This commentary is by Dave Gram of Montpelier, who was a reporter for more than 30 years with the Vermont bureau of The Associated Press.
“Everyone seems to hate what they call ‘the media,’” a journalism professor wrote recently. He added that this is a good thing.
Writing in March for an online publication called “The Conversation,” Michael Socolow of the University of Maine proceeded from there with more than 1,200 words of journalistic self-flagellation, going back more than four decades, to the Janet Cooke scandal at The Washington Post, to come up with sins to re-confess.
Socolow’s performance was disappointing, especially when contrasted with the sort of rigor that is the norm in newsrooms around the country. Real journalists acknowledge their mistakes and correct them with all due haste.
This was the practice during my more than 30 years as a reporter with The Associated Press. The most dreaded task on that job was to write a “corrective,” but if one was needed, it was tackled with no attempt to evade the facts of the error or make excuses.
Socolow’s mistake is to lump all the media together, something that has become a national pastime, and that people who care about the news media should resist at every opportunity. The revelations stemming from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News and what apparently were outrageous ethical violations there provide a perfect opportunity for real journalists to drive home public messaging about bad versus good journalism, to ostracize the bad and to recommit ourselves to sound practice.
None of this is to say the better news media are perfect. There are errors of fact and of judgment even among the best. But real journalists try to avoid them and correct them when they occur.
No other industry matches the willingness of the media to self-correct — not Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Chemical or Big Clergy.
Socolow’s central argument is that it’s good — and healthy for democracy — to be skeptical about all news media reporting. But he also acknowledges that when you throw the wheat away with the chaff, you end up hungry for the sort of benefits healthy news media provide to a democracy:
“Now, only 26% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the news media, according to a poll published in February 2023 by Gallup and the Knight Foundation,” Socolow writes. “Americans across the political spectrum share a growing disdain for journalism — no matter how accurate, verified, professional or ethical.”
But of this “erosion of trust in American journalism,” Socolow tells us it “can be seen as a sign of democratic health.”
No, no, and a thousand times no. The way American democracy works is that we have a Constitution that always urges us toward the creation of “a more perfect union,” and a First Amendment that allows robust criticism of what exists so that we might work to improve.
News media content is much of what flows between these two poles. We need healthy media or the system dies.
Socolow also gives way too much weight to another reason for the erosion of trust in the media: carping by politicians — from Lyndon “Great Society” Johnson to Ron “woke goes to die” DeSantis — who don’t like critical coverage.
Good journalists, providing they’ve done the work and gotten their facts right, need to brush off this blowback and urge the public to do the same. Who has more motivation to lie — a journalist whose only stock in trade is credibility, or a politician hoping that a positive spin will help in the next election?
How do we separate good journalism from bad journalism? For one thing, good journalism drums its own wrongdoers out of the corps. When Janet Cooke fabricated her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Jimmy’s World” concoction about an 8-year-old heroin addict for The Washington Post in 1980, the fabrication was investigated and exposed and the prize was returned. Who did the expose on Cooke’s wrongdoing? The Washington Post.
The same pattern held for Jayson Blair at The New York Times and Stephen Glass at The New Republic — two other cases cited by Socolow. Glass, Blair and Cooke all quickly became former journalists.
Contrast that with Fox News, where, the Dominion revelations strongly indicate, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham all knew they and their network were promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen in the crucial weeks following the November vote and decided not to tell the truth for fear of losing audience.
Fox’s narrative falsely placed Dominion at the center of the alleged fraud. While Glass, Blair and Cooke all were ousted, Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham are still in their chairs as nightly prime time anchors on Fox.
Another key distinction: Responsible news organizations tell their journalist-employees to work to keep their own political biases out of their stories, and sometimes fire reporters who fail to do so. The goal of bias-free journalism isn’t always perfectly met, but real news organizations are always pushing in that direction. Fox doesn’t even try, another reason to separate them from the rest of the news media.
There was a lot of hand-wringing among mainstream journalists about the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. Many wished Fox would settle — which is what ultimately happened — or that the litigation otherwise would go away. They feared it could upset the apple cart constructed by New York Times vs. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled the media could not be sued for publishing falsehoods unless it could be shown that the media outlet did so intentionally or with “reckless disregard” for what was true.
There’s speculation that the Sullivan standards, which are widely seen as strongly protective of media conduct that is responsible even if mistaken, could soon come under attack from the court’s current conservative majority, and that the media could emerge with less protection.
That’s why real journalists should have been hoping that Dominion would win its case against Fox. Such an outcome would show once and for all that Fox is beyond the pale of responsible journalism. It would show that the Sullivan standards work and are the proper tool to establish that.
And it would have served as a powerful reminder for journalists, journalism professors and the public that there is a difference between good journalism and bad, and that good journalism is worth defending. By banishing a major bad actor, the news media could put themselves on the road to regaining the public’s trust.
