"Public bias[ed] against the press"?

Poynter Institute scholar Roy Peter Clark reads the Sacred Heart study and then turns the situation on its head:

I hold journalists less responsible -- and the public more responsible -- for misperceptions of news media performance. In short, the last two decades have seen unprecedented attacks upon the legitimacy of the news media, so many messages from so many directions that they are as impossible to ignore as, say, the soft-core sexual images that pervade American culture.

(Cute analogy. Those awful critics... why, they're just like pornographers!)

Clark blames everyone- the “culture of entertainment and celebrity,” politicians (especially the Bush administration), the public (for “lump[ing] the news media (journalism!) with other forms of entertainment and professional gossip,” talk radio (with its agenda to “destroy the credibility of the mainstream press”), “partisan bloggers,” members of the “alienated technocracy” who dismiss “‘dead tree’ journalism,” television’s depiction of reporters as “slimeballs or part of the wolf pack^[1],” even David Letterman, Jay Leno, and “The Daily Show”- everyone, that is, except the reporters, editors, and publishers who sold us on the idea of journalistic objectivity, and then failed to deliver.

And who polluted the news with “entertainment and celebrity”? Seems to me it was a newspaperman^[2] who said, “what’s in the public interest isn’t necessarily what the public is interested in,” meaning the press had a duty to be sure that the dull, boring stuff got covered, even if nobody read it. Claiming to be giving the public what it wants is no defence. (After all, pornographers give the public what it wants, too.)

Even with shrinking resources, journalists have never been more responsible or better trained.

I would disagree on both points. First, too many journalists want to be pundits. They got into the business “to make a difference,” not to “report the news.” The new-journalism concept of “compelling narratives” too often results in advocacy, instead of reporting. And I’m not sure that the degree-requiring professionalization of the press has produced “better trained” reporters. “Better trained” at the mechanics of their trade, perhaps, but often astonishingly ignorant of history and the greater world.

Finally, Clark laments:

But nothing journalists do will reverse the dark tides of popular cynicism. The wrecking balls destroying the credibility of the press cannot be stopped until we focus more attention on the credibility of those who are pulling the levers, including a public that has been conditioned, like rats in a Skinnerian dystopia, to hate us.

So citizens are too dumb, too propagandized, and too conditioned to be able to rationally judge the press’ output. It’s not the press, it’s those evil lever-pullers!  We’re victims!

What arrogance! What chutzpah! What a shame.


Afterword: Poynter has a comments thread for Clark’s article. Unfortunately, you must register, even if you only want to read the existing comments. Talk about staying inside the walled garden. I wonder what Jeff Jarvis would think.

Via: McClatchy Watch
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^[1] Clark recalls

...the days when the alter-ego of Superman was crusading reporter Clark Kent, or when the heroes of Frank Capra movies were dashing reporters, the booze-swilling champions of the little guy.

He needs to watch some more movies: Like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (in which the evil publishers line up their newspapers and radio networks against a courageous senator), or The Return of the Thin Man (the sharpest reporter in the pressroom phones in his “on the spot” reports without getting off the couch).

^[2] Google failed me here. Any readers recognize the quote?

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 17:50:18 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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