More On News Coverage and Critical Thinking

by Sharon Kayne

Last week I promised you more stories from my days of working in the news media and how it all relates to the distressing lack of critical thinking among the public.

First, I will say that when you work in print news, you get a very different quality of callers than in broadcast. I mean, in print news, your consumers have to have at least a minimal level of literacy. With broadcast news, they only have to be literate enough to look up your station’s number in the phone book (yes, I worked in broadcast news that long ago—the internet was in its infancy, and everybody still had landlines).

While working in TV news, it became clear that many people don’t understand exactly what the media’s role is. When people get bad news, they like to blame the messenger. Of course, TV news is almost always about bad stuff, so we got a lot of blame. But it went beyond blame, in that people seemed to think that we somehow had something to do with how the situation we were covering was unfolding. Like we were directing the events we were covering rather than the other way around.

For example, I once took a phone call from a viewer who was very angry about the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. (I told you it was a long time ago!) I’m not sure why he thought a TV station in New Mexico had anything to with what was happening on Capitol Hill, but he was very angry that Clinton was not being prosecuted for lying under oath. I tried diligently to explain that Congress does not have the power to prosecute anyone in a criminal proceeding. That, therefore, the impeachment route was the only way they could go. Still, he was very angry that we had the audacity to cover a mere impeachment when, clearly, what we should have been covering was a criminal prosecution. Never mind that no such prosecution was underway.

Many people also seem to believe that the hundreds of thousands of news outlets all over the world are somehow in cahoots with each other. Never mind that most news outlets are profit-driven businesses, which means we’re actually competing against one another. I mean, not just in the movies, but in real life, we’re always trying to “scoop” each other. Since we’re all covering the same events, I guess some people think we’re somehow coordinating our coverage so we can influence the public’s opinion about it. Such coordination would be nearly impossible, of course, considering the sheer number of outlets. News outlets do sometimes work together to share resources, particularly for covering events that occur outside of the reach of each outlet’s very limited staff. But people seem to see the news media as a unified monolith. (Trust me, it’s not.)

This reminds me of the call I took from a very angry woman who was incensed that, the day after Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car crash, we were reporting that the driver of her car was allegedly drunk. She was quite certain that we were trying to “take the blame from ourselves” by shifting focus away from the paparazzi. After I got over the laugh that I was quietly suppressing, I very patiently explained to her that, first, paparazzi are not members of the “news media.” They are vultures that work for subpar tabloids and are as much responsible for the crash as the idiot people who purchase the tabloids that print their stuff. This really shocked her because “her sister,” who was a huge fan of Princess Di, also purchased tabloids, and she would be terribly sad to think that she had a role in the whole thing. Next, I went on to explain how news is gathered and that, yesterday, we’d reported on the paparazzi because that was the only information that was available, having been gathered from witnesses at the scene. But, today, the French police, who had begun their investigation, had uncovered new information, and that was what we were reporting now. If we had known that the driver was drunk yesterday, we would have reported it yesterday. Again, I’m not sure why she thought a local TV station in New Mexico had much of anything to do with an event taking place in Paris—other than to present the reporting of international news outlets like CNN and Reuters, which actually did have staff in Paris.

I enjoyed working in the news media, even though the pay was miserly at best, and I only left it because the alternative weekly I was working at closed due to lack of ad revenue. The whole media landscape was shrinking by that time, and I found a much better paying job in nonprofit advocacy. (And, no, that’s not a joke. The news media really does pay that badly.)  Interacting with the public was perhaps one of the least appealing aspects, but that’s probably true of most jobs that require interfacing with consumers.

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