HOW JOURNALISTS CAN GET IT RIGHT: FIXING THE NEWS, PART 1

You cannot – thank God! – bribe or twist
The mind of the American journalist
But seeing what, unbribed, he'll do
Thank God! There is no reason to.
– George Orwell (paraphrase)

Not long ago I made an assessment of everything which ailed the American press (“Why Journalists Keep Getting It Wrong”), and concluded that journalism in the United States was, for lack of a better word, broken. Specifically I made the following accusations:

1. American journalists don't understand their own profession of journalism – its rules and basic standards. Because of their deficient training and knowledge, as well as their personal biases, reporters are unable to see the world as it is, but only as they want it to be.

2. The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political as well as his journalistic education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives.

3. Journalism-for-profit has debased the profession and led to an increase in sensationalism which has, in turn, led to further blurring the line between hard news and entertainment.

4. The 24-hour news cycle has fundamentally changed the relationship of the press to the news. Before the cycle, the press reported the news; after the cycle, they created it.

5. Modern reporters lack objectivity, and allow that lack of objectivity to color their stories and their predictions of both specific political events (elections, referendums, etc.) and broad historical-social-economic trends (white working-class anger, etc.).

6. The roots of these deficiencies can be traced to the general failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking to our young people, and to a collapse in the overall standards of journalism (which brings us full-circle to #1).

Conspicuous by its absence in that mass of complaints was any constructive suggestion on how to fix our troubled Fourth Estate. To be honest, it is easier to whine that something is broken than to effect repairs, and so I had to take some time and really look at the problem from all angles. It was, to say the least, a daunting task, rather akin to patching up the Hindenburg with a bicycle repair kit; but there is an old joke in which a student, dismayed by the huge task which awaits her, goes to her master and says, “Where should I start?” And the master dryly replies: “You should start where you are.” So, without further ado, I start where I am...which is at the very beginning.

When you learn to box, the teacher tells you that the sweet science is actually very simple...provided you remember two fundamental rules. The first is “hands up, chin down.” The second is, “Boxing is the art of hitting and not getting hit.” Everything, absolutely everything, which follows in terms of conditioning, tactics, technique, diet, psychological preparation, etc. is merely an outgrown of those two fundamental truths you learn on the first day – hands up, chin down; hit and don't get hit. If you don't learn those two basic primers, everything else you do, no matter how well intentioned, will ultimately come to grief. It is exactly the same with journalism. No amount of knowledge, stylistic ability, sincerity, courage, intelligence, industry or integrity will prevent your journalism from sliding into disrepute unless your basics are rock-solid. The first and most serious problem modern journalism faces is that the appellation of “journalist,” which used to have such weight, is now thrown around willy-nilly, like the paper crowns they hand out on New Year's Eve. Anyone with a keyboard and working internet connection who wants to talk about politics or current events is handed a journalistic credential. This is as ridiculous as calling someone a black belt who happens to be wearing a belt which is black. There are basic standards which must be met, and having been met, be maintained, or else the honor is meaningless. In “Das Boot” the commander of a U-boat tells his men that “an Iron Cross is not a medal one receives for a specific act of courage, but must be re-earned continuously lest the recipient lose the right to wear it.” So it is with reportage. A reporter of 30 years good standing who commits egregious ethical or technical blunders on a current story is not forgiven because of his prior good acts; as both Dan Rather and Brian Williams discovered to their sorrow, the honor of their title “news correspondent” must be continuously re-earned. No resting on past laurels is permitted. But a title, like a medal, has no value if you bestow it upon yourself; I can pin all the Iron Crosses and “journalist” mantles on myself that I so desire, it doesn't make me either a war hero or a reporter. In every profession on earth, there is a peerage; a community of those in the same profession who set standards. This applies to stonemasons, electricians, barbers, plumbers, lawyers, physicians, you name it. Journalism has such profesional watchdog-entities, but they are increasingly impotent and recessive; they “police” only the dwindling number of “real” journalists and ignore the great mass of people who claim to be reporters but don't have a clue as to what being a reporter actually involves. Therefore the responsibility falls to us, the reading public. The first fix is to acknowledge that we are the watchdogs. Not the press, not the government; we the people. Carl Sagan once said that if only Americans would learn how to think scientifically – “carry a baloney-detection kit” in his memorable phrase – they could be their own intellectual policemen, and would not need others to rescue them from astrological con men and pseudo-scientific hucksters. But first they had to learn to think scientifically. Well, we have to think journalistically. So let's get at it.

In order for a news article to qualify as such, it must meet a certain minimum standard in regards to what questions it answers. That standard, which is known as “The 5 Ws and the H,” has been the same for hundreds of years and never varied in any way. It is completely objective and must be applied regardless of the reporter's personal feelings or political leanings. It boils down to six clear-cut questions. They are:

Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?

Any newspaper story which does not ask and answer these questions, insomuch as it is humanly possible to do so, is not legitimate journalism. What's more, these questions must be answered as swiftly as possible, preferably within the first two paragraphs. For example:

Buffy Anne Summers (who) stabbed a vampire (who 2) through the heart (what) with a stake (how) last night (when) in a cemetery in Sunnydale, California (where). When questioned, Miss Summers, 20, identified herself to authorities as a “vampire slayer” placed on earth to fight the forces of evil (why).

Sometimes it is not possible to answer all six questions due to lack of information. This is perfectly acceptable provided that every effort is made to answer those questions which are, in fact, answerable and to ask knowledgeable authorities to speculate about those which are not. For example:

Colonel Mustard (who) was murdered (what) in the library (where) with a candlestick (how) sometime last night (when) by Miss Scarlet (who 2).

This answers, in a single sentence, everything about the murder but “why,” which may be unknown at the time of Miss Scarlet's arrest. Therefore a reporter could supply the as much of the “why” as possible by quoting from the police spokesman that “police have no motive for the crime at this time, but friends and family speculate it may have been due to Col. Mustard's excessive flatulence at the dinner table.”

Okay, so I'm using facetious examples here to lighten the mood, but only because real-life examples of proper journalism are becoming increasingly hard to come by. In 2014, California state senator Leland Ye was arrested by the FBI for his involvement “in an extensive criminal conspiracy to traffic guns and drugs, launder money, assassinate for cash, and influence public policy.” (Vice) When the L.A. Times broke the story, they consistently refused to identify Ye as a democrat; only a torrent of outraged e-mails and messages sent by their readership forced this left-leaning newspaper to admit that yes, a (D) had been buying guns from the Italian mafia to sell to the Chinese triads. I hardly think it conspiracy-theorizing to say that if he had been an (R), the Times would have trumpeted his political affiliation to the very heavens. The leftist sentiments of the Times are well-known and self-admitted, and not unethical as such (every newspaper and news entity in the world has a political slant of some sort) but that is not an excuse to excise information inconvenient to their politics from their reportage, which, unlike their op-ed pieces, must be objective (we will return to this later). What's important about the Ye example is that the absence of his political affiliation from the story was noticed immediately by thousands of people, and subsequently corrected, but only due to their continuous pressure. This incident gave me hope that the public can play the Watchdog successfully – provided, of course, that we continue to educate ourselves and our neighbors (and most especially our children) as to what constitutes “acceptable” journalism.

Any time you read a news article, it is important to ask yourself, after the second paragraph or so, whether a direct, clearly-worded effort has been made to answer these six fundamental questions. A reporter who fails to do so by, at least, the third or fourth paragraph is almost certainly negligent in his duties. A reporter who leaves any of the questions out without making a diligent attempt to answer them has simply failed in his job, either deliberately or through incompetence. Again, it may seem condescending or pretentious to offer such basic instruction, but the decline in journalistic standards has been so precipitous, so all-encompassing, and so extended in its duration – this has been going for decades, folks – that many otherwise intelligent people are no longer even aware that these standards exist. They have been so inundated by shoddy, incomplete, unobjective journalism that they can no longer discriminate; indeed, many can put down the newspaper without realizing how little of the story they have been told, or how badly they have been told it. So: the first task in fixing journalism lies equally in the hands of both reporters and the reading public. Reporters must remaster the fundamentals of their profession, and practice clarity and brevity in their writing, so that they dispense the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of words; readers must satisfy themselves that in every news article they read, these six questions have either been answered, or that every effort has been made to answer them. And here is the crucial part: you must train yourself to ask this question every time you read a hard news article, regardless of the subject or the source. This takes mental discipline, which is precisely what is lacking in journalism itself nowadays, and more than mental discipline, it takes a measure of ruthlessness. For we all have our favorite news outlets, whatever they might be, and if we should discover that our favorite is not delivering the goods, then we must cut the cord right then and there, and look elsewhere. This is not as easy as it sounds; humans are creatures of habit, and Americans have been conditioned (in many cases, willingly) to take up residence in an echo chamber which permits them to hear only their own opinions delivered back to them at maximum volume, and never mind their accuracy. Leaving the echo chamber is not easy, nor is it comfortable; but it is necessary. The entire concept of “pick and choose news" is antithetical to the central purpose of journalism, which is finding the truth. Which often hurts.

As I mentioned above, the ability to discriminate between “hard news” and “editorial/opinion” is fundamental to legitimate journalism, and indeed, the line between the two is not fine. It is more like the Berlin Wall: a big sonofabitch made of concrete and barbed wire you can see from space. This Wall was built with both conscious and noble purpose; it is important, actually vital, to know whether a reporter is speaking objectively in the hopes of informing you about facts, or whether he is speaking with a personal agenda and trying to persuade you to come around to his point of view. In a legitimate news organization, the Wall is maintained in such a manner that you could never mistake news for op-ed, or op-ed for news; but in the last 25 years, through a quite deliberate and short-sighted effort, said barrier has been all but obliterated. Nowadays there is literally no difference between “hard news” (which uses the 5WH as its foundation stone) and “op-ed,” which by its nature is unobjective and biased. I can scarcely open the Los Angeles Times or Washington Post without being confused as to whether what I am reading falls in the former or the latter category. Often this sleight-of-hand is achieved subtly. A left-wing paper refers to “undocumented immigrants” or simply “immigrants,” as if there is no distinction between an illegal immigrant and a legal one. This is part of a political agenda, and should be recognized as such. On the other hand, a right-wing paper refers to the former president by his full name, “Barack Hussein Obama,” knowing that the name “Hussein” will inflame many of its readers and for no other reason. This, too, is part of a political agenda. And while I don't fault news organizations for having political agendas, I do fault them for expressing those agendas outside the walled-off arena of opinion-editorial, for it is precisely at that moment that we can't tell the difference between what we want and what we know, we begin to venture into the dreaded area of the map known as “fake news.”

It so happens that the definition of fake news is not as rigid as one might think. The Orwellian idea of the completelyfabricated news story, which does not have a relationship with the truth, “not even that implied by an ordinary lie,” is less common than the deliberate, systematic misinterpretation of existing news, the surgical removal of statements or images from their context, for the sole purpose of misleading the reader or slandering an individual. Indeed, in recent times we have been confronted with the idea, once discredited as a conspiracy theory, that much the news we read is either a) untrue or b) taken out of context to the point where it may as well be untrue. This sort of thing has always taken place, but it such incidents used to be exceptional; now they are so common that they go almost unnoticed. In the face of such systematic “warping” of the truth we seem helpless, for we have little in the way of trustworthy, independent means to verify anything we cannot ourselves see and hear; but the truth is our position is quite strong. The trouble lies in the effort and patience necessary to counteract this sort of twisted reportage. To fix this aspect of broken journalism, we must take the crucial step of identifying and categorizing the news, not by its political leanings but by its reliability. And the way to do this is by judging its speed.

Yes, I used the word speed. It has long been established, though not widely understood, that there is an inverse relationship between the speed at which information is disseminated and its accuracy. For example, many years ago the U.S. Navy vessel Stark was hit by an Iraqi cruise missile while on patrol in the Persian Gulf. The initial report was that the damage was slight, “only” one crewman had been killed, and the ship was proceeding under its own power back to base for repairs. In truth, the 47 sailors had been killed and the ship was dead in the water and burning; but it took days for this tragic fact to emerge from behind the literal and figurative smoke. Initial reports are by definition the most unreliable; if one wanted the full, objective facts, unearthed by exhaustive investigation and subjected to professional analysis, one had to wait several months, for the official Navy report – which was then subjected to yet further scrutiny by the press and its experts. Between the initial report and the “final” one, the key factor was not sincerity but time. Anything worthy of a news report usually involves some level of chaos or upset, and that chaos and that upset distort the truth the way a stone distorts the surface of a pond. The “real story” is often impossible to ascertain at first glance, no matter how diligently we try. We only know that something – an earthquake, a missile attack, a riot, a fire, an assassination – has occurred, and later, often much later, the details begin to filter in, conflicting with earlier accounts and sometimes making nonsense of them. Therefore the news source which is the fastest is also the least reliable. Understanding this fact is the key to grasping what much of supposedly “fake” news is, and how we can combat it.

Excluding word of mouth, there are five basic means by which we receive information. They are:

1. The internet
2. Newspapers
3. Magazines
4. Books
5. Peer-reviewed scholarly journals

I have stacked these means from fastest to slowest and least to most reliable, but also, without trying, by order of popularity. It so happens that the vast majority of Americans get their news from the internet, which is an instantaneous means of communication; a substantial minority by newspapers, which appear every 24 hours; a certain smallish percentage by news magazines, which appear once weekly or monthly; and a very small percentage from scholarly journals and books, which appear quarterly or even yearly. Therefore the ordinary American gets the majority of his or her news through a patently unreliable source. In an era like ours this is unavoidable, but what is not unavoidable is our reaction to such news. By keeping in mind the inverse relationship between speed and accuracy, we can always put a brake onto our emotions when seeing an inflammatory headline. “How did I come by this information?” is a simple question which is not asked anywhere near enough nowadays, but it begs a second question, to wit: “Is this a source which has been consistently credible in the past?” Remember that it falls on us to rate and judge the quality of what we are reading, based on its commitment to journalistic principles. A great deal of fake news could be killed at birth if people would take the half-second it requires to glance at the source of said news. (Example: I have joined numerous WW2-themed “enthusiast” sites on Facebook, which are for historical interest. One of them turned out to be nothing more than a clickbait “front” for a white supremacist website. Had I looked at where the links were headed before I moved my mouse over them, I could have avoided the embarrassment of having “White Resister Dot Com” on my internet history.)

Before I break, I'd like to add here that when I was in law enforcement, I realized the cliche taught to when I was studying criminal justice in college was entirely true: to properly police a community requires that both police and community work together, and take an equal share of the responsibility for keeping that community safe and orderly. The fact this so seldom happens is part of the reason why the police system in the United States does not work properly. So it is with journalism. It's not enough to say that the profession is broken, or enumerate the reasons why, or even trace them to their root causes; we must act on that knowledge. And the knowledge, however bitter it may taste, tells us that we, the reading public, must take a measure of responsibility for the sorry state of the press. We are too ready to believe anything that reinforces our existing prejudices, too eager to dismiss any fact which challenges them. It's a group effort, and we must pull our weight. But I agree that the majority of that weight resides on "them," and in the next installment, I'll discuss what journalists themselves can -- and should -- be doing to restore their profession to its proper place as the Watchdog of Democracy.