With the recent string of exposures of outright inaccurate reporting due to insufficient sourcing, checking, and re-checking, not limited to the recent Newsweek Periscope retraction or the Dan Rather/forged memo imbroglio, is it reasonable to say that journalism “ain’t what it used to be”?
Joe Gandelman, the proprietor of this weblog, writes in his recent commentary on reporting:
Indeed, Newsweek — like Dan Rather in the memos scandal — seems to have been caught in a time tunnel coated with a slew of assumptions from the past.
The problem is, the time tunnel didn’t work and they got a rough taste of 21st century reality.
Upon first reading, this implies that the quality of sourcing has not necessarily declined but that journalism is running into a new situation without adjusting to the changes.
I use reporting on science and technology issues as my gauge because these areas are relatively straightforward to both get right and to verify.
One of my earliest encounters with journalism on the content-creation side instead of on the content-receiving side was when I was in graduate school. At the time, the cold-fusion excitement was running through the media based upon a sensational press release by a university.
A reporter from the local newspaper came and interviewed one of the professors in the Physics department, and the interview happened to occur in a laboratory where I was working, so I heard exactly what the professor said.
When I later read the story, not only were the direct quotes different than what I heard, but the science itself was wrong, even though I knew the professor had explained it clearly to the reporter and had asked repeatedly if he understood.
This was shortly after I had read in another newspaper how “rockets are less efficient in space because there is no air for the rocket to push against.”
Since that time I have asked, “If they cannot get the science right, how much should we trust other reporting?”
Recent events indicate that the level should be that Reagan referred to when discussing arms control with the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify.”
However, this does not address the fundamental question of any recent changes in “quality”, not necessarily of the writing (which I do feel has declined), but of the sourcing and the checking and cross-checking before publishing or broadcasting something labeled as “news”, it only shows that journalists have routinely gottten facts wrong that they could reasonably check to ensure what they reported was correct.
The 24-hour news cycle has undoubtedly had the effect of increasing the time pressure for getting the infamous “scoop” that will make a journalist’s career, but the rise of the Internet has also made information much more easily accessible far more quickly than ever before, as well. It is difficult without an extensive study to really address the question of decline in the quality of jornalism, but it is a bit facile to argue that the increased time pressure on journalists is worse than the increased pressure that technological advancement has placed on other professions that have levereged the new technologies to improve the quality and quantity of work.
Regardless of whether the quality of jornalism has declined, the ability of the audience to verify has increased, and errors previously passing remarked upon only long after the fact are now caught within days, if not hours.
It remains to be seen if the journalism profession can recover and come to resemble a more traditional definition of profession with its members following and enforcing a code of conduct and ethics.