In News We Trust?
News, like everything else is subject to pollution. The toxic elements seeping into news aquifers are generally from three sources: religious and political opinion, entertainment and marketing.
News is news. It strives to be factual and objective. It tells a story from multiple points of view. It does not express opinion. It may call on others to do so, but it frames the context and derivation of their opinion within the story. It checks facts. The reader/viewer forms these facts into opinions.
The two key disciplines in news production are journalism and editorial. The first gathers and composes a story. The editor selects which stories are to be run, edits and verifies them and formats their navigation on a page or in a broadcast time slot. Each of these disciplines effects the perception and understanding of news by the reader/viewer. The placement of stories conveys their relative importance in the hierarchy of events.
Religion, politics, entertainment and marketing can all be news subjects, but they must not influence a story, they must be a story. Increasingly they drive news selection and presentation and there is remarkably little hue and cry.
News organizations “of record” like The NY Times, The Washington Post, The BBC, NPR, The Guardian, CNN, USA Today and others adhere to varying degrees to a mission of objective news gathering and presentation.
One form of pollution, driven by the advertisers’ relentless demand for eyes and ears, is entertainment. If news is either entertaining or titillating and not bereft of troubling stories that induce fear and reduce consumption, it is more profitable. The presentation of news becomes the tide on which a flotilla of ads arrives in our homes. The editor, of course, must be sensitive to the advertiser’s image and concerns, so the story about serious contraindications of some Pharma megalith’s latest wonder pill may be pulled from the news lineup.
Much news today hopelessly conflates political and/or religious opinion with facts. Stories are presented from a liberal, progressive point of view or from a right wing or religious perspective. The political opinions of Rupert Murdoch unmistakably pervade the production of Fox News. The New York Times, although revered as being generally “of record,” is often viewed as the voice of the Eastern liberal establishment. News must rise above the political and religious convictions of producers.
Forbes is putting advertising links in its online edition. The New York Times has flirted with contextual ads in their online edition as well. The Internet has lubricated the already slippery slope between news and marketing. In digital news editions, affinity search engines have made some legendary and gruesome errors trying to link stories to product offers. This effort to “add value” for advertisers by deflecting the reader/viewer’s interest from a news story to the purchase of a product or service is pollution. When is a “style story” an ad? When is a “business profile” a run up to an IPO? When is an entertainment feature a puff piece on a new film release by the same holding company?
Print and broadcast news, of course, have always been pockmarked with ads, but boundaries exist with which the viewer/reader is familiar. But for ABC/Disney to run on the ABC Evening News a story about the Legend of King Arthur just as their new film is about to debut in theaters would is a gross violation of mission.
In a wired world where people get their news from a variety of sources and channels, and world-shaping events debut hourly, it is critical that we re-establish an uncompromising news ethos not subject to the pollution of marketers, religionists, politicians or the entertainment industry. On the Internet, anyone who can draw traffic may become a “news service.”
News pollution is by no means new. “Yellow journalism” has deep roots here and abroad. The effluent of personal opinion runs deep in the history of news production, as it did when William Randolph Hearst bought from Albert Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s brother, The Journal which became synonymous with “yellow journalism,” most especially after the sinking of the USS Maine and the hue and cry it raised over a cable claiming sabotage, later proved false. This led to the mortally questionable Spanish-American War. As they say, there is little new under the sun.
We have largely abandoned the “public good” deal struck between the FCC managing our airwaves on and a then incipient broadcast industry desiring to use those airwaves for their own profit. It was a good deal that supported the growth of a new and profitable industry, created jobs and served people. The “public good” component involving news, information, education and access to which the broadcasters originally committed, through successful lobbying and munificent political contributions, has steadily eroded in the legislative and regulatory arenas. Where Edward R. Murrow and Playhouse 90 once aired, we have well-coiffed anchors delivering snippets of news and reality TV.
Bill Schubart
082004
6:42:30 AM 
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