Journalists produce media to be consumed. Without an audience, the role of a journalist would be obsolete.
The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel outlines ten elements needed to produce a given piece of journalism. The last element states, “Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to news.” And those responsibilities have never been greater than they are today in the digital era.
Dan Gillmor, professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, outlines the modern principles of media consumption in his book Mediactive.
The five principles can be summarized as follows:
Be Skeptical
Exercise Judgement
Open Your Mind
Keep Asking Questions
Learn Media Techniques
1. Be Skeptical
Of what? Everything.
Facebook posts, Tweets, blog posts and even your most trusted media outlet. It’s the media consumer’s job to ensure due diligence when it comes to evaluating the truth.
Lazy reporters are a dime a dozen, and manipulation comes in many forms including omission, diversion and confusion. According to Gillmor:
Most worrisome are errors of omission, where journalists fail to ask the hard but necessary questions of people in power (16).
He goes on to further point out:
The Washington press corps and financial journalists, in particular, have shown again and again that they crave access to the rich and powerful more than they care about the quality of their journalism (16-17).
Gillmor examines the “two-side fallacy” of providing balance.
To use an admittedly extreme example, when you’re doing a story about the Holocaust, you don’t need to balance it by quoting a neo-Nazi. Nor is it ‘showing balance’ to quote a climate-change denier in every story about global warming—not when scientists who study these issues have concluded with rare, near universal fervor that climate change is not only real but presents an existential threat to civilization as we know it, if not to our species (17).
Attempting to engineer objectivity is only one problem among many others. What’s worse than pseudo-objectivity? Perhaps the antithesis of a journalist: paid liars.
Yes, they exist. And in a variety of ways. They hide under the guise of advertisers (such as the tobacco industry), lobbying firms and “think tanks,” to name a few.
2. Exercise Judgment
This shouldn’t be difficult. People exercise judgement on a daily basis whether conscious of it or not.
Learning proper criticism techniques can help reduce illogical commentary, which only adds to the deceitful noise. All theses virtual lies plaguing the web can make it hard not to be cynical, but Gillmor warns readers about generalized cynicism:
Unfortunately, generalized cynicism feeds the problem. If we lazily assume that everyone is pushing lies rather than trying to figure out who’s telling the truth and who isn’t, we give the worst people even more leeway to make things worse for the rest of us (20).
It’s illogical to claim that all bloggers are untrustworthy and uninformed. Conversely, it’s also unreasonable to claim that all of the employees of a mainstream media outlet are dishonest.
Trust should be placed in individuals, not corporations. Corporations have never been, and never will be human — at least in the natural, traditional sense of the term.
3. Open Your Mind
Period. There’s no excuse for bigotry.
Properly learning these principles of media consumption will help expand your horizons.
Gillmor introduces the third principle by reminding readers of the “echo chamber” effect.
The “echo chamber” effect—our tendency as human beings to seek information that we’re likely to agree with (21).
A few tips to avoid this sort of effect:
Challenge your own assumptions
Go outside of your comfort zone (e.g. read a niche publication that’s not targeted to you)
Follow hyperlinks to source material
Read a book on a topic you don’t know much about
Diversity makes this principle so important. There are various viewpoints and opinions at every level, even amongst like-minded individuals. We all experience the world from a unique vantage point, which Gillmor illustrates:
Whatever your world view, you can find educated, articulate people who see things differently based on the same general facts. Sometimes they’ll have new facts that will persuade you that they’re right; more often, no doubt, you’ll hold the view you started with, but perhaps with a more nuanced understanding of the matter (22).
4. Keep Asking Questions
Always. Don’t just absorb information without doing your own homework and verification.
This is easier to do today than ever before as Gillmor notes:
The rise of the internet has given us, for the first time in history, a relatively easy way to dig deeper into the topics we care about the most. We can ask questions, and we can get intelligent answers to these questions (23).
We no longer need to trust major news outlets blindly. We can exercise our skepticism by asking unanswered questions and pointing out the gaps in news coverage. In a sense we’ve become our own editors as well as content producers.
5. Learn Media Techniques
We are all media producers and consumers in the digital age. Chances are you already know a few techniques, but it’s also important to learn how they fit into the overall digital media landscape.
Social media is part of that landscape, which means Facebook posts, Tweets and even blog posts are now intertwined in the media sphere. Technology enables reporting at the grassroots, human level. Yet, people need to be educated on the proper techniques and practices to maximize the impact of their efforts as Gillmor points out:
Young or old, learning how to snap a photo with a mobile phone is useful, but it’s just as important to know all the possibilities of what you can do with that picture and to understand how it fits into a larger media ecosystem (24).
In addition to understanding how a given piece of media applies to the big picture, people must acquire the ability to distinguish between the different types of information circling the web. Marketers, advertisers, filmmakers, etc. aren’t bound by truth, yet they participate and contribute to the media ecosystem at large.
This is where we find the true value in media criticism — it can help distinguish between genuine journalists and manipulators. Until blogging became popular, Gillmor notes the lack of media criticism:
Media criticism was a somewhat sleepy field until bloggers came along, with only a few publications and scholarly journals serving as the only serious watchdogs of a press that had become complacent and arrogant (24).
Any media organization can attempt to discredit bloggers for unfair criticism, and that’s why we need more informed media consumers — to independently judge the facts for oneself.
We’re moving towards an era where self-governing by the people is more possible than ever before. It all starts with an actively informed public. We still have a lot of work to do, but the effort is certainly worth it as Gillmor concludes:
We all need to help each other sort out the information we can trust from that we shouldn’t. This will be complicated, but if we get it right, the value will be immeasurable (25).
Work Cited:
Gillmor, Dan. Mediactive. 2010. Print. <http://mediactive.com/>.
Originally published Feb. 25, 2014.
