudly proclaiming themselves innocent, correct, or above the fray. It would be easy to simply write off the media as a whole, and many people have done just that, in some ways including me.

But it's not a good idea to write off the whole of the media, for a couple of reasons. First, the news media is not monolithic; there are a variety of perspectives, competencies, points of view and areas of interest in the media. This makes it hard to generalize. Second, the media have an organization capable of gathering information that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to get. If the media were not sending reporters out to the corners of the Earth, and watching all of the wires and press releases looking for items of interest, people who want information about what's happening in the world would have to work much harder to get it.

Yet there remains a problem: the media are not distrusted randomly, but because they have become untrustworthy in many ways. As an experiment in proving this to yourself, pick an area about which you know a great deal. Find a couple of news stories about it. How accurate are they? Do they miss a lot of information? Do they get basic facts wrong, and make unwarranted assumptions? Why would journalists be any more competent at some other issue, say international affairs, than they are about the issues you know well enough to doubt them on?

It seems to me that if we want to use the media to learn about the world, it's not enough to just cry "bias" and ignore what's reported that we don't agree with. It's also not enough to say that it's the media's job to fix the problem: all institutions have inherent reinforcements and punishments that makes a bias very difficult and time-consuming to correct. As with our dealings with other people, we have to understand not if we can trust the media, but when and to what extent we can trust the media. Understanding what drives media outlets allows us to vet their reports and properly credit or deny their reports.

It seems to me that there are four dimensions to the way any given media outlet reports a story, or chooses not to: domain, scale, template and perception.

"Domain" refers to what the story is about, whom it involves, and where and when it occurs. Every person and institution has areas in which they are interested, and those in which they are not. Some reporters and media outlets cover domestic news extensively, while ignoring international news. Others cover international news well, but largely ignore domestic news. Some areas of interest are unexpected: Fox News has an (unaccountable, to me) interest in gossip and celebrity trials, which is why they tend to gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, or large numbers of "runaway bride" stories. A story in an institution's or reporter's domain is likely to be covered, while a story outside that domain is unlikely to be covered.

"Scale" refers to the size or importance of the event. A minor event within a domain, or one that's well-covered elsewhere, may not elicit a response from an organization or reporter you would expect to be interested. A major event in a domain - and an important enough event outside a domain - will draw coverage.

"Template" refers to how well the story fits the reporter's or organization's preconceived story line. People are pattern-finding animals: we attempt to find a comprehensible shorthand story that explains events, so that we don't have to think about it any more, but can react to events more quickly because they match the story line we've developed. These templates are pervasive: they effect every aspect of our lives. The media is no different; if a reporter has a template that says the US military always lies, you'll eventually be seeing them compared with Eason Jordan and Linda Foley. It is here that the charges of bias come in, and for good reason. Everyone is biased in some way; we all have templates.

For the media, their goal is not to find the truth in the news, but to make the news comprehensible and acceptable to the widest possible audience. This leads them to create templates that serve the desires of that audience. And these templates skew everything that the person or organization reports. They control which stories are deemed important, which not; what angle to take on the information gathered; which information to even attempt to gather in the first place; whom to trust; what to emphasise and deemphasize in a story, and so forth. This is not deliberate, in most cases; reporters don't set out to spin and shape and mislead (well, generally not, Jayson Blair is the poster child for someone trying to do exactly that).

So a story that is within an organization's domain, but doesn't fit the template, doesn't get widely reported. A story that fits the template, even if there is no evidence or all the evidence goes against it the story's veracity, will get reported; it's fake, but accurate. Similarly, the stories themselves - there's a reason that they aren't generally called "reports" any more - are heavily slated to fit the template, even when that involves leaving out decisive evidence and putting in questionable information. It's not generally even a conscious process, I think; it's just human nature.

"Perception" refers to how the reporter/institution wishes to appear to others. The only reason that the templates and their implied bias is even a problem for the mainstream media is that the mainstream media constantly trumpets itself as not conforming to templates. How often do the media claim that they are "fair and balanced", "objective", and so forth? All the time, of course.

This myth of media objectivity is in some ways a corrective, and in other ways a club. It can induce reporters to put in opinions that dissent from the template, and can induce them to cover stories they otherwise wouldn't. It can also be wielded to accuse others of trying to spin and distort the news when they disagree with the reporter's story. Again, Dan Rather is the poster child: he takes the attitude of "you can't handle the truth" as if he's telling it. He's not alone: many reporters get offended when confronted with templated reporting, usually as charges of bias, because it chips at their underlying perception of themselves.

These perceptions are important beyond the effect on biases though. NPR and PBS, for example, have more fair news (though not necessarily editorial) coverage than they likely otherwise would, because their funding in part depends on their perceived impartiality; otherwise Republican administrations would likely defund NPR and PBS. Similarly, Newsweek wants their templates known, so that they can appeal to a specific audience and gather advertisers, but not so well known that people who are not in that audience will simply discount them.

Yes, all of these factors apply to blogs and bloggers as well.

By looking at these four factors and how they apply to any given reporter or media outlet (or blogger), a much better sense of when and how to trust the source becomes possible. For example, the lamented Steven Den Beste could be counted on to speak eloquently and truly and with authority on many subjects; but I tended to ignore his rantings about computers because of his obvious anti-Mac bias. I would trust Newsweek to accurately report intra-Party spats among Democrats, but not spats between Democrats and Republicans.

This brings up a final point: each of us, individually, applies these characteristics (except perception, in most cases) when we decide which news to read, and which news to trust and why. We each individually apply our templates to a news report, which is why Democratic Underground can have such a widely disparate view from Free Republic on the same issue, and why each can feel the other totally unhinged.

We make decisions on which news sources we trust in large part by checking them against our own bias, and deprecating those that don't fit. What we decry in others, we often practice.

Posted by jeff at June 6, 2005 10:03 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/110

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Ed Murrow had a Child ...:

» Caerdroia: Media (In)Experts from Winds of Change.NET
"...pick an area about which you know a great deal. Find a couple of news stories about it. How accurate are they? Do they miss a lot of information? Do they get basic facts wrong, and make unwarranted assumptions? Why would journalists be any more com... [Read More]

Tracked on June 7, 2005 11:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: TheOtherBlogger at June 6, 2005 11:14 AM