Eat more veggies

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The country needs more of INI's kind of journalism

The country needs more of

INI’s kind of journalism

By Joe Smyth

INI Board Chair

The Knight Foundation and Gallup polled Americans this summer about their views of local news consolidation and found that over 90% of respondents were concerned about the biases of media owners.

“More than nine in ten Americans are ‘very’ (66%) or ‘somewhat’ (26%) concerned that the owners’ views would influence coverage if a large company purchased their local news organization,” Megan Brenan and Zacc Ritter wrote of the findings.

That so many citizens fear media bias is shameful.  Sadly, I’m convinced that the public’s distrust is entirely deserved.

Posted below this article is another one from the early 1990s, after INI had stopped publishing staff editorials. Trade publications reprinted it, but unfortunately few in the industry followed our lead. 

Even worse, the opinions of journalists have been allowed to spread well beyond the editorial pages.  They are obvious throughout.  Some journalism schools even encourage students to engage in advocacy, instead of straight journalism.  Is it any wonder that the media is so distrusted?

Cable “news” is one of the biggest culprits.  I used to urge friends who watched CNN to spend equal time watching Fox, and vice versa.   It was bad advice.  Now I instead advise avoiding those channels (and others like them) entirely.

Their corporate owners have learned that there’s more money in pandering to people’s prejudices than in fair and balanced reporting.  Their “stars” are entertainers, not reporters; they are propagandists, not journalists. 

It’s human nature that most people prefer to be entertained and coddled than challenged.  So, they seek out the channels that cater to their opinions and avoid the channels that cater to the “other side”.  Is it any wonder that our nation has become so divided politically?

Too much print journalism isn’t much better than broadcast. 

The New York Times is a media powerhouse, employing some of the finest journalists in the world.  Yet it’s impossible to read that newspaper without seeing clearly that the owner’s opinions aren’t limited to the editorial pages.  The Sulzberger family’s progressivism can be found throughout the newspaper.  It’s a powerful and undeniable culture at the Times, and the owners have a right to impose and enforce it.

But journalism loses when it is mixed with --- and tainted by --- advocacy and political activism.  The public’s distrust of all media is intensified.  Citizens lose.  The nation loses.

And journalists themselves are compromised when --- in order to be employed and to advance in their careers --- they are expected to fit into a culture other than one of pure and unbiased journalism. 

Straight, fair and balanced reporting is difficult enough.  Too few media organizations provide a platform for that kind of journalism.  Our citizens need more. The nation needs more.

I’m proud that our little company provides a haven for such journalists.  They are charged with producing agenda-free journalism.  Their reporting helps people learn about issues, and our public forums draw citizens into civil discussions of public issues.  

Thanks, INIers, for your dedication to purposeful neutrality in journalism, even while so many others in media are self-destructing and undermining public trust by flagrantly injecting their own biases into their coverage.

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No Editorials?

Editor’s note:  The following is a related article that Joe Smyth wrote for Press Lines in the early 1990s.   As you read it, think about how much worse and more blatant media bias has gotten over the past 30 years.

No Editorials?   A Heresy That Works

By Joe Smyth
INI  Board Chair

Our community newspapers have been free of editorials for several years now, and it works!   For many newspaper traditionalists, this is pure heresy.  "A newspaper without editorials is no newspaper at all," they say.

Because the no-editorials idea was so radical in the 1980s, Independent approached it with considerable caution.  We started phasing out editorials somewhat tentatively.  But it felt right, and has evolved into a heartfelt policy. Some of our editors at first only tolerated the policy. Now, many of these same editors embrace it with enthusiasm.

While I at first thought the no-editorial policy might only be appropriate for smaller community newspapers, I now believe all newspapers should consider it.

Most of Independent's newspapers serve small communities. They don't have the luxury of a separate staff for editorials.   Before we went "on the wagon", our editorials were often written by the same people who covered the stories.   The editor might cover the town council meeting, write the news stories and then proceed to voice his or her opinions about what the council had done wrong.

This represented an inherent conflict of interest, and one that we believed was undermining the newspaper's reputation for purposeful neutrality.  

When everybody in town knew the editor's stance on issues, how could they trust our coverage of those same issues?   (Traditional journalists like to believe readers can make the distinction, but the evidence suggests that most do not.   Could this have more to do with public distrust of the press than most traditional journalists would like to admit?)

At Independent, our mission is to publish purposeful newspapers that encourage and support meaningful community involvement, and that provide citizens with the knowledge they need to make rational decisions about public issues.   A mission like that doesn't leave a lot of room for jamming our opinions down people's throats, does it?

Dropping editorials has allowed us to turn our opinion pages into a vigorous forum for community discussion of public issues.   One of our discoveries may amaze hard-core editorialists:  Our readers don't need us to tell them what to think!   Our opinion pages help readers learn from one another, in a process that allows them to progress from knee-jerk opinion to mature judgment about public issues.

To fill the editorial void, we reached out to our communities.   We encouraged more letters to the editors.  We used “Speak Out” and other approaches to open our pages to segments of the community which often had felt excluded and

powerless.   We recruited guest commentaries from people who had special expertise about the issues being discussed.   Our readers are exposed to a much broader spectrum of opinions than they were previously.

Our editors, freed of the burden of being partisan participants in the community's discussions, can instead act as pro-active but evenhanded facilitators, thus helping to elevate the quality of the community's discussion of public issues.

We've also been able to put more effort into improved coverage of public issues.   We try to provide understanding of key issues, not just reporting the latest events.  And we try to put events in context for our readers, again with the goal of providing citizens with the knowledge they need to make their own decisions.

The no-editorial policy allows us to be real journalists --- continually engaged in a never-ending search for truth, without claiming to possess "truth".   We are not propagandists. We are journalists, zealously guarding our reputation for purposeful neutrality.

As our readers gain trust in us as a fair facilitator of the community's discussion, they become more likely to participate.   In our communities, readers aren't sitting back waiting for the editorial writers and other experts; they are involved in the process of citizenship.

In his book, "Coming to Public Judgment --- Making Democracy Work in a Complex World", Daniel Yankelovich observes:  "The key to successful self-governance in our Age of Information is to create a new balance between public and experts.  To offset creeping expertism, the public must be able to stand its ground against the experts better than it is doing now.  Yet in present-day America, few institutions are devoted to helping the public form considered judgments."

Is this a role newspapers could play?   Yes, but not when the tone is set by the newspaper's need to promote its own opinions.   As long as those top-down editorials are there, it's unlikely the public will trust newspapers to play this role, any more than people would choose one candidate's campaign manager to be the moderator of an election debate.

If newspapers were to drop editorials, what would happen to all of those editorial writers?   Well, some of them are hopeless propagandists, and perhaps they could find jobs as campaign flacks, columnists or lobbyists.   But many of them could be salvaged and could return to journalism; they could write stories that would help citizens understand issues, and trust readers to form their own opinions.

When John Naisbitt said we are living in a "society that is drowning in information but starving for understanding," he hit the nail on the head. Too few newspapers do a very good job of helping people understand.  We are too busy feeding them "factoids" and attempting to tell them what to think.

"Citizens and Politics --- A View from Main Street America", a report prepared for the Kettering Foundation by the Harwood Group, concluded that "Americans do care about politics, but they no longer believe they can have an effect....they believe there's been a hostile takeover of politics by special interests and lobbyists, along with negative campaigns and the media."

The report went on to suggest that we need "to find ways for citizens to form a public voice on policy issues a voice that is informed and deliberative.. .and moves the political debate beyond considering just special and organized interests and to create ways for public officials to hear that public voice."

Isn't this a role newspapers could --- and should --- fill?

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