New Year’s resolutions can be an important step to overcoming personal shortcomings—something our twenty-four hour news cycle could certainly use.
While local and standard television news strives to maintain the journalistic integrity and grit that made the Fourth Estate such a protected and lauded part of American politics, others suffer from a severe quality control issue.
Since we’re at the point where simply abandoning twenty-four hour news is no longer viable, here are a few ideas for some resolutions the big news networks might want to consider. It may be past New Year’s Day, but better late than never.
First up: fact-checking. Remember when the news had the time and wherewithal to make sure what they were reporting was accurate? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
In a piece from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Journalism and Mass Communication Department, Bill Adair of politifact.org said, “In the old days outlets and reporters acted as filters for political statements, weeding out false messages before presenting information to the public. Today, with a virtually endless supply of news sources across television, Internet and print media that report political messages by the minute, the filter is broken.”
The twenty-four hours news cycle has the technology and resources to fact check. Sometimes they lack the desire and sometimes they lack the time, which brings me to my next proposed resolution: focus on legitimate news.
I don’t care what trimester the Prince of Great Britain’s wife is in. I don’t care about the inane ramblings that are used to distract us during elections.
Focus on the issues at hand and for the love of Vecna stop trying to make up things to report on. That’s not news, that’s job security. There will always be news. Just because every story isn’t a major catastrophe doesn’t mean we should undermine its importance.
Which brings me to my next resolution: sensationalism. Stop it. Seriously, stop it. Making a mountain out of a mole hill is not news and it is not journalism. Unless maybe you’re a mole, but I have a feeling some of the twenty-four news folk are a slightly lower form of rodent.
Speaking of which, another good resolution would be objectivity. As in: actually having some.
Most news has an ideological bent. You could plop a seemingly innocuous story about almost anything in front of a Republican, a Democrat, a Socialist and a Libertarian, and they would all look at it from a different viewpoint. That’s human nature. It’s also no excuse. Overcoming human nature’s baser instincts is the entire point of civilization.
It’s one thing to have an ideological lean when reporting the news. It’s quite another to have that lean cloud your judgment and make your reporting biased and slanted so far in one direction that the news loses all meaning. We call that editorializing and that is best left to the experts.
Being a journalist comes with certain expectations and responsibilities. To disregard those expectations undermines the power and respect granted to it in a democratic society.
Worse, it makes news as a whole look unprofessional and ludicrous.
Without trust, journalism can’t reach its most vital goal; keeping the people informed and the government under surveillance. If the watchers have lost their integrity, who do we turn to in order to light the path of ignorance?
