AUDIe and the Media: The Problem of Objectivity in Journalism and the Emergence of a New Reality for the Media, the Press and the Public
As has been the case with her reporting about Trump over the course of her entire career, there is a lot of fresh anecdotes and insights in her forthcoming book. He tells her, for example, that he’s glad for his turbulent time in the White House because so many other rich men have tiny or nonexistent public profiles, their bank accounts bloated but their names unknown. For him, the presidency was Page Six on the Potomac.
They have a relationship that says so much about Trump, some of it less obvious. It proves his awareness of the lies he tells: If he really believed, as he publicly claimed, that Maggie was a fabulist, he’d deem it pointless and potentially ruinous to talk with her. He would stop. Even though he trashed her, he still respected her, even though the act of trashing her confirms the void where a moral person’s conscience resides.
He will do anything to survive. He will do anything to please an audience. To him, the other journalists who he insulted, the notepads and audio recordings of which he secretly recorded, and the television cameras were conduits to ever, they were his friends, and their eyes were trained on him. There was danger in letting them in, peril in having them around, but the alternative was worse. Some other circus act might be given prime real estate on the evening newscast. They might write books about a lesser clown.
The debate among journalists over how to regain the public’s trust is increasingly centered around the idea of objectivity. In this episode, AUDIe talks about herself and the media. She wants reporters to ask her if she’s comfortable with the idea of objectivity. Does it still work? And, what’s the way forward for both the press and the public? You’ll hear from Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School; Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist at the Washington Post, and Maggie Haberman, reporter for The New York Times.
In the journalism department at the University of Massachusetts-AmHERst, Nicholas McBride is an associate professor. Unlike the other professors who focused on the who, what, when, where, why and how, a basic news writing. He played us a VHS copy of Akira Kurosawa’s legendary crime thriller about unreliable narrators Rashomon. And Professor McBride introduced his syllabus with an essay he wrote that began like this. News writing and reporting is both science and art.
He wrote this in the nineties, but we are still talking about what it means to be a good and honest journalist. And I am well aware that many of you listening right now have lost trust in that idea in us.
A lot of younger voters don’t trust the media. They’ve never known an era where you’re just trusting at face value the stuff you see in your news.
Or whether the post-Watergate era glamorized the role but didn’t do enough to cure its ills. What should regain the public’s trust look like? One story at a time.
How I Feel About Science and How I Look at It: Three Views from Three Different Viewpoints on Objectivity in the News-Correlations
You have to be as willing to look in the mirror and to look inside of yourself to see, okay, why am I framing it this way? And asking yourself that? And progressively you get better at showing clear pictures of the way things are. But it’s never perfect. It’s not just another country.
I’m going to spotlight three of my peers, who have differing views on objectivity. And we’re going to start with two people who have taken up the work of thinking about these challenges.
It is one of those words that is used in a completely different way, like how scientific terms mean one thing to scientists, but are 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465. When the general public talks about objectivity, it doesn’t correspond with what journalists mean by objectivity and what kind of journalism was meant to be. It is meant to mirror science in a particular way. It is supposed to be proven that if we were sent to report on a story, we might have different quotes. We might talk to different people, but we would come away with the same thing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
Methodology. I’m sorry, but I will try to make sure that I understand the rationale of the exercise [in a laboratory], as an aspirational thing
Right. And by methodology, I’ll throw some ideas out there and you can tell me if I’m wrong. It’s seeking, assembling, and then verifying the information that you get. That is the method, so to speak.
Right. Which, of course, is where it gets a little, you know, question, a little shaky. And so there’s no way of kind of refereeing human affairs in the same way that you can do in a kind of controlled environment like a laboratory. But it’s an aspirational thing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
Performing neutrality and the cost of making friends in the news – a lesson learned from white nationalists, soccer moms, and the masquerading scandal
There is a problem, and I think it is performative neutrality. It’s the effort to look neutral. Right. The effort to be fair isn’t the same as being fair. Yeah. I think if you change your mindset from what is the most exciting story to what is the journalism that serves the public interest it will get a lot of attention. If that is the mentality that is articulated at the top of news organizations, you make a whole lot of different kinds of decisions.
One thing that happens when you challenge people in that way is you are cut off from access and you do find you’re in a position where people from a certain political persuasion will no longer talk to you at all as a journalist because of their beliefs about either you or your organization.
I keep coming back to the idea that it’s not a job for you to make friends. Certainly not with the people that you cover and that there are certain costs that you have to be willing to brook. And, you know, when we’re looking at the things that like white nationalists became a mainstream constituency or close to one, and we have just proceeded as if this were the same as environmental.
Exactly. Or soccer moms or any other constituency. The kind of volatile element of American society that has found a home in one of the major American political parties. There needs to be alarm. We sit and proceed with business as usual. In those circumstances.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
What should we do now? What we can do to help the community of the news and the opinion aggregation community, so that we can help the public understand what’s happening
What should we do now? What happens to the people who are not opinion writers or news gatherers? How can they repair their relationship with the public? The industry could be taking a number of steps.
That’s true. And so. I’m aware of that. You know, again, I still really do believe in the mission of journalism. And I, I think that if there was something that I could wave a magic wand and do Audie it would be to prescribe news literacy classes in every high school in the country, taught not just by a professor explaining sort of what reliable news sources are, but honestly also by a journalism professor to explain how the process works and sort of what the aims or even with all the caveats of everything we’ve discussed about how how varying journalism is as an endeavor.
Of course, the former New York Times editor in chief and executive editor, he said that it’s very difficult to think in the big picture when you’re doing daily stories and that you are chronicling everything that’s happening right now in the moment. And so it’s hard to step back and see what the themes are. It’s important for people to do that occasionally.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
Why should we care about what’s going on in our lives? I am not afraid to admit it, but I am afraid of what is going on
People want to be passive in taking in things because there is a responsibility that is also being shirked. And.
I think there’s a tendency to want to shut it down. Shut out the news now. I hear it so much I can’t take it. There have been years now with COVID, with Trump and all this other stuff, all the bad news, the school shootings. I’m not going to pay attention anymore. If we want to live in a democracy, I think we owe it to ourselves and the country to stay informed.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
Ghosting the News: What Local Journalism Covers in the School Board, in the Fourth of July Parade and in the Concert. The Letter to the Editor by Margaret Back to her
Is it possible to quote Margaret back to herself? So I think in in your prior book Ghosting the News, you make a really important point about what local journalism does and sure. You know, it covers what’s happening in the school board. That’s important. It covers like what’s going to happen with these municipal tax rates, etc., etc.. But they also cover the local high school football game and they cover the 4th of July parade. And the.
The concert. The letter to the editor written by the nine year old. Those are things that forge real civic bonds. And it’s been difficult for us to figure out how to do those things. And so I do think that.
I think the kind of worst consumer instincts that can be found among readers, among viewers, and among that sort of audience, have made it easier for them to become more prevalent.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
Newsroom Confidential Lessons and Worries from an Ink Stained Life: An Empirical Analysis of the Making of Donald Trump and America as a Nation
Margaret Sullivan is a media critic. Her latest book is titled Newsroom Confidential Lessons and Worries from an Ink Stained Life. We heard from Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia journalism school and staff writer at The New Yorker. Now, we need to know what it’s like for someone in the thick of it.
There are a number of stories that I would go back and do differently that I think a lot of people would. I don’t think anyone took a picture of the White House as normal or typical.
Maggie Haberman is a correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst at CNN. Her new book is called Confidence Man The Making of Donald Trump and America as a Nation.
It’s a term in journalism that doesn’t have, I think, a ubiquitous meaning for everybody, as most terms in journalism don’t. I think it’s difficult for those of us on the other side of the wall to explain to people what we do to them. I think it’s about presenting fairness in both coverage and copy. It’s not a requirement to say something is different than it actually is.
This was the article you wrote about Donald Trump who thought he was entitled to his own facts. And you said that objectivity is not what he expects of people. And he long ago came to believe that facts are really arbitrary. So what did that mean for your reporting on him?
Establishing a baseline of facts has been one of the hardest things about covering this man, because he he treats facts as if they are things that can be bent and changed. And they’re only real if he says they’re real. And that creates a culture where people around him either expect that they can get enhanced credibility just by not being him and sometimes saying things that aren’t true and sometimes offering self-serving accounts about themselves. Or they can say things that aren’t true for other reasons.
One of the things that makes Trump different is that in these small amounts of time, he exists and so does the media. And we tend not to think about the cumulative effect of what we do, which really.
Correct that things sort of amass over a period of time. I think that a person under federal investigation is part of a story, but not everyone will see it that way. But just as I think that that would be the case with any candidate anywhere in any race, and I came to this thinking less about the last four years than I did about the work I was doing researching this book on Trump. It became very clear, going back and looking at the coverage from the seventies and eighties and nineties, just how much myth building he did about himself and creating this artifice of himself as this titan of industry that he just wasn’t you know, he was.
I do. It’s important to speak clearly, as I said earlier about what he’s doing and what he says. And I, I think we’re well past the point when things that he says should confound people the way sometimes they do.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
What are you doing differently in terms of platforming? I’m trying to be careful with some of the things that you’re doing now that you weren’t doing before
But for us who don’t know your process and I want to ask you to reveal every little bit, but, you know, the show is kind of about being on the inside. And I get it. You now, all of these years in New York, all of these years in Washington, now the book. What are you doing differently?
I’m trying to be careful with some of the stories. That’s the most important one. I guess that’s the question, do you think I owe a debt of penance? Is that what the question is about my coverage over the last.
Just. Okay. Is it possible you do things differently? Do you say, “Yeah, I’m being very precise here”, to yourself? I’m doing things differently and I know it. Right. Like this whole podcast, the approach of it is much more transparent. Right. I’m in terms of my own business, which was a very voice of God business. I am not the voice of God I want to be. And in terms of. Even doing a podcast of this style. I know that I’m walking into the lion’s den argument of platforming, right? Putting people, giving people a spotlight without that opposing point of view sitting right next to them to jump into the fight. I’m aware of things in a different way than before. And I’m wondering for you, what are things you’re cognizant of now in a way that maybe you weren’t before?
But let me ask you a question just since you raised that. Yeah. I wanted to know if you are doing differently in terms of what you just said about platforming people. How are – What are you doing differently that you wouldn’t have done before?
In my past life, it was hard to fact check people on the fly when they were lying so much. Yes. And you’re sort of interjecting and then jumping in and then following up, and then you tumble down the rabbit hole, arguing over a fact that is incredibly obvious. You’re supposed to engage in it, because of the rules of objectivity and the kind of norms of our job. They haven’t answered the question in the first place, so go back and forth and tell the audience that it’s a distraction. It’s essentially on their terms, and there is a kind of transparency you don’t want to expose. So I’m giving you this is just my little. It’s interesting to do a live hard news interview. So, of course, what a surprise. I am doing something that is taped.
I can add context before or after fact check. I respond to myself in real time, and that’s a good thing. So it’s interesting. I’m in a way, I’m kind of responding to the last couple of years where I had to do an ungodly volume of interviews in which I just thought, this is a blitz of nothing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
What do we actually know about Donald Trump’s tweets about the 2020 presidential election? A critical look at the current state of the art, and what do we need to do about it?
That’s right. Well, that’s so I would say that I think I am doing I don’t think I am doing the print version of that, which is trying to contextualize as much as possible. I don’t I don’t have the opinion that we can’t cover Trump. I don’t think that’s possible. He is the leader of a party. He is suggesting suspending the Constitution to be able to get back into it. Whether, you know, he’s doing that just to try to troll for attention or because he wants to draw attention to another story. I almost don’t. I think that’s important to note in a story, but I don’t think that’s the headline of that story.
Exactly. And so I think that I will say an area where I think the media has been very good. The mainstream media for the last year and a half is contextualizing the lies that Trump is telling about the 2020 election. I think that the dearth of stories that are basically blah, blah, blah, Donald Trump said yesterday is a, I think, an important data point forward. I hope to do the same thing in my coverage. I try to do less. You know, even something simple like on Twitter, like just tweeting lines from one of his rallies devoid of context. I don’t think that works anymore. Right.
So whereas in the past, there was this sense that the leader of the free world speaks. We kind of repeated the quote for the record. Exactly right. Or does sort of amplify that. And suddenly, I think as an industry, the question was, well, wait a second, why do we do that? Do you think we should ever have done that? That’s correct. And maybe this doesn’t make sense anymore.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/08c3545b-5c82-43f1-bd11-af7200ef9ae7
What I’ve Learned About Journalism, Social Media and the News — It’s not for the faint of heart, but for the wise and the foolish
You are placing me on the spot. The my first lesson would be honestly a tutorial on what the goal is of journalism historically, where it has done well, where it has not. We are not a single entity, that we do not all use the same book and that the free press is so important in this country is just one example of why. And then I would look at news sources. It was my first lesson.
And or social media in general. It’s right. Which is why they call it a feed. Correct? That’s exactly which I think is what farm animals use. It bothered me, but it’s the idea that the opinion person, fact finder, tabloid person and rando all put out the same information about the same topic. It’s coming to you in a kind of passive way. Exactly.
I’m talking about something. Okay. You know what? I’m just like that. Sure. The idea that, like, all of these journalists got on to social media. Yep. And everyone’s trying to be cute and clever and quippy quip.
Explain to people who aren’t in journalism how journalism works. And that doesn’t work either. And I’ve been guilty of that myself. So I you know, yes, I think we have all except for the very smart ones who have stayed off social media. It would be fantastic if we could get rid of some of the roles we have played here. No time like the present.
I want to come up with solutions. What advice do you have for repairing trust? And I’m using the royal we because I don’t want to absolve myself of anything here. So what are the steps newsrooms can take to get people back in touch with their faith?
The Times has said it would be a good idea to be on social media lists, which is a good idea, and I think it’s just a good way to not be out there all the time. I’m talking about the thing that you were referencing earlier, which I think is a very real issue, which is popping off about this joke or that joke or treating it like a Slack channel, which I think many of us, myself included, have done. It’s been foolish. Doing things to undermine the seriousness of the report is a real thing. I think it will be very hard to have confidence in the media because they are doing the same thing that I think most other media is doing.