27 October 2008
Media Analyst Urges Revival of “Independent” Journalism
Kovach says coverage of election has been ceded to political advocates
Washington — News coverage of the 2008 U.S. election campaign illustrates the crossroads at which American journalism now stands, according to one veteran journalist, who urges the industry to reassert its role as an independent provider of verified information while taking advantage of the many new communications opportunities.
Election coverage beyond basic reports of what candidates are saying and doing largely has been turned over to political advocates who are telling audiences what to think and how to interpret campaign statements. “That’s not journalism,” says Bill Kovach, the former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and now a senior counselor to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Kovach was speaking October 23 in Washington to a group of journalists from outside the United States who are participating in a State Department program that gives them access to campaign battleground areas across the United States for their coverage of the November 4 election.
Journalism exists to provide its audience with the information necessary to make informed decisions, Kovach said. Journalists’ devotion and dedication must be “to the citizen first,” using the key principles of verification and impartiality to provide “the nearest approximation to the truth that they can discover and develop.”
Coverage of the 2008 U.S. elections prominently features former politicians, campaign managers and others who cannot or will not be “completely open about what they know” and “have a vested interest in the outcome of this election on one side of the equation or the other.”
Instead of offering an independently verified message of what the candidates stand for or an impartial account of their history, “you have a journalism now that is moderated, in effect, by advocates of one side or the other, which is the antithesis of the journalists’ role.”
As a result, Kovach said he has less confidence that he truly knows what a John McCain or a Barack Obama administration would entail than he knew about potential administrations from coverage of previous presidential campaigns.
At the same time, even though journalists who check the facts on what the candidates are saying have done “a better job than ever before,” their work is having less effect than in years past because the campaigns continue to repeat statements after they have been exposed as false, and news outlets dutifully repeat the misinformation without including the information provided by the fact checkers.
“I don’t get that part,” Kovach said. “It’s not just lazy. It’s stupid.”
THE QUEST FOR QUALITY JOURNALISM
He said he and other longtime monitors of American journalism are troubled by the current situation and plan to organize meetings with journalists and academics “to start some serious discussion” about trying to get political coverage focused on journalism’s core responsibilities and away from “this road where the search for the mass audiences is leading them.”
The financial pressure to attract advertising revenue has led to the news media’s overarching goal of keeping the largest possible audience. This has meant an increase in light “infotainment” stories that appeal to a broad audience, coupled with a decrease in harder-hitting — but less-entertaining — news pieces that could offend some and drive them away from being exposed to the advertiser’s pitch. (See the blog entry “Parasite Consumes Host, Part 2 - What’s up with U.S. election coverage?”)
The quest of today’s journalism is to “find an economic model that will support quality journalism on the Internet,” Kovach said.
This is something that needs to be done soon and done well, he said. The new communications mechanism allowed by the Internet is very powerful, and can “provide the most thorough, the most careful, the most deeply documented information ever.” But it is also creating plenty of confusion and distortion of information, Kovach said.
“Sooner or later it is either going to serve the people or we’re all just going to step back and turn the world over to an oligarchy that tells us what to think and where to go and what to do and how to do it,” he said, drawing a comparison to the pre-17th-century era in Europe, before the Enlightenment, when the ideas and thoughts of the common people were irrelevant and they had no reliable information from which to form opinions.
Journalists should be striving to provide a middle ground of verified information in the midst of an increasingly polarized and frustrated audience.
“We’ve got to keep a sharp, clear, deep and strong flow of information that has been verified, that has been documented, that says, ‘No, this is not what I think, this is what I know, and here’s how I know it,’” he said.
“We can create that kind of journalism with this new technology, if we can find an economic base that will support it.”
