The question is this: Moving into the new year, do you trust the media?
If the answer is no, what do you do about it?
As 2020 drew to a close, Utah Rep. Chris Stewart sent an op-ed into the Deseret News newsroom headlined: “The biggest threat to our country is misinformation.” The subtext to the piece was that no one knows what is true anymore and he laid much of the blame at the feet of the media.
He wrote:
“Free nations require an informed citizenry. No free nation can survive when its citizens no longer know what to believe or who to trust. Broken trust weakens our nation in unimaginable ways. Every time we learn we’ve been duped, our distrust grows.”
He went on to say that he supports “a free and unfettered press,” but wants accountability, not just from the press, but all institutions that have been politicized, including government agencies.
Stewart has plenty of support for that position, but also detractors who noted that his op-ed failed to call out President Donald Trump’s provocations and falsehoods.
Fair enough. Media, on all platforms — from print to digital to broadcast — has failed to convince a large portion of the public that its work is credible. And in a fractured media landscape, where fake news — the original definition of fake news, the websites created for financial gain or other devious intent — co-mingles with legitimate reports, it threatens democracy.
Several issues are at play.
- Journalists want objectivity, but not all journalists.
- The public’s media literacy has declined, as has the ability to differentiate between opinion content and news content, particularly on digital platforms.
- Journalism is going through its own reckoning, trying to determine what a balanced news report looks like (more on this shortly), and how “the view from somewhere” (the point of view of a media company or reporter) should be recognized.
- Finally, adults are struggling to understand where their news actually comes from.
According to the Pew Research Center, “as news consumers navigate an information environment that includes news aggregators and social media feeds, confusion abounds regarding the original source of reporting.”
Pew reported that “Just over half of Americans (55%) are at least fairly confident they can differentiate between organizations that do original news reporting versus those that do not, including 46% who are pretty confident. But remarkably, only 9% say they are very confident, which means casual readers may have trouble distinguishing content.
Additionally, when asked to identify which of six sources create their own content, nearly a quarter of respondents could not identify them correctly.
One of the questions we are working to answer at the Deseret News is how do we improve our own report and communicate that effort to the public? How do we get better journalistically, and help the public improve its media literacy?
As I noted, journalism itself has gone through change. Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor and longtime media observer, has written extensively on journalism’s problem with false equivalency, meaning the effort to present balanced views can be harmful if one side is false.
An example: Experts say the world is round, but at least one man says the world is flat.” Do you then explore the view that the world is flat?
A more real-world example: If the president says something that isn’t true, do you call it false? Do you call it a lie? Do you KNOW that it is a lie or assume it is a lie? If you don’t call it out as false, have you then not done your journalistic due diligence to bring forth true, factual information?
The divisions between the way Democrats and Republicans view the media stem greatly from the approach members of the media took in reporting the words and activities of President Trump. That dynamic will change in 2021. But the lessons, both positive and negative, from 2020 media coverage are only now beginning to be explored. Understanding those lessons will drive us into 2021.
Note: Doug Wilks is editor of the Deseret News.
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January 03, 2021 at 12:00PM
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How 2020 lessons on media coverage, literacy will drive us into 2021 - Deseret News
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