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December 15, 2005
A question of trust
I can trust my newspaper for the ball scores every morning, but can I trust anything else I see or read in the media?
With that question, Dick Hesse of the Franklin Pierce Law Center opened a wide-ranging discussion yesterday at the Monitor. The participants were a media panel and this year’s class of Leadership Concord, a group of businesspeople, nonprofit leaders and public servants who learn about the city’s institutions through a series of visits and classes.
Many of the Leadership Concord class members had come to the Monitor the previous few days to observe our 4 o’clock news meeting. That is where we decide the tentative lineup of stories and photos for the next day's page one. Those decisions in turn determine which world/nation stories will go inside the A-section and which local stories will run in the Local/State section. The meeting is the handoff between the day editors and the night editors and the starting point for the production of the news sections.
My participation in this program always reminds me what a lousy job newspapers do in explaining themselves. That includes the Monitor. Here was a group of intelligent, involved regular readers of the paper. Their probing questions after the news meetings and during the panel discussion made clear that they had a strong desire to understand the values we bring to deciding what to cover, how to cover it and where to play it. Their questions also made clear that we had done little in the paper or any other venue to explain these values or their practical application.
This is a particularly troubling lapse because our values and our standards define not only us but also the newspaper we publish. They distinguish us from a media culture of shock talk, partisan blather, fake government news and heedless internet posting. The internet is a vast new medium on which I rely daily to check all kinds of facts, but I do so with great care because it is also a vast sea of misinformation. Wikipedia’s recent libel of the journalist John Siegenthaler should give users a clue that even a much-used and supposedly respectable site must be approached with great caution.
Why are newspapers any different? What about Jason Blair, or the columnists who made up stories, or the misjudgments that motivated Judith Miller’s reporting on weapons of mass destruction?
Well, yes, these were terrible lapses. They tainted us all. They are one of two big reasons that Dick Hesse’s lumping all media together – “Can I trust the media?” – was not entirely off-base.
The other reason is that the false division of the country into blue and red states, driven by partisan bigmouths who are not really journalists, has affected the way people read newspapers. Readers are suspicious. They think we are manipulating the news to reflect a partisan point of view. We are transparent in laying our opinions on the table on the editorial page, but can readers trust us not to allow those opinions to affect what we cover on the news pages and how we cover it?
I’m going to make it my mission in this blog and in the paper to do a better job of explaining why we do what we do. I welcome any questions from readers in this vein, but as I learned from the questions posed by the Leadership Concord class, it is easy to identify story and photo play, and even broad policies, that we should be explaining.
In the meantime, let me close on a brighter note and with a statement of belief.
This country is blessed with more sources of information and more access to it than any other country in the world. Citizens can find out what’s going on from dozens of sources at any time. If Americans are uninformed, it is generally not because information is not available to them.
More than ever, the challenge is to use this freedom wisely. “I don’t trust the media” – the premise behind Dick Hesse’s question, and a sentiment widely expressed today – is a copout. What the public should bring to the marketplace of ideas is not distrust but a healthy skepticism.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 15, 2005 10:13 AM