Abstract
I would encourage every journalist to pause this weekend, and reflect back on what you covered last week on your show or in your stories. Did you cover what is actually happening in our country and meaningful stories? Or were you distracted into covering the shiny coins.
This provocation from Amy Siskind, who keeps a weekly list about the United States’ supposed march into authoritarianism under President Trump, is directed at the American national news media, but could just as well be applied to journalists elsewhere covering mature democracies. If there is one challenge facing journalism that does not offer an easy answer, it is because journalists themselves are the single biggest problem facing journalism today. This is nonetheless a normative critique, though, that stems from the belief that professional journalism does matter and indeed serves a valuable role in a functioning, deliberative polity. Yet all too often, as Zelizer (2017), one of the founders of this journal, argued, imagining ‘what journalism could be’ requires the kind of reflexivity all too often lacking in journalists and in journalism scholarship.
There are three reasons that journalists are their own worst enemies in light of the contemporary contest over their social, political, economic, and cultural positioning. First, the continued, growing, and increasingly tiresome obsession journalists have with journalism as its own story. Second, a failure to learn from mistakes – both in terms of news coverage and in terms of industry business strategy. And third, what might be called ‘defensive professionalism’, or the knee-jerk use of professional norms and practices as a buttress against the changing media landscape. These three critiques are not new, of course, and are levied here primarily against national, elite journalists in the US context, whose outsized influence also means their foibles have greater impact. Nevertheless, the role journalists play in undermining their own value to society is particularly important to consider at present, given the deep fissures festering in social life such as the rise of populism, heightened levels of partisanship, and a rejection of empiricism.
Journalists are (and have been) the story
Complaining about journalism’s solipsism is old hat for critical media scholars. As Altheide and Snow (1991) observed prior to the mass adoption of cable television, The journalism enterprise, especially TV news, essentially is reporting on itself; it addresses events that are cast in its own formats and frames of relevance, rather than attempting to understand the events in their own terms, and then trying to communicate the complexities and ambiguities of ‘real world’ conditions. (p. 51)
There is no question that metajournalistic discourse is part and parcel of contemporary journalism, particularly as industry watchers, scholars, and journalists chart the downturn in journalism’s economic sustainability. Journalism movies are back in vogue, with The Post and Spotlight garnering Oscars, establishing a Hollywood fiction version of what journalism has been and could be. In the Trump era, it is all too tempting for journalists to report on Trump’s provocations of the news media as the leading story of the day. Yet at time of declining trust in the news media and faith in institutions overall, crying me miserum is unlikely to win new fans. If Rosen (2012) is right to suggest that the news media has become more disliked the more it has become a political institution and power player itself, journalists’ discourse about a declining lack of power, influence, access, and respect reinforces their presumption that they should be – and are – members of the power elite.
Journalists don’t learn from their mistakes
On 9 November 2016, American journalists had to look themselves in the mirror – perhaps Nate Silver and The New York Times’ Upshot bloggers more than others. Yet failing to spot Trump’s deep support across the country wasn’t the first big miss of the 2016 election cycle; journalists’ presumption that Trump would never make it to the general election had also been wrong. The mea culpas happened, as they do routinely after every major journalistic mishap – which in recent memory includes the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis (Usher, 2013), Trump’s nomination by the GOP for president, and Trump’s election. The metajournalistic discourse that follows is cyclical: some self-blame, some displaced blame, and some promises to change.
The pattern is similar when it comes to news innovation, whereby journalists and industry leaders malign poor choices that led to a failure, promise to regroup, and then commit the same errors, albeit in a different context. Consider how journalists first gave their content online away for free, spotted their error, then en masse gave content away to Facebook and Google, then spotted their error, only to put their faith in Apple News for a subscription platform and Facebook and Netflix to launch news shows, a new plan circa June 2018. The public journalism debacle has now been revived as ‘news engagement’, but with the same goal of creating loyalist news consumers for the sake of democracy – and economics, of course. While professional change does happen, its slow burn tests the patience of its most ardent defenders, particularly as affirming results seem urgently needed.
Defensive professionalism enables media change deniers
There are those in the news industry and associated onlookers whom refuse to incorporate the best academic scientific consensus about how the news media is changing, whether this be lack of support for a filter bubble or the spotty future for terrestrial television – Nielsen (2018) calls them ‘media change deniers’. These people, often industry leaders, are emboldened by a defensive professionalism that serves as both a source of confirmation bias and a guiding ideology that makes it difficult to see how media is changing and how to adapt. The undergirding ideology of defensive professionalism can be articulated roughly as such: ‘Our time-honored and time-tested professional ideals guide us to do noble, public-service, quality, and morally sound journalism, which we can do, do, and will do, and we trust people will see its value’.
Defensive professionalism is on display best when Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, defend their institutions. When asked in a forum at the US’ National Press Club about whether Times or Post journalists going on TV to give commentary meant sacrificing objectivity, Baquet obliquely noted his journalists were not providing their own opinion, just an opinion about stories they had written. 2 Journalists’ defensive professionalism also manifests as blind faith that good work will see journalism’s troubles through both institutionally and economically. When my students asked a top-notch national journalist about problems with parachute journalism and local audiences, she replied, steadfastly, that her reporting was so trustworthy and her skills so well-practiced that her coverage needed no defense. Defensive professionalism manifests as a belief that people will pay for ‘good’ content, but this has not only warped what ‘good content’ might mean (in some cases, lots of puppies, in other cases, longform journalism), but also makes it harder to rethink journalism’s form, norms, practices, as well as audiences, such as underlying news use behaviors.
What remedies exist?
Endemic professional cultures of journalism run deep, as journalism studies scholarship has shown well. Can journalists stop talking about themselves? Probably not. But perhaps they need to do a better job showing why they – elite national journalists – matter. Can journalists learn from their mistakes? Perhaps, and slowly, but only with the continued vigilance of extra-journalistic institutions and onlookers (from trauma centers to journalism ethics institutes to academics) and support for their efforts within the news industry. Will journalists be able to overcome their defensive professionalism that roots them in a kind of obstinacy that prevents engagement with media change? Likely not, but these critiques posed here can be asserted as a productive challenge to elite journalists in mature democracies: big stories that change the world need to come from Washington, London, Paris, and other centers of power, regularly. If these journalists do reporting that matters rather than chase after the shiny coins, then journalists will have elucidated problems that indeed will make their own troubles seem far less consequential.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.