(Editor’s note: Randall King is a former professional journalist who now teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. This blog is used by permission of the Indianapolis Star, where it appeared earlier this month.)
I don’t know who will win the presidential race this November, but I know who has already lost 2016: the U.S. news media. Not “the media,” as many incorrectly say, as in “the media lies …,” “the media distorts …” or “the media controls…” “Media,” as a collective noun should be plural, yet we speak of it as a monolith — as if all media organizations think and walk and report the same way. They don’t, yet collectively the news media are losing the American public and if it continues, we all lose.
Leading the bash this year is the biggest loudmouth in the room: candidate Donald Trump, who rarely misses a chance to kill the messenger that made him. Trump has made the “lying media” a centerpiece of his campaign strategy, if there is one. He’s mused publicly about “opening up” libel laws to make it easier to go after reporters, and tweeted recently, “It’s not freedom of the press when others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false,” he said.
Uh … it kind of means exactly that, Mr. Trump. But if you still don’t understand, I would like to invite you to sit in on my media law class next spring. I think you will have the time.
This season of media bashing is not confined to one political side, though. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has gone more than 250 days without holding a formal news conference and complained openly of a different “Hillary standard” when it comes to public scrutiny. Bernie Sanders criticized the “corporate media” who, presumably, ignored his candidacy. Still more dismaying are attempts to shut down media coverage on college campuses nationwide — often student protesters denying access to student journalists who could give attention to their grievances.
Media bias is nothing new, of course, but this seems to be on a different level. In my more than 30-year career as a journalist and media educator, I’ve never seen a time when not only the conduct of journalists is suspect, but the very consensus of their role in a free society is misunderstood or dismissed.
No doubt, many of these wounds are self-inflicted. Cable television has redefined “news channel” to mean talking opinionheads more than actual reporting. Yes, on some issues reporters betray a source or omission bias — who they talk to and what they leave out are more illustrative of bias than how they cover it. National surveys do show a predominance of Democratic voting and left-leaning views among elite national journalists. But the causal linkage between those personal views and their actual reporting is more difficult to discern.
Here’s the crux. Every single day, in communities across this country, journalists hit the streets with one purpose: to tell their audience what is going on. And, in spite of huge resource limitations and barriers to getting information, they still largely succeed at that task. In fact, their daily work is the grist for the opinion-writing/talking head/blabber radio/social-sharing/media-bashing mill that drives some of us crazy. Someone had to find the “truth” that everyone else is arguing about. Reporters do that, but they’re losing the battle.
Job losses and economic failings of media companies have been well documented for two decades. As an educator, I see the effects of this each fall as fewer students declare journalism as a major. It has always been difficult to get 18-year-olds to ask tough questions, challenge assumptions and report “truth” through professional journalistic methods. Now, those students’ families, friends and pocketbooks tell them there is no value in that pursuit, so they are better off taking their communication skills elsewhere.
I worry about these declines most in the small communities I’ve been privileged to serve. Some form of national media will survive the digital onslaught, but what happens to local reporting in towns and cities where there is less money and less public trust to keep media in business? Who will tell us what’s going on in local government? Schools? Streets? How will we know the good, bad and ugly of our world without someone holding up the mirror? I don’t always want to see what’s reflected, but I need to see it, as a citizen and a human being.
So please support the local and national journalists who try — imperfectly — to get it right every day. If we keep losing journalists, and everyday, just-the-facts journalism in our media, we will lose a part of our American soul so important to the Founders it led the Bill of Rights: Free press, right in there with speech, religion and assembly, unencumbered by government.
When reporters mess it up, let them know about it, but don’t stop reading and watching. We don’t want to live in an America where “the media” are silent and “truth” is only what our politicians say it is.