Don’t Look Now, But They’re Not Following Us
A Public Radio Pioneer Looks Over His Shoulder
By James B. Russell ’74
James B. Russell giving the
2004 Hovey Lecture.
There is a serious gap developing between journalists and the public. We journalists have been accused of everything from poor grammar and spelling to laziness and stupidity, to a lack of respect for our listeners and readers, to deliberately inventing facts, sensationalizing the news and spinning stories to match our own liberal biases. As a profession, we certainly don’t help our case with high-profile transgressions like those of Jack Kelley, Stephen Glass, Rick Bragg and Jayson Blair. But disturbing as their transgressions have been, my concern isn’t about them nor even about lamenting our loss of popularity—or as a self-proclaimed pundit at the Brookings Institution put it—“worrying so much about being loved.”
After performing journalism or managing it for 37 years, I have come to believe that a good part of the American people simply does not seem to value a free press. They appear not to trust our motives or our reason for being. For them, we are not the fourth estate; we are not an essential part of American government. This public certainly does not appear to subscribe to a comment that Walter Cronkite once made that “freedom of the press is not just important to democracy; it is democracy.”
Instead, to this public we are an ever bigger, ever more powerful, more consolidated business, a media superstore where dollars and cents are the rule and where freedom of the press is reserved, as Liebling suggested, to those who own the presses or the radio and TV stations.
Somewhere along the way, we lost our profession’s importance and respectability in the eyes of at least some of the public. Reality TV shows, local newscasts with “if it bleeds, it leads” as their MO, and O.J. Simpson’s live car chases have not done much to earn respect for our profession. A year ago the Pew Research Center reported that only 49 percent of the respondents to its annual survey said they thought news organizations were “highly professional.” An even greater percentage said news organizations are politically biased, that news reports are inaccurate, and that the press tries to cover up its mistakes. Even we journalists have admitted that we are worried about the state of the media. In this year’s Pew Report journalists made two striking observations: Roughly eight in ten journalists are worried about the shallowness of coverage, and there’s been a major decline in our confidence in the American public’s ability to make good decisions.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, let’s do a little reality check. Imagine the following scenario: Instead of running out of gas, imagine that the Patriot Act were expanded tomorrow. The government starts closing down newspapers and taking radio and TV stations off the air or curtailing their activity. Do you honestly believe that the American public would rise up? Do you think American students would man the barricades? Would intellectuals go on strike? Would readers, listeners and viewers feel that something of tremendous, defining and momentous value was being threatened?
How did we get to this point? In 1998 Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The (Portland) Oregonian,answered that question plainly and simply, saying, “Readers are in the dark about journalists’ goals and decision-making.” In other words, we have made a big mistake simply assuming that the public understands us and automatically shares our values. They don’t understand what we do, why we do it, how we do it—because we haven’t told them.
Audience trust for us and valuation of our work may have sunk so low because of the plethora of choices that audiences have for getting news. Some studies have shown that viewers, readers, and listeners are more likely to obtain their news from so called non-journalistic sources including websites, talk radio, reality TV and entertainment programs. While many traditional journalists may disparage these as sources for legitimate news, an interesting article in USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review reported that some people trust bloggers more than traditional general assignment reporters, and it cited four reasons for this. One is the niche expertise of bloggers. They have deeper subject knowledge than general assignment reporters. Two, transparency in motives: Bloggers own up to their biases, but journalists often don’t. Three, transparency in the process: Bloggers often link to documents and supporting evidence. Fourth, forthrightness about mistakes. Bloggers admit their mistakes; we often don’t.
So how do we regain our credibility and teach our readers, viewers and listeners the importance of free and independent journalism? If we want to “get it,” we need to educate the American people on the role of journalism as a fundamental centerpiece of democracy.
Before we go out and start preaching and proselytizing, we’d better do a self-check of our own faith, our own “religious beliefs and convictions.” Do we still believe in ourselves and the importance of our mission? Is journalism still a “calling,” as it once was, or has it become merely a good job, a place to practice a craft, an interesting diversion? Do we vehemently believe in the mission and that our purpose is to educate our citizenry so they will make better decisions about their civic lives? Are they educable? Do they vote better when they have better information? Do the media really inform and provoke thinking? Do we ourselves believe in journalism as “a public trust?”
Let’s assume that we all passed the test. If enough of us in this profession still believe, then what can we do to teach the American public who we are and why it matters?
I said before this isn’t about our loss of popularity. Rather, it is about the values that we hold so dear and that we assume the public does, too: objectivity, fairness, balance. Those values are coupled with what good journalists do: question, probe, uncover, expose, challenge.
I am someone who frequently asks my staff, “Does this story produce enlightenment? Does it actually reveal something?” So I can walk away and say, “You know I didn’t get it before, and now I get something.” If I can take away one nugget from a conversation on the radio or on television or from a newspaper story I feel I’ve really benefited. I feel that’s a good deliverable. I feel that I’ve traded you my time and my attention, and you’ve given me one clear idea, a clue about how something works.
How do we undertake the re-education of the American public? Well, I think we begin by admitting our own arrogance and our sometimes-splendid journalistic isolation. Let’s get off our high horses and interact with the public. Let’s make journalism a subject that the public can discuss and criticize, and let’s put some sunshine on our own profession.
Every single person in this room ought to be teaching the value of journalism to people in their communities every week. We ought to start in our own organizations, because I know that many of the people who manage and bean count do not understand or buy into the journalism values we hold so dear. We need to stop hiding behind the firewalls we have erected and come out of hiding to engage in, to be confronted, to explain and interact with audiences in robust and often heated debates.
Russell appreciates thanks from University President
Mary Sue Coleman.
Beyond our own companies, we ought to take the journalism education campaign public. We ought to start by bridging the gap between journalists and their readers, viewers and listeners. We ought to be open to telling audiences what we care about and how we practice our journalism. We ought to reveal, disclose, shed light on, peel back the skin of how we do our jobs. At my company we’re experimenting with two concepts designed to do just that. One called “Public Insight Journalism” begins by accepting that our audience is filled with people who know more about many subjects than we do. We’re seeking their ideas and expertise, and we’re assembling a database of listeners who will participate in identifying ideas and resources for stories. Another approach we’re taking has a less fancy name: “Naked Journalism.” In it, we admit that journalists are human beings first. We want to know what it feels like to be in the middle of a story. We have erred in putting journalism up so high on a pedestal that it became a mystical religion. Now we need to recognize that it’s a down-to-earth everyday profession, one that audiences can understand and criticize without demeaning its value.
And above all, we should admit to being human. We have feelings, points of view, and we sometimes make mistakes. Last July, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a wonderful piece called “Rethinking Objectivity,” by CJR’s managing editor Brent Cunningham, that spoke of a journalist’s humanity in unapologetic terms. He talked about a journalist named Ron Martz from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who was embedded with the Army in Iraq, and in the course of doing his job he came across a severely wounded Iraqi civilian. He stopped doing what he was doing in order to save this person’s life, and he took a lot of heat for doing that. This man apparently didn’t understand that his job was to be a kind of passive observer reporter—but not a human being—and it was wonderful that issue was raised, because I think back to days in Vietnam where monks would light themselves on fire and burn themselves to death. And I always wondered if I had been a photographer in Vietnam and had seen a human being dousing himself with gasoline, would I have had the courage to put down my camera and rush to prevent that man from burning himself alive or would I have taken an award-winning picture? Did I have the right to stop him from doing what he wanted?
I have been allowed in my career to practice a kind of human-affairs journalism. I had a boss early on who asked me, “When are you going to start doing serious stories?” And I said, “By serious stories do you mean stories about institutions, as in ‘The White House today said?’ You see my problem with that is I know the White House is a building—it doesn’t talk, I’ve never heard anyone report that it talks.” But people do talk, and I’m interested in people, and I want to focus on people. My editor would send me out to cover dull-as-stone press conferences, and I wouldn’t go. Instead of interviewing economists about inflation, I was permitted to go shopping with an elderly black lady in Washington’s ghetto and simply let her describe the meager food staples she was living on. When I asked her whether she thought she ate well, she replied that she got “two square meals a day.”
“No,” I said, “that’s supposed to be three square meals a day.”
“I get two,” she said. And many of them consisted of sausage and a can of peas.
Listeners responded to these kinds of stories, and I was able to do many more of them. It was a journalism of human stories, now called by the fancy name “narrative journalism” by some of its foremost practitioners like Robert Krulwich, now of ABC News, and Scott Simon of NPR, and Ira Glass of “This American Life.” It combines honesty and transparency. It makes journalism into human storytelling again.
I believe we journalists can begin to win back the “hearts and minds” of our readers, listeners and viewers. But only if we understand and accept that we have lost much of their respect and that we as journalists are able to begin cleaning up our act. I am not optimistic that we can turn what has become an entertainment industry into a public service. But I am confident that we can as individual journalists identify with and communicate with our audience, creating pathways between us that at least start to make better connections and reestablish faith in us and our profession.
— James B. Russell ‘74 is senior vice president of Minnesota Public Radio and general manager of American Public Media-Los Angeles, the producer of “Marketplace,” “ Sound Money” and “Weekend America.”
