(no subject)
Interesting story in the Baltimore Sun about the demise of mainstream media
You guys should all read this... most of it we already knew, but still interesting to read.
IT WAS a bad week to be a journalist.
Three court decisions went against the media last week: Two reporters from The New York Times and Time magazine face prison time for refusing to name their sources. The governor of Maryland, who barred his staff from speaking to two journalists from The Sun whose reporting he doesn't like, won a dismissal of the newspaper's suit seeking to lift the ban. And, on Friday, the Boston Herald was ordered to pay $2.1 million for libeling a Superior Court judge by portraying him as lenient to criminals and unsympathetic to crime victims.
The decisions come on the heels of recent surveys that reveal the public's increasing disdain for the media - in one, for example, respondents ranked reporters 16th out of 21 professions for ethical standards. It's no wonder some in the media are feeling under attack in the court system and on the public relations front.
"Oh, sure, reporters are under siege," said Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "There's a distrust of the media. Period."
It was not so long ago that reporters were seen in a more heroic light - consider the Watergate era, when two Washington Post reporters uncovered a scandal that led to a president's resignation and were portrayed in a movie by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
It was also not so long ago that reporters could sometimes find a friend in the courts, one media lawyer said.
"From the public's perspective and also from a judicial perspective, there has been a backlash against the media," said Reid Cox, general counsel for the Center for Individual Freedom, an advocacy group that promotes free press issues. "In the courts now, there's any number of decisions where the media has actually lost rights that it previously had."
Over the past two decades, Cox contends, the courts have compromised the ability of journalists to do their jobs, awarding greater protections for public figures in libel cases and making it easier for plaintiffs to win invasion-of-privacy suits against news outlets. Cox argues that one effect has been the erosion of the landmark ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan - the 1964 case in which the Supreme Court found that the need for open scrutiny and a free media was more important than the damage to public officials from factual mistakes.
"It's like the judges are backing away from constantly protecting the media," Cox said, "and instead are allowing these suits not only to go forward but to prevail."
Last week, a three-judge panel ruled that reporters Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine were in contempt of court for refusing to name their confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity. They are appealing.
In a separate case, a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by The Sun seeking to lift Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s freeze-out of two Sun writers. The Sun argued that the ban violated the journalists' First Amendment rights, but the judge ruled that The Sun was seeking "privileged status beyond that of the private citizen." The paper has said it will appeal.
At week's end, the Boston Herald and one of its reporters, David Wedge, were found guilty of libeling Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy in a series of articles published in February 2002. Another reporter was cleared in the case. The newspaper has stood by its reporting.
The recent court setbacks, some fear, give new authority to those already inclined to dislike the media.
"It's starting to feel a little bit like a judicial rout, and that's very worrisome," said Tom Kunkel, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland. "The common thread here is that people who don't have a lot of use for the press clearly are seizing what they see as their moment. If you're a football team and you sense the other team is buckling, you pour it on and you kill them."
The general public has little awareness or outrage over what the press is going through, Kunkel said, and the media cannot count on a surge of public support in battles of access with government officials.
"The problem is the public does not see the press as its surrogate," he said. "We see ourselves as the voice of the people, the surrogate for the people. But to the public, we're just another institution that they don't have a lot of use for."
The press bears some blame for its current troubles. A series of high-profile scandals, including the serial fabrications of reporter Jayson Blair at The New York Times and the flawed 60 Minutes report about President Bush's Vietnam-era military service, have damaged the media's credibility.
The news industry is under more scrutiny than ever - from Web sites and blogs devoted to rooting out bias, and from within the media itself. News outlets increasingly are assigning reporters to cover their own industry and appointing ombudsmen or public editors to monitor their own doings.
The public's understanding of just who is a reporter and who isn't, and how the news section's mission is different from that of the opinion page, is increasingly clouded.
"People find it very hard to make a distinction between editorial positions and what appears in the news pages," said Daniel Okrent, the public editor appointed by the Times after the Blair scandal. "You see the offenses against your position - but you don't see the offenses against the other guy's position. If you're passionately against a particular subject, you'll read an article that concerns that subject with suspicion."
Public trust in media, many surveys document, has been in sharp decline for the past two decades. Last year, 45 percent of Americans said they could believe little or nothing of what they read in the newspaper - a figure that has almost tripled from 1985, when 16 percent of Americans said they felt that way, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in Washington.
"There's a generalized mistrust. There's a 'shoot the messenger' mentality we find in a lot of surveys," said Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center and author of a report last month called Media: More Voices, Less Credibility. He found that the public is critical of the way the press collects and reports the news, as well as its core values and morality. "Republicans, especially, have become so sour on this," he said. But, he added, "It's pretty bleak across the board."
Additionally, there has been an explosion of news sources - the Internet, cable TV, talk radio, pagers and other devices - that threatens the central role of the mainstream media.
"In, say, 1952, you either read the bloody newspaper or listened to the radio. The day has only the same number of hours it had in 1952, so any amount of interest you display in these other things is taken away from the centrality of the media you used to consume," said Richard Wald, a Columbia University professor of media and society and former NBC News president. "When it becomes less valuable to you, it has less trust."
That is compounded by a perception that newspapers are failing in their role as government watchdogs and are not representing their readers. For instance, major media companies, including the owner of The Sun, Chicago's Tribune Co., have lobbied the government to relax rules on how many TV stations a single company can own. Such a focus on the bottom line can turn off readers, Wald said.
"Most people don't know who owns the ... paper," he said. "They just know there are these big things out there and they are little people and it's all beyond them. What we are doing when we create huge corporations is to reinforce the idea that you have no control over anything, and when you have no control over it, you're unwilling to trust it."
Radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Web sites such as FreeRepublic.com and RatherBiased.com have filled the vacuum in explaining how the press works. Talk radio often uses bias to explain what makes news - and that explanation is accepted by many because the mainstream media have not offered an alternative, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.
"Journalists haven't tried to explain themselves to the public - the real basis for their decisions, the why of news," Rosen said.
The future doesn't look like it will be treating reporters much better. In a recent survey by the Knight Foundation, more than 30 percent of high school students suggested that the government should be allowed to tell journalists what to print or put on the air.
"What's disturbing to many people about the survey is that students do not stand strong for First Amendment rights, especially about freedom of the press, except when they view those rights having a direct link to what they do in their life," said David Yalof, a University of Connecticut political science professor who researched the study.
With image trouble and problems in court, some journalists worry that reluctant sources could be emboldened to limit what reporters need most: access to information. To promote that cause, the American Society of Newspaper Editors will urge news organizations to produce stories about the dangers of excessive government secrecy and the need for open government laws in a public access campaign the week of March 13.
With all this hand-wringing about support for the reporter's role in society, the image of valiant journalists crusading for truth seems to belong to history - and, in fact, there's a new exhibit about it. The University of Texas in Austin recently began displaying the papers of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, detailing how the reporters uncovered the Watergate scandal. The exhibit's archivist, Stephen Mielke, described a reverent mood among the crowds.
"Almost all the comments put Woodward and Bernstein on a pedestal ... ," says Mielke. "That's not the general view of journalists today."
For Bernstein, though, the current media troubles shouldn't create a false nostalgia for a bygone journalistic era.
"The press has always been closer to the establishment than it has been some kind of anti-establishment institution," the former Watergate reporter said. "Keep in mind, great reporting has always been the exception, not the rule."
He sees more examples of bad journalism than ever and calls the recent court ruling against the protection of confidential sources the ultimate result.
"There is considerable misuse of journalistic privileges and protocol by practitioners at the low end of the scale," he said. "In that environment, it's very difficult for many people to recognize the need and the urgency of the protection of confidential sources. That urgency is no less great today than it was at the time of Watergate."
You guys should all read this... most of it we already knew, but still interesting to read.
IT WAS a bad week to be a journalist.
Three court decisions went against the media last week: Two reporters from The New York Times and Time magazine face prison time for refusing to name their sources. The governor of Maryland, who barred his staff from speaking to two journalists from The Sun whose reporting he doesn't like, won a dismissal of the newspaper's suit seeking to lift the ban. And, on Friday, the Boston Herald was ordered to pay $2.1 million for libeling a Superior Court judge by portraying him as lenient to criminals and unsympathetic to crime victims.
The decisions come on the heels of recent surveys that reveal the public's increasing disdain for the media - in one, for example, respondents ranked reporters 16th out of 21 professions for ethical standards. It's no wonder some in the media are feeling under attack in the court system and on the public relations front.
"Oh, sure, reporters are under siege," said Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "There's a distrust of the media. Period."
It was not so long ago that reporters were seen in a more heroic light - consider the Watergate era, when two Washington Post reporters uncovered a scandal that led to a president's resignation and were portrayed in a movie by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
It was also not so long ago that reporters could sometimes find a friend in the courts, one media lawyer said.
"From the public's perspective and also from a judicial perspective, there has been a backlash against the media," said Reid Cox, general counsel for the Center for Individual Freedom, an advocacy group that promotes free press issues. "In the courts now, there's any number of decisions where the media has actually lost rights that it previously had."
Over the past two decades, Cox contends, the courts have compromised the ability of journalists to do their jobs, awarding greater protections for public figures in libel cases and making it easier for plaintiffs to win invasion-of-privacy suits against news outlets. Cox argues that one effect has been the erosion of the landmark ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan - the 1964 case in which the Supreme Court found that the need for open scrutiny and a free media was more important than the damage to public officials from factual mistakes.
"It's like the judges are backing away from constantly protecting the media," Cox said, "and instead are allowing these suits not only to go forward but to prevail."
Last week, a three-judge panel ruled that reporters Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine were in contempt of court for refusing to name their confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity. They are appealing.
In a separate case, a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by The Sun seeking to lift Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s freeze-out of two Sun writers. The Sun argued that the ban violated the journalists' First Amendment rights, but the judge ruled that The Sun was seeking "privileged status beyond that of the private citizen." The paper has said it will appeal.
At week's end, the Boston Herald and one of its reporters, David Wedge, were found guilty of libeling Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy in a series of articles published in February 2002. Another reporter was cleared in the case. The newspaper has stood by its reporting.
The recent court setbacks, some fear, give new authority to those already inclined to dislike the media.
"It's starting to feel a little bit like a judicial rout, and that's very worrisome," said Tom Kunkel, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland. "The common thread here is that people who don't have a lot of use for the press clearly are seizing what they see as their moment. If you're a football team and you sense the other team is buckling, you pour it on and you kill them."
The general public has little awareness or outrage over what the press is going through, Kunkel said, and the media cannot count on a surge of public support in battles of access with government officials.
"The problem is the public does not see the press as its surrogate," he said. "We see ourselves as the voice of the people, the surrogate for the people. But to the public, we're just another institution that they don't have a lot of use for."
The press bears some blame for its current troubles. A series of high-profile scandals, including the serial fabrications of reporter Jayson Blair at The New York Times and the flawed 60 Minutes report about President Bush's Vietnam-era military service, have damaged the media's credibility.
The news industry is under more scrutiny than ever - from Web sites and blogs devoted to rooting out bias, and from within the media itself. News outlets increasingly are assigning reporters to cover their own industry and appointing ombudsmen or public editors to monitor their own doings.
The public's understanding of just who is a reporter and who isn't, and how the news section's mission is different from that of the opinion page, is increasingly clouded.
"People find it very hard to make a distinction between editorial positions and what appears in the news pages," said Daniel Okrent, the public editor appointed by the Times after the Blair scandal. "You see the offenses against your position - but you don't see the offenses against the other guy's position. If you're passionately against a particular subject, you'll read an article that concerns that subject with suspicion."
Public trust in media, many surveys document, has been in sharp decline for the past two decades. Last year, 45 percent of Americans said they could believe little or nothing of what they read in the newspaper - a figure that has almost tripled from 1985, when 16 percent of Americans said they felt that way, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in Washington.
"There's a generalized mistrust. There's a 'shoot the messenger' mentality we find in a lot of surveys," said Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center and author of a report last month called Media: More Voices, Less Credibility. He found that the public is critical of the way the press collects and reports the news, as well as its core values and morality. "Republicans, especially, have become so sour on this," he said. But, he added, "It's pretty bleak across the board."
Additionally, there has been an explosion of news sources - the Internet, cable TV, talk radio, pagers and other devices - that threatens the central role of the mainstream media.
"In, say, 1952, you either read the bloody newspaper or listened to the radio. The day has only the same number of hours it had in 1952, so any amount of interest you display in these other things is taken away from the centrality of the media you used to consume," said Richard Wald, a Columbia University professor of media and society and former NBC News president. "When it becomes less valuable to you, it has less trust."
That is compounded by a perception that newspapers are failing in their role as government watchdogs and are not representing their readers. For instance, major media companies, including the owner of The Sun, Chicago's Tribune Co., have lobbied the government to relax rules on how many TV stations a single company can own. Such a focus on the bottom line can turn off readers, Wald said.
"Most people don't know who owns the ... paper," he said. "They just know there are these big things out there and they are little people and it's all beyond them. What we are doing when we create huge corporations is to reinforce the idea that you have no control over anything, and when you have no control over it, you're unwilling to trust it."
Radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Web sites such as FreeRepublic.com and RatherBiased.com have filled the vacuum in explaining how the press works. Talk radio often uses bias to explain what makes news - and that explanation is accepted by many because the mainstream media have not offered an alternative, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.
"Journalists haven't tried to explain themselves to the public - the real basis for their decisions, the why of news," Rosen said.
The future doesn't look like it will be treating reporters much better. In a recent survey by the Knight Foundation, more than 30 percent of high school students suggested that the government should be allowed to tell journalists what to print or put on the air.
"What's disturbing to many people about the survey is that students do not stand strong for First Amendment rights, especially about freedom of the press, except when they view those rights having a direct link to what they do in their life," said David Yalof, a University of Connecticut political science professor who researched the study.
With image trouble and problems in court, some journalists worry that reluctant sources could be emboldened to limit what reporters need most: access to information. To promote that cause, the American Society of Newspaper Editors will urge news organizations to produce stories about the dangers of excessive government secrecy and the need for open government laws in a public access campaign the week of March 13.
With all this hand-wringing about support for the reporter's role in society, the image of valiant journalists crusading for truth seems to belong to history - and, in fact, there's a new exhibit about it. The University of Texas in Austin recently began displaying the papers of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, detailing how the reporters uncovered the Watergate scandal. The exhibit's archivist, Stephen Mielke, described a reverent mood among the crowds.
"Almost all the comments put Woodward and Bernstein on a pedestal ... ," says Mielke. "That's not the general view of journalists today."
For Bernstein, though, the current media troubles shouldn't create a false nostalgia for a bygone journalistic era.
"The press has always been closer to the establishment than it has been some kind of anti-establishment institution," the former Watergate reporter said. "Keep in mind, great reporting has always been the exception, not the rule."
He sees more examples of bad journalism than ever and calls the recent court ruling against the protection of confidential sources the ultimate result.
"There is considerable misuse of journalistic privileges and protocol by practitioners at the low end of the scale," he said. "In that environment, it's very difficult for many people to recognize the need and the urgency of the protection of confidential sources. That urgency is no less great today than it was at the time of Watergate."