Media who Abet Ignorance

As shocking as it is that 27% of Americans believe that President Barack Obama was probably or likely not born in the US, and 20% believe he is Muslim, evidence to the contrary, it is just as troubling that broadcast and print media continue to report this as "news".

It is self-evident there is something wrong in American society today . . . a society which can throw up an influential 'tea party' movement completely indifferent to history and considered inquiry, as well as a mess of inbecilic demagogues.

But the question posed by David Winer (a visiting scholar at NYU in journalism in a tweet yesterday) was why is CNN continuing to run this story? Why are American media giving credence to wing-nuts like Frank Graham, son of evangelist Billy, who only grudgingly accepts that Obama, although "born a Muslim" (now isn't that a lovely bit of sophistry), has embraced Christianity?

Part of the answer is simply the decline of truth-telling in some media in favour of celebrity or 'spectacle' political reporting. The rest is filled in by Jay Rosen in an interview in The Economist (hat tip to colleague Brendan Hodgson for the reference):

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn't born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren't "wrong", they're just limited. The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and "report both sides" reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they've violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

Sometimes it is better to ignore neutrality when "neutrality" means abetting ignorance.

People Familiar with the Investigations

Let's give the journalist the benefit of the doubt in this one. David Crawford could be facing a battery of Wall Street Journal lawyers as he wrote his article titled "Probe of Bribery at HP Heats Up" posted on The Wall Street Journal online today and reprinted in The Globe and Mail's Report on Business section.

Parsing the story quickly this morning, I realized I was reading the phrase "people familiar with the investigations" (twice) in different ways in nearly every paragraph. Sometimes these informants were "people familiar with the matter" (four times), other times "people close to the investigation" (twice), and "people familiar with the probe". 

By my count that is nine unattributed references. "German authorities", "German prosecutors", the "U.S. Department of Justice", "a spokeswoman for HP", "U.S. and Russian authorities", "spokesmen for the Justice Department and the SEC", and "Russian investigators" all also make their specifically unattributed appearance.

Not a single person seems to have been willing to be identified in the story and, in fact, no names are revealed at all.

And journalists berate bloggers for vagary, lack of specificity and using unverified facts.

Social Entrepreneurship

I had coffee yesterday morning with David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World and other books, who will soon be launching a news platform to get stories out about solutions to environmental, economic and social problems at dowser.org (still in beta although launching soon).

The emphasis here is on solutions . . . what is being done to fix things. David believes too much energy (and media attention) is spent on complaining about what's wrong and not enough on profiling successful social change programs. When live, 'dowser' will help right the balance by providing news stories about positive illustrations of social entrepreneurship and innovation. It will, as a note on the beta site says, "(T)ell stories about people who are creatively attacking social problems and show how achievable it is to make an impact."

Apparently indefatigable, sometime in the next couple of weeks David will also be releasing another book co-authored with Susan Davies called Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know published by Oxford University Press. Part of the book focuses on a theme we talked about over espresso (me) and croissant (David), the need for "journalists who are both good storytellers and familiar with the challenge of social problem solving."

I haven't read David's books yet. But this call for more forward-looking storytelling is likely to be the toughest proposition on the social entrepreneurship agenda. The goal of dowser.org is a refreshed narrative archetype: I'll be cheering for David and dowser.org.

Journalists See Benefits to Social Media After All

One of the surprising findings in the 2009 Middleberg/SNCR Survey of Media in the Wired World, along with such facts as 70 percent of journalists are using social networking sites for their work, is this:

More than 90 percent of journalists agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.

Instead of seeing social media as a leviathan destroying news rooms and enfeebling the quality of news reporting, they are recognizing that “Social media is changing the profession. It has enhanced the dialog between audience and writer and expanded the scope of those who can participate in disseminating news.”

Spot on . . .

Newspapers as Niche News Providers

This post by Jim Horton at Online Public Relations Thoughts makes an interesting follow-on to my last post on the decline of newspapers.

The story Mr. Horton references adds even more evidence of the print implosion going on. But his point that "newspapers are fast becoming a niche medium" is the one that hits home: (This is the full text of his post.)

"This is interesting. Newspapers have finally recognized that they are no longer mass media and are cutting back to a core of readers willing to pay for the paper daily. In other words, newspapers are fast becoming a niche medium, no longer powerful but catering to what is probably an older crowd. This means, of course, that newsrooms will continue to shrink and coverage as well until a balance between cost and revenue is achieved. The hard task for newspapers is not to cut too much. The New York Times, for example, is in the middle of newsroom buyouts and lost some of its well-known business reporters in the last few days. Who will replace them? No one.

In PR, we have seen this coming for a couple of years and as practitioners we have been shifting away from newspapers for some time. The problem is that in some areas like business news, there is nowhere else to go. There are no independent blog sites for business news that have become prominent like Politico for political news. Business news blog sites are associated with the same mainstream media that are cutting back. It is a challenge for corporate PR that will only become larger."

There is a shortage of reliable and trustworthy social media alternatives for business news and analysis. Yes, there are dozens of financial and market-watching blogs, online newsletters for the investment industry, and an assortment of kvetchers, but as far as I know no credible news alternatives to the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times of London or the New York Times business pages (at least for the time being).

Until that gap is filled, it will be difficult to convince some organizations of the value of social media-driven communications strategies, although as Mr. Horton points out there may be little choice if business reporters become extinct.