The Greatest Threat to Journalism

I’m glad to see that longterm journalist John Solomon agrees with me:

We journalists have more freedom, more reach, and more ability to inform today than ever before. But with those advantages comes an even greater responsibility to the public, one I fear is being denigrated by journalists who substitute opinion for facts and emotion for dispassion.

Beyond the killings, the threats, and the vitriol, what most threatens journalism today is the behavior of its own practitioners.

We have become too full of our own opinions, too enthralled with our own celebrity, too emotionally offended by warranted and unwarranted criticism, and too astray from the neutral, factual voice our teachers in journalism school insisted we practice.

Read the whole thing.

He correctly lays the blame on “point of view” journalism. Facts are now relatively unimportant. What is important is having a point of view and expressing it vehemently. I suspect that is one result of the move towards visualcy in our consumption of information, something I have written about frequently. That itself leads to more agonistic modes of expression.

4 comments… add one
  • Andy Link

    That was a good essay.

  • Ben Wolf Link

    Most journalists aren’t journalists, they’re opinion generators. Actual journalism is the zealous crusade against excesses of power. “Neutral language” is an invention of the modern era, not a standard to strive for. It’s fine for a journalist to hate and write hatefully about anything or anyone, so long as they admit it and make a good-faith effort to justify their position factually. The problem we have is that these conditions are no longer met because today’s crop are just a bunch of overpaid hot-takers, not investigators.

    That’s where Solomon’s essay falls well short of where it needs to be, because he leaves the reader with the impression that jourmalism just changed, like the wind or rain can change. He exorcises agency and explanation in favor of a limited description which leaves us no closer to understanding why.

    He doesn’t tell us the reason fact-free commentary has exploded is because of media consolidation. He doesn’t tell us that corporate imperatives for cost-cutting have emphasized in-studio personality over investigation because hot-air is much cheaper. He doesn’t tell us that journalistic narratives are controlled by the profit-driven imperative of not offending advertisers. And he doesn’t tell us that journalists are explicitly told by corporate executives what they may and may not report on.

  • Andy Link

    “He doesn’t tell us the reason fact-free commentary has exploded is because of media consolidation.”

    If anything, I’d say the opposite is true. There are more media options than ever – even before accounting for social media, which I think has a huge influence on both journalists and the public.

  • steve Link

    I think it is both consolidation and proliferation. There are fewer primary reporters for the major news sources, so they all use the same stuff. The proliferation of alternate news sources has journalists that are really writing mostly opinion pieces as they dont do primary investigations and interviews very much.

    The other problem, among many, is the lines between news and entertainment have become very blurred.

    Steve

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