Not unlike Sarah Palin, the fat, philandering, bankrupt businessman who masqueraded as president liked to bash the press.
But “lamestream media” and “fake news” are hardly new. Fifty years ago, soon-to-be disgraced U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew lambasted reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Not that press criticisms are the exclusive domain of the right. Progressives can be just as critical.
A recent broadcast of the public radio show “Freakonomics” was spent on the question, “Why is the U.S. Media So Negative?” with reporting that American journalism “exploits our negativity bias to maximize profits, and social media algorithms add fuel to the fire.” The piece quoted a researcher who found some high percentage of stories published by the New York Times were “negative.”
To that fine piece of academic analysis, I send a great, big “duh.”
Neither the researcher nor apparently Freakonomics producers ever learned what news is. For this, I blame generations of social studies teachers, but also the media themselves, who are woefully poor at explaining what they do and why they do it.
For starters, news is what is not expected to happen.
Like your hometown high school basketball team winning the state championship. Like your congressman accepting bribes for a vote. Like a jet crashing into a cornfield. Those are news. So is the car accident on Main Street that seriously injured an infant. And the bedbugs found in sheets at an expensive hotel. And the mailman who bit a dog.
A good definition of news is what you tell an old friend when meeting up at a bar after work. If you were to give your friend a perfectly “fair and balanced” account of your day, you might start by explaining that you got out of bed, showered and ate eggs and drove to work and…
Your friend’s eyes would glaze over and he might start thinking of finding a new friend.
If, after 10 minutes of “fair and balanced reporting,” you mentioned that you received divorce papers from your spouse at 3 p.m., your friend would say, “Hell, why didn’t you just come out and tell me!”
Because the divorce papers – not your egg breakfast – was the news.
That the news is mostly bad is because we rightfully expect things to work, including our marriages.
We expect the expensive hotel to have immaculate housekeeping. We expect our representatives in Congress to represent us and not work for cash on the side. We expect motorists not to plow into an infant on Main Street. We expect dogs to bite mailmen and no the other way around.
Mostly, the world works. Most planes take off and land safely. Most infants survive a trip to Main Street. When the world doesn’t, work, we sit up and take notice and, not unlike infants, the first word we utter is: Why? Why did the jet crash? Why did the car strike the infant? Why are bedbugs at the swanky hotel? Or, why (or how) did our team win the state championship?*
Reporters are tasked with answering the “why” question and we, as citizens, are tasked with responding responsibly to those parts broken parts of our world as reported in the headlines. We ensure jets and Main Street are safe by supporting safety agencies, laws and policies. We vote out of office crooked Congressman, and so on.
We live in trying times. From an attempted coup at our nation’s capital to cataclysmic climate events to new variants of a killer virus, there’s a lot of bad news out there. News consumers feel overwhelmed by it. In response, some big-city papers are now devoting entire sections to “good news” stories.
That’s understandable. As publisher of the Chilkat Valley News, I would always try to get one “good news” story on the front page, for the reason that while vegetables are best for you, a little dessert never hurt a meal.
But a person can’t live on good news any more than they can live on dessert. The news is bad because many things in our lives are broken. But many other things in our lives work just fine. If the news is “too negative” for you, read a book or take a walk. Just don’t blame the media for reporting the news. Making the world a better place is your own responsibility.
(*Answering the “why” question is the most important job of reporters.
When the space shuttle Challenger exploded on national television seconds after lift-off on Jan. 28, 1986, the explosion was news. Months later, chasing the “why” question, reporters learned that certain rubbery seals that insulated fuel tanks from open flames had shrunk due to unusually cold weather on the morning of lift-off.
Reporters also uncovered that engineers had recommended against launching in cold weather because of the risk of such an explosion. They also reported that President Ronald Reagan was planning to cite the lift-off in his State of the Union speech that night and that several Reagan aides had contacted NASA before the launch, which had been delayed three times. They reported that Reagan refused to make public the records of those phone calls.
Why weren’t they made public? From news accounts, it appears reporters didn’t ask that question.)