Abstract
This study examines the actions of readers as press critics and, therefore, as potentially powerful shapers of journalism’s cultural capital. An analysis of 2 years’ worth of online reader comments on the ombudsman columns of three national news organizations reveals readers’ support of – and even nostalgia for – mainstream journalism values such as objectivity, echoing earlier research suggesting the stability of the journalistic field in the face of challenges from new players such as bloggers. But commenters’ critiques of journalistic performance also employed social, and not only professional, values, representing a potential challenge to journalist autonomy.
Keywords
An intense dialogue about the roles, duties and definitions of journalism broke out in early 2012 between the public editor of The New York Times and the hundreds of commenters who responded to his columns. The Times’ Arthur Brisbane, then the paper’s public editor or ombudsman, had solicited ‘reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about’ (Brisbane, January 12, 2012c). Reaction to the first column, which ran under the heading ‘Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?’ was incredulous: ‘What kind of question is this? It sounds like you wouldn’t want people to be biased by … the truth’. Reaction to two subsequent columns, in which Brisbane attempted to clarify the issues and his thinking, only increased the commenters’ ire: ‘Your persistent failure to understand is infuriating’, one wrote.
The exchanges between Brisbane and the commenters are remarkable for at least a few reasons. First, the very fact that a top US newspaper would ask for readers’ collaboration in clarifying the roles and tasks of journalists would likely have never happened in an earlier age, when journalistic autonomy meant journalists rarely listened to audience input (Gans, 1979). Second, the exchange produced some impassioned pleas and colorful commentary, but above all it produced a breadth and depth of press criticism rarely acknowledged by journalists. Third, readers seemed to care so deeply about the journalism field and their place, as commenters, in maintaining the field’s traditional roles and definitions. As one commenter posted, ‘thanks to Mr. Brisbane for addressing this, but count me among those who are dumbfounded that the answer isn’t obvious, if not the very definition of journalism’.
Times readers are not representative of all news consumers, and those who bother to comment on Times articles are perhaps even less so. But their participation in a dialogue about ‘the very definition of journalism’ – a dialogue in the immediate, open-ended and public space afforded by digital technology – places them in a press critic’s role and, therefore, makes them potentially powerful shapers of journalism’s standards of performance. Their criteria for evaluating that performance and the extent to which those criteria correspond with journalists’ own criteria warrant investigation, as journalism faces challenges from an array of new and newly empowered players in the news and information domain, or journalistic field.
Journalism’s cultural capital, constituted by a shared sense of journalism’s epistemologies, ethical ideologies, and institutional roles (Hanitzsch, 2007), is central to what makes journalism an autonomous field and, hence, a hedge against exogenous pressures. For example, on the one hand, economic pressures can function as a gatekeeping force that recasts news into sensationalism (McManus, 1994). On the other hand, journalistic cultural capital can be a countervailing force, keeping sensationalism at bay (Demers, 1995). While economic actors may be the most persistent in bringing pressure, many extra-media institutions bring pressures on journalists, in effect wearing down or, perhaps in some cases, building up journalism’s cultural capital. Public relations, advertising, governments, flak groups, sources, and audiences all can have a hand in wearing away at journalistic cultural capital (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009).
Audiences make for an interesting case, since one of the institutional roles constitutive of journalistic cultural capital, mentioned above, involves journalists’ orientation to the market or audience. The traditional cultural capital of journalism has held that journalists have an obligation to set the news agenda, to give audiences what they need for self-governance. Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) call this ‘the implied covenant with the public’ (p. 52). It is when journalists treat audiences as consumers, rather than citizens, that they end up giving audiences what they want, rather than what they need. Journalists’ playing to wants instead of needs puts audiences in direct contradiction to journalists’ traditional cultural capital (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). Paying attention to the wishes of readers, viewers, and listeners – it is believed – will lead gatekeepers to craft superficial news rather than news that is valuable to self-governance (Allen, 2005).
However, might audiences be a valuable ally to journalists in maintaining cultural capital? The public and participatory journalism movements have asserted a positive role for audiences, enlisting audiences to support efforts that create news needed for self-governance (e.g. Black, 1997; Singer et al., 2011). Indeed, Brisbane’s post on his public editor column explicitly reached out to readers for their help in addressing an epistemological matter vital to journalism’s cultural capital – how to make truth claims in news stories. By soliciting the audience’s help on the side of journalism’s traditional cultural capital, The New York Times clearly showed a willingness to engage the audience as public.
Press criticism has long been a means of policing and strengthening journalism’s cultural capital (Wyatt, 2007) through a discourse in which diverse claims about journalistic performance compete for primacy (Carlson, 2009). The premise of this study is that the audience might serve as press critics, holding the publications they read to standards of performance or challenging the publications to reinvent their cultural capital to better serve the public.
Theory and literature
The study of journalistic cultural capital generally begins with the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1998, 2005). Journalism is constituted as a field based on a generally accepted set of principles, rules, and practices that Bourdieu (2005) calls ‘doxa’ (p. 37). In the United States, these agreed-upon principles include a commitment to truthfulness and independence, commonly held rules include keeping fact and opinion separate and abstaining from political affiliation, and shared practices include methods of verification and identifying sources of information (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). Taken together, this doxa constitutes the orthodoxy of the journalistic field or journalism’s cultural capital. Similarly, Hanitzsch (2007) distills journalistic cultural capital to agreement on institutional roles, such as monitoring those in power, epistemologies, such as reliance on facts, and ethical orientations, such as avoiding harm, and Deuze (2005) considers principles, rules, and practices such as independence and neutrality to be journalism’s ‘ideal-typical’ traits. Journalism’s cultural capital can chasten an ethic that might otherwise value the maximization of economic capital (Benson and Neveu, 2005).
Doxa, by its nature, is a source of stability. To the extent that journalistic doxa is accepted as legitimate by journalistic actors and reproduced in daily practice by journalists, journalism is constituted as a socially distinct field (Benson and Neveu, 2005). Bourdieu (1998) emphasizes, however, that fields such as journalism are contested social spaces where ‘the various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field’ (pp. 40–41). There is some evidence, in fact, of a pre-paradigmatic conflict in journalism in which transparency may be displacing objectivity as a key norm for journalistic truth-telling (Hellmueller et al., 2013). This shift, if and when it is fully realized, would constitute a significant reshaping of journalistic doxa related to the different capacities and expectations of online networks. Thus, while journalism may be a socially distinct field, its autonomy is limited (Benson, 1999). It is subject to influence and pressure from adjacent institutional fields (Bourdieu, 2005).
Media sociology scholarship has identified a number of exogenous institutional forces that shape journalistic practice and content (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). Those forces range from advertisers, to sources, to public relations, to markets. These are akin to the forces that Bourdieu (2005) argues impinge on journalistic autonomy. For example, to the extent that news organizations must prove profitable in the economic marketplace, they lack the autonomy to simply do as they wish. Audiences are also posited as an institutional force that can exert pressure on journalists (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009), limiting their autonomy (Hayes et al., 2007). Audiences are conceived as market forces, which push news organizations in the direction of sensationalism (Napoli, 2003) or which incentivize news organizations to cut important news, such as international coverage (Kim, 2002). The gap between journalist and audience news preferences underscores the potential for audiences to push journalists in directions they otherwise would not go (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2013). In other words, audiences represent the kind of market forces that leads some news organizations to compromise their cultural capital.
However, field theory and media sociology scholarship have also conceived of the audience as a public. Field theory has addressed the interplay between how journalists conceive economic pressures and how, based on professional norms, journalists conceive the audience (Rohlinger, 2007). Media sociology has addressed how audiences, whether imagined or real, are built into the routines of news production (Anderson, 2011; Gans, 1979; Sumpter, 2000). Journalists select and craft news of public importance, for example, because they imagine the audience to be civically engaged (Rosen, 1999). It stands to reason that in an era of web metrics (Anderson, 2011; Tandoc, 2014) and reader online comments (McCluskey and Hmielowski, 2012), audiences might be even more salient to journalists than in the past. As Anderson (2011) points out, to the extent that the audience is understood – or imagined – as ‘active, empowered, [and] generative’ (p. 564), journalists are adjusting their work routines to account for audience-related input.
Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) argue that journalists and their audiences are becoming increasingly connected. This connection ‘is one by which the individuals in the audience are given a chance to judge the principles by which the journalists do their work’ (p. 248). This means audiences offer judgments that encourage ‘the kind of journalism’ they most value (p. 248). In other words, the audience is a source of press criticism that can either challenge or reinforce the doxa and cultural capital of the journalistic field. Some scholars (Hayes et al., 2007; Lowrey, 2006; Singer, 2007) conclude that authenticity, accountability, and transparency would improve if journalists and audiences acknowledged and embraced their complementary roles. This relationship might be adversarial, but that does not mean it cannot also be constructive.
News commenters are typically voracious news consumers who are deeply connected to their local community and think that commenting forums offer useful ideas for solving problems in their community (Rosenberry, 2010). Commenters are generally educated and affluent members of the community and tend to be White, employed, and male (Baek et al., 2012). Commenters are clearly not representative of the broader audience of a news organization, nor are they representative of a community’s or nation’s population. They are instead just another kind of imagined audience (Litt, 2012).
To say that commenters are not representative of the audience or that they are more ‘imagined’ than real does not, however, necessarily diminish their value as press critics. After all, traditional press critics – indeed, professional journalists – also are not representative of the public. Widening the circle of press criticism could benefit journalism as well as help the public meet its own obligations in democratic life, as Wyatt (2007) suggests. Journalists have been leery of external criticism, operating as a somewhat insular ‘interpretive community’ (Zelizer, 1993) that creates and enforces its own rules for journalistic work. The dismissive responses of journalists to letters to the editor illustrate both that insularity and how journalists use letters and other artifacts of audience interaction to construct a notion of the audience (Sumpter, 2000; Wahl-Jorgenson, 2002).
While some journalists – particularly those who assert their autonomy as a key form of journalistic capital (Hayes et al., 2007) – might avoid reading online comments, it is becoming clear that most journalists do read comments (Santana, 2011). Indeed, some journalists are assigned to moderate comments on their stories and see engagement with commenters as a journalistic responsibility (Robinson, 2010). What remains to be seen is whether the kind of press criticism that audiences offer reinforces or challenges traditional journalism standards. Might audiences be a source of stability or instability in the cultural capital of the journalistic field? Vos et al. (2012) and Coddington (2013) ask similar questions about the ways bloggers challenge or reinforce journalism’s traditional cultural capital. This study extends their inquiry.
Research questions and methods
This study seeks answers to the following questions:
RQ1. What kinds of evaluative statements are being made by commenters about journalistic performance?
RQ2. To what extent are these evaluative statements consistent or inconsistent with traditional journalistic standards?
Given that press criticism is likely to be scattered within a sea of reader comments, this study made the choice to look in online spaces where press criticism would likely be more highly concentrated. Thus, we made the strategic choice to examine online comments on ombudsmen’s articles because ombudsmen typically address issues of journalism performance (Kapoor and Smith, 1979). Unlike a ‘newspaper ambassador’, who explains the news organization’s actions, ombudsmen are more critical and attempt to represent the views of members of the community (Van Dalen and Deuze, 2006). Indeed ombudsmen, who are, arguably, part of journalists’ interpretive community, are often viewed with suspicion because of their unique position between the newsroom and the audience (Shafer, 2013).
To be as open as possible to the diverse, perhaps even unconventional, ways commenters might convey their press criticism, we made two additional strategic decisions. First, we cast a very wide net, collecting all of the ombudsmen columns and accompanying online comments from January 2011 to December 2012 for three news organizations: National Public Radio (NPR), The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Not only are these national news organizations enhancing their comparability, but they also were among the very few news organizations in the United States with an active ombudsman whose work appeared frequently enough and addressed journalistic performance routinely enough to warrant analysis. (The Washington Post discontinued its ombudsman position toward the end of our study period.) This wide-net approach, capturing the entire population of comments over a 2-year time period, yielded more than 30,000 comments responding to 443 ombudsman articles published online for analysis. The number of comments per article varied greatly, especially at The Washington Post, depending upon the topic of the discussion chosen by the ombudsman.
Second, we did not create an a priori coding protocol, which in our view would have risked missing the more unconventional critiques commenters might offer. Rather, we adopted an inductive, iterative approach to answering our research questions in which evaluative language in the comments was identified, considered, compared, and categorized and the context in which the comments were made was examined. In the first step of the analysis, an undergraduate research assistant read through the entire set of comments and highlighted any evaluative language – whether directed at the performance of a specific news organization or at journalism generally – for further review. Evaluative language included any words or phrases that characterized journalistic performance, whether positively or negatively. The assistant was instructed to interpret ‘evaluative’ broadly and, if unsure, to err on the side of marking a comment as evaluative.
In the second step, the researchers each conducted a close reading of the highlighted comments to get an initial sense of the evaluation of journalism being made by the commenters. The researchers met to compare notes on their initial impressions about the types and topics of criticism they found in the comments, a discussion that was repeated after second and third readings of the comment set and eventually converged on a few broad themes. This procedure is consistent with the constant comparative method used to code large amounts of qualitative data such as this (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1968).
Commenter criticism 1
If one were looking for defenses of – even nostalgia for – traditional journalism values, one needed look no further than the ombudsman commenting arenas of NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post in 2011 and 2012. Commenters evaluated journalism according to its objectivity, accuracy, balance, and a host of other typical criteria for good professional performance. However, these familiar benchmarks were not the only norms commenters used to judge journalistic work. Commenters applied social norms of behavior in addition to professional norms, for example, taking journalists to task for being lazy and sloppy and for employing stereotypes. These two strains of criticism – one originating in professional values and the other in social expectations – may lead to different conclusions about the stability of the journalistic field and to the role of the audience in establishing and maintaining its standards.
Criticisms grounded in professional norms
Partisanship and objectivity, false balance and bias, accuracy and facts, transparency, truth, and the pursuit of ‘scoops’ – these were the most common subjects of critiques in commenters’ responses to ombudsman columns. Indeed, these have been among the most common criticisms of traditional journalism for decades, a familiarity that suggests just how stable the journalistic field is. Commenters, for example, complained of ‘left-leaning bias’ and ‘propaganda’ at NPR and The New York Times, respectively (Brisbane, 2012d; Schumacher-Matos, 2012b), and said that at NPR, ‘balance is more important than reality’ (Schumacher-Matos, 2012f). They took issue with the Post offering ‘opinion and speculation rather than fact’ (Pexton, 2011b) and journalists offering ‘assumptions and generalizations’ without facts to back them up (Schumacher-Matos, 2011a). The Post, a commenter said, ‘would rather sell a few more papers at 75 cents a pop than act in our nation’s best interest’ (Pexton, 2011d), while the Times and other news outlets ‘are bending over backwards to protect Obama’ (Brisbane, 2011d). In response to a column addressing an incident in which the Times, at the US government’s request, withheld information about a newsmaker’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a reader concluded, ‘The New York Times is now, quite obviously and by its own admission, in the business of concealment’ (Brisbane, 2011a).
Objectivity, bias, and partisanship – which often, but not always, referred to essentially the same thing in commenters’ eyes – figured especially prominently. Journalists were criticized for acting as stenographers and merely reporting what is said without context and analysis (Brisbane, 2012a), for writing puff pieces that promote advertisers and sponsors, and for their over-reliance on policy think tanks and so-called good government groups which actually represent partisan positions. There was some agreement that many of the problems of objectivity could be remedied through increased transparency in reporting: ‘Regardless of whether a writer is an “objective” reporter or opinion columnist, their connections to those who might influence them – or need the writer’s influence – must be disclosed fully’ (Pexton, 2011c). Another criticism of media objectivity came from the commenters’ perception that the media create a false sense of objectivity rather than attempting to discover the truth. One commenter referred to this phenomenon as creating a ‘political prism’ (Schumacher-Matos, 2012e) through which to view an issue, while another described the method as ‘pick something in the middle … that passes for objectivity’ (Pexton, 2011c). The typical comment in this vein criticized the news institution for focusing on creating false equivalence rather than pursuing informed opinions (Schumacher-Matos, 2011b). There also was some evidence of commenters’ impatience with, if not quite rejection of, objectivity as a key standard of performance. Some commenters specifically called out journalists for hiding ‘their bias’ (Shepard, 2011b) or hiding behind objectivity (Shepard, 2011c) to avoid discovering the truth. Others were disturbed by the ‘pretense of objectivity’ being used to hide one’s agenda (Schumacher-Matos, 2012a). One commenter specifically cited media critic Jay Rosen’s idea of the ‘view from nowhere’ in which journalists create and occupy a faux middle-ground position (Pexton, 2011c).
While all these criticisms are (perhaps too) familiar, they suggest commenters have a coherent and consistent notion of what they expect from traditional journalism – a notion that mostly tracks with what traditional journalists expect from themselves and believe, on the whole, they offer (Weaver et al., 2007). Impatience with objectivity notwithstanding, commenters do not offer alternative professional standards for judging the performance and practices the ombudsmen columns tackle. At NPR, this was evident in a comment stream in which people argued over whether the news organization’s ‘liberal’ sources were liberal enough or ‘conservative’ sources conservative enough (Schumacher-Matos, 2012f). Few if any questioned the underlying premise that diversity is achieved by offering a mix of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ voices. Many commenters also indicated an awareness of just how common their criticisms were. They did not, for example, just call NPR ‘left-leaning’, but also pointed out that this is ‘the most conspicuous criticism of NPR’. They did not simply accuse the Times of sensationalism but also implied that such distortion is more the rule than the exception in Times’ (and other news organization’s) news coverage. One commenter said, ‘Al Franken wrote once that the media is only biased towards sensationalism and ratings. Even the gray lady has to fight this tendency’ (Sullivan, 2012b). Inaccuracy is so common that ‘readers are not even surprised by sloppy journalism these days’, a Post commenter said. ‘In fact, it’s pretty much the norm’, (Pexton, 2011e). The ‘of course’ tenor of many comments – the sense that these news practices and the criticisms of them are so basic that they almost go without saying – underscores just how non-controversial the commenters believe the standards for performance to be. The comments are, then, largely consistent with traditional journalistic standards, more likely to reinforce journalism’s cultural capital than challenge it.
Nostalgia for higher standards
Often, and especially at The New York Times and The Washington Post, this emphasis on traditional journalism values had a nostalgic feel, as though commenters were asking for a return to a time when their criticisms would not have been warranted. Commenters compared current standards and those of the (remembered) past, expressing disappointment and even embarrassment at the difference. ‘As someone who has read the Times almost daily for over 50 years, I am ashamed at what it has become compared to what it was before my generation took over management’ one commenter said (Sullivan, 2012d). Lamented another, ‘The Times has forgotten its journalistic principles’, (Brisbane, 2012c), while another warned, ‘If the NYT wants to continue as an iconic and TRUSTED news source, it will have to do better’ (Burgess, 2012). Many made reference to the Times’ reputation as the newspaper of record and most respected newspaper in the country in ways that suggested that those descriptions were no longer apt, such as one commenter who said, ‘It used to be this paper of record could be counted on …’ (Brisbane, 2012b). Another worried that the Times would follow in The Washington Post’s footsteps: ‘The NYT needs to start exposing the crooks, the way they used to. We’ve given up on The Washington Post, which has fallen far from Watergate days’ (Brisbane, 2011c). Indeed, the Post of today did not compare favorably with The Washington Post of the past in commenters’ eyes, the ‘once-great newspaper’ (Pexton, 2012b), ‘once the best newspaper in America’ (Pexton, 2011g) becoming ‘irrelevant’ (Pexton, 2012c) and a paper ‘readers like me no longer trust’ (Pexton, 2011g). ‘I no longer see the Post of Woodward and Bernstein’, (Pexton, 2012a) a commenter concluded.
Nostalgia for a less partisan, more objective past was particularly strong. This narrative typically followed the form of a commenter telling the news organization that it once followed traditional standards of objectivity, but that it had recently lapsed in judgment and needed to go back to those standards. Many commenters used the term focus to describe how the institution should employ standards – ‘[J]ournalists need to go back to focusing …’ (Pexton, 2011a) on objectivity. A return to a concentration on facts (Pexton, 2011a), independence (Pexton, 2011f), and accuracy (Brisbane, 2011b) was also linked with the objectivity nostalgia. In one case, NPR was chastised not only for turning away from traditional standards of objectivity but also for continuing to claim to be objective. A commenter criticized NPR’s presenting only those facts that fit its viewpoint, ‘as well as your obviously self-serving insistence on ignoring the objectivity and truth you claim to champion’ (Schumacher-Matos, 2011c). These comments appear to be an assertion by the readers that NPR once had legitimacy because of its adherence to journalism standards and not simply that it never met those expectations. Nostalgia, then, especially when considered alongside commenters’ use of traditional criteria for evaluating journalistic performance, casts them in the role of journalists’ allies in defending traditional values and practices.
Criticisms grounded in social norms
This defense of traditional journalistic norms does not tell the story, however. Commenters stand outside the journalistic field and thus draw on values and ethical standards that guide individual morality or, in some cases, professional standards in other fields. Here, norms rooted in broader, social values appeared in a variety of ways. For example, commenters criticized journalists for being too judgmental, much like they would criticize any persons who are too quick and too harsh in their judgments of others. A commenter, for example, argued that ‘articles in the Times often contain debatable assumptions, generalizations, judgmental characterizations, and opinions’ (Brisbane, 2011b). Journalists were not spared criticism from commenters simply because the journalists’ job involves making judgments every day. In fact, they were sometimes praised for being non-judgmental. Other professional fields have heard criticisms of management as an old boys club. The idea is that those in elite positions look after themselves at the expense of the rank and file and the public. Similarly, commenters on stories about plagiarism criticized an old boys club that protects even the worst journalists.
Unsurprisingly, many of these social values were invoked to criticize what the commenters considered bad journalism, and thus their criticisms ultimately reinforce professional values. For example, one commenter posted, ‘Another day, another piece of lazy journalism at NPR’ (Shepard, 2011c). When journalists were called lazy or sloppy, the criticisms drive home journalists’ shortcoming in accuracy, verification, or reliability. For example, a commenter posted that ‘this kind of extremely sloppy and unreliable journalism has become what I expect of NPR’ (Shepard, 2011a). Likewise, when journalists were accused of character assassination their fairness is being called into question. Of course, this just underscores that many journalistic values and norms are not unique to the journalistic field. An admonition to be fair, long a part of formal journalism codes of ethics, could reasonably be expected in various settings, from business to interpersonal relationships.
Much of this criticism based on social values relates to the power or visibility of the press in public life. In fact, it is precisely because news organizations take on leadership roles in society that they are susceptible to charges of being sanctimonious and pompous. Commenters generally accepted that journalists have a leadership role, but chastised them for misusing that role for nefarious ends. For example, commenters were very critical of a particularly unflattering The New York Times profile of Olympian Lolo Jones, accusing the writer of being self-important, mean spirited, and ‘pompous’ (Brisbane, 2012a). Commenters also chafed at a publication’s self-appointed leadership role. For example, a commenter argued, ‘Too many fancy-tailed upper management types (with even fancier titles) sit around pondering their roles as gatekeepers’ (Brisbane, 2011c). In other words, it was the very role of acting as gatekeeper that made the paper pompous.
In the same vein, news organizations were criticized for their lack of humaneness or benevolence. The organizations were considered too detached from their communities or indifferent to the mores of neighborliness and civic regard for others. For example, a commenter suggested that journalists sneer at their audience members as lesser persons: ‘it’s not that we’re normal, everyday people – peers (god forbid!) to the folks at NPR – who we might conceivably run into at a Starbucks and strike up a conversation’ (Schumacher-Matos, 2012d). But here the commenter connected the journalists’ indifference to their audience to a broader ethic of dehumanizing persons, particularly persons in countries with which the United States is at war. Commenters also called out the news organizations for coverage that dehumanized subjects of their stories. As one commenter put it, ‘By using “illegal immigrant,” the Times is legitimizing a line of rhetoric that divides neighbors instead of uniting them. This dehumanizes people without papers and makes them “the others”’ (Sullivan, 2012a).
Commenters called out journalists for other, similar shortcomings, such as denying persons their individuality and negatively stereotyping the subjects of their news stories. For example, when an NPR commentator came under public pressure for comments many considered racist, a barrage of criticism appeared in the comments section of the ombudsman’s column. A comment that captured much of the sentiment expressed pointed out that the commentator’s joke, far from innocent, played ‘into an old stereotype about African-American men’ (Schumacher-Matos, 2012c). While journalists have been chastised for stereotyping as far back as Walter Lippmann (1922) and the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947), the commenters’ criticisms drive home the concreteness of the issue. News coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movements drew criticisms for many commenters who felt the journalists were missing the real story. As one put it, ‘for the true story they need to leave stereotypes behind and open their minds to very new perspectives’ (Brisbane, 2011e). Criticism of stereotyping seemed to encapsulate a number of other criticisms based on social values. For example, a commenter condemned a story that ‘not only perpetuates a stereotype, it misinforms the reader. This is lazy and sloppy journalism’ (Sullivan, 2012c).
As much of the criticism outlined above demonstrates, many commenters addressed the news organizations as persons, as individual human beings. Thus, criticism was based on how the commenters thought good persons should behave. For example, individuals should not be self-absorbed, and neither should the news organizations. Individuals should not have double standards, nor should news outlets (this was an oft repeated criticism in the comments). This perspective – thinking of news organizations as individual persons – was at the heart of criticism based, not on professional values, per se, but on social values and norms. In fact, many of the criticisms leveled at journalists – such as being sloppy, lazy, or pompous – are criticisms that the commenters also leveled against fellow commenters, newsmakers, and the ombudsman. Nevertheless, the perspective that sees news organizations as individuals challenges journalists to see their professional actions as the actions of responsible and morally aware human beings.
Conclusion
To the extent the criticisms of journalism observed in commenter responses to ombudsman columns reflect traditional criteria for evaluating journalistic performance, they can be seen as reinforcing professional norms and journalistic capital. Commenters criticized the three news organizations for not being objective, for creating false balance, for failing to uphold the standards of accuracy and truth, and for not being transparent, among many other criticisms. These standards collectively represent the doxa of journalistic capital through its established institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical practices (Hanitzsch, 2007). Similar to earlier research (Vos et al., 2012), commenters appear to be championing traditional norms rather than challenging them. It is important, however, to acknowledge that the discourse examined here might be somewhat constrained in ways that emphasize rather than challenge those norms. The choices ombudsmen make about the topics deserving examination in their columns direct the discussion toward those widely accepted professional standards for journalistic practice. For example, how else might a reader respond to a column about a newspaper concealing someone’s identity at the government’s request but to criticize the breach of expectations regarding transparency the newspaper demonstrated in doing so? Also, the online space for this discourse notwithstanding, NPR, the Post, and the Times are mainstream news organizations, suggesting that any shift away from objectivity taking place in the wider journalistic field is likely to be less noticeable among these reader comments.
We also found a form of commenter criticism that challenges the professional norms of journalism. Commenters were employing social criteria in their evaluations of journalistic performance, evident in their criticisms of journalists as judgmental, lazy and sloppy; sanctimonious and pompous; self-absorbed; and even dehumanizing. Invoking social norms can be seen as an encroachment on journalists’ autonomy in that it suggests journalists should be held accountable to traditional social norms in addition to, if not instead of, the professional norms journalists set for themselves. This criticism of journalism on social grounds is indicative of the flattening of the hierarchical relationship that previously existed between readers and journalists, stemming from the increased ability of audiences to participate in public press criticism. The application of social norms also could be related to the increasing participation in the journalistic field by non-professionals, such as bloggers and citizen journalists, who work outside the structures and codes provided by professional organizations and, therefore, rely on common social norms for guidance about best practices. Of course we do not know whether or how many commenters are part of this non-professional group – indeed, many commenters could be current or former professional journalists – but it is perhaps not too far a stretch to say that commenting itself constitutes a kind of participation in journalism that places commenters at least within striking distance of the field. Because the cultural capital of journalism is defined by the roles, ethics, and epistemologies unique to that field, introducing social norms that are by definition broadly applicable to all members of society undercuts the field’s unique capital and, therefore, represents a contestation of the traditional doxa of journalism that could act as a disruptive force on the field (Bourdieu, 2005).
However, we have to consider this potential disruption alongside the finding that commenters also tended to support traditional professional journalism norms – to even be nostalgic for a time when those norms were perceived as being enacted more consistently. Stability in journalism criticism that is rooted in traditional professional journalism norms appears to show that the commenting audience, while contesting some journalists’ practices, is not contesting traditional journalistic cultural capital. This raises doubts as to how serious a threat the audience represents and cuts against the conclusions evident in the research literature that exogenous pressures from the audience exist specifically in the form of market forces and cuts to important news coverage (Kim, 2002; Napoli, 2003).
Whether audience criticisms should be threatening to journalists could also depend upon the current context in which the field exists. Commenters represent just one part of the audience that can exert exogenous force on the field to contest doxa. Arguably, they are an especially salient part of that audience in having made their thoughts and concerns explicit and therefore readily available to journalists. Journalists are already under pressure to distinguish themselves from citizen journalists and bloggers; online commenters – whether a real or merely perceived force – could put even more exogenous pressure on the journalist to preserve the field. This increased force coming directly from the audience could lead to journalists seeing the audience as more salient, much like what was found in previous research (Anderson, 2011; McCluskey and Hmielowski, 2012).The way that journalists respond to this threat could determine whether certain social values reshape journalistic doxa and whether audiences perceive themselves as a credible force that can enact change in journalism.
While some traditionalist-journalists have doubted the value of listening to readers’ criticisms and concerns (Robinson, 2010), other professionals have argued that an interactive online world might be the site to harness crowds as forms of collective intelligence (Alag, 2009). For those who wade through ‘flame wars’ and inane online comments, the idea that commenters might be a form of collective intelligence might seem laughable. However, given the right structure, journalists might be wise to avail themselves of the intelligence that reader comments have to provide.
Limitations and future research
While this study offers a comprehensive examination of commenter criticism at three major US news outlets, there are many other places where media criticism of these institutions takes place; this research, then, represents only the most accessible commentary of those who chose to reach out to these outlets. Moreover, at least some of those who reach out could be members of the journalistic or political fields, which could offer an important backdrop to their specific criticisms. Future research investigating the composition of the commenters group could shed light on this. Also, research comparing criticism expressed via other means, such as letters to the editor and direct contact, could suggest whether and how the online environment shapes audience criticism. Finally, research should be conducted to discern how journalists are responding to these audience forces on the professional journalistic doxa.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.