Judging the news

I’ve never been much for reading or watching the news, especially when I was younger. I used to catch criticism for not doing the grownup thing — watching the news or reading the paper as much as everyone else did. I managed to keep up with most of the important news, but I noticed early on that the news upset me, a lot. It got me worked up about things beyond my control, and raised my overall fear and frustration level, without giving me all the facts, or any resolution. It’s possible this news avoidance started when I had a brother serving in Vietnam and saw war news every night during the dinner hour. Maybe it began even earlier. But those negative side effects of the news stayed with me and seemed to outweigh or play down the benefits of keeping up with every little thing presented as news.

When I worked, as a student, in a public library that carried several different newspapers (one of my jobs was placing newspapers on those sticks that hung on racks), I quickly got the idea that different newspapers had different slants, just as my journalism teachers had told me. But back then those slants were less obvious.

The news today isn’t what I learned it should be in junior high and high school journalism. I learned in those classes (the most recent in the early 1970s) that journalism was a format that could inform and educate, or misinform and manipulate. But, I was told, the most ethical journalists and news sources attempted to be more balanced and factual. More and more today, I think we’re simply manipulated by the news. It’s less about the facts, and more about opinion, speculation, or passing judgment. Every news source seems to have its bias, whether toward liberal or conservative politics, toward or against religion, science, environmental concerns, current business and economic influences, and so forth. It resembles what I learned was yellow journalism or propaganda, back in school. I’ve also noticed, as I look back, that nearly all my life even the most factual news has been about carefully selected facts. There was always something left out. And it’s what people don’t say that often carries the kernel of truth.

For instance, I learned recently that modern news sources sometimes almost completely ignore a candidate in their presidential election coverage. (Look up Larry Agran, who ran in the Democratic primaries in 1992 to learn just how effectively the news media can marginalize a candidate.) In what we consider a democracy, we depend perhaps too much on news coverage to provide us balanced information to draw on when we vote. In our desire for a convenient source of information, we fail to realize news coverage can be lax, and even manipulative.

I’m not going to criticize any particular news source here, though I could mention several, probably some that you and I both attempt to learn from or rely on for facts. There are few that seem to provide objective news anymore. The other night I watched what appeared to be in-depth coverage of a recent minor political intrigue, in which a journalist used judgmental terms to describe what had occurred. I thought the events and facts could stand for themselves, with the viewer left to judge, if enough facts were given. Instead the reporter made judgments for us.

What I take issue with the most is something I see in nearly every news source I’m familiar with: News reporting with strong emotional hooks that get people worked up, but barely scratch the surface of fact. This kind of reporting doesn’t lead us to a resolution or even a path toward solutions — which could be gained simply by providing more information in a balanced, responsible way, about news that really matters, then letting the viewer or reader make up his own mind. Even when we’re presented with straight news rather than opinion, even when journalists don’t judge or speculate about the background or outcome of an event, even when they’re not reporting on Paris Hilton’s or Britney Spear’s latest exploits instead of a newsworthy event — even then, these emotional hooks leave me with little wonder that many people today are too stressed by the “news” to think straight or take charge of their own lives, let alone vote or spend intelligently and responsibly.

Is anyone else increasingly dissatisfied with news coverage? Is it any wonder newspapers are folding, or that with more television channels than ever, there’s less news worth watching? Does anyone else think the news anchors sometimes seem less informed than we who bother to read rather than just rely on their reports? Do you think that TV news networks are less involved with reporting the facts, and more involved with increasing our culture’s adrenaline addiction and steering popular opinion in particular directions?

The only thing that keeps me a bit more interested in the news today than when I was younger is the Internet. When I see superficial or emotionally involving coverage by the media on something that interests me, I can read several more perspectives on it, if I do some judicious research of my own. One needs to exercise skepticism when reading on the Internet. Even edu sites are sometimes suspect sources these days. But once I locate a few different and disparate sources of a particular story, it’s easier to find the thread of truth in the news than when I depend on a single newspaper or TV source for coverage. Some news that’s important to me is missed entirely by mass media, or the media is slower to respond to it.

But researching the news on the Internet takes time, more time than I usually have, and more time than many people are willing or able to put in. That leaves us with the more convenient “professional” news sources, which I find more suspect and less responsible than ever.