National Public Radio: The Facts and the Truth

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2012/03/national_public_radio_the_fact036098.php

National Public Radio: The Facts and the Truth

By Michael O'Hare



NPR has changed its rules for journalists {HTs and more discussion: Daily Kos, James Fallows} from reporting “both sides” of any issue to including expert judgment about the sides’ relative weight. This is a very big deal. Print journalism used to be quite partisan, but around the turn of the 20th century, wire services started to market a product designed to be attractive to all newspapers, and invented the idea of “balanced reporting” presented as an ethical principle, a bowl of grits model of news: tasteless, vitamin-free calories that can’t offend anyone. The idea was to stick to facts, and to present them in pairs. This degenerate idea of fairness and ‘accuracy’ became a de facto standard for newspapers generally. For example: “Galileo Galilei announced today that three moons circle Jupiter, but the Bishop of Padua said that was impossible.” Martin Linsky used to demand that the press report the truth and not just the facts: that Galileo and the bishop said what they said are indeed facts, but it’s essential for the reader to know that Galileo had seen the moons doing their thing with a telescope, while the bishop only had an dogeared copy of Aristotle. Supply your own current illustration from, for example, climate science reporting.

So-called “he said/she said” reporting, as the NPR code now recognizes, makes the reporter the servant of her sources and not the reader/listener. Reporters are not just selling news to us; they are selling us to politicians, lobbyists, and their other sources, and they are paid by access. If your copy isn’t useful to a senator, the senator will not return your calls. When the senator says what is not true, and the reporter says “Senator Foghorn lied to a press conference this morning”, the reporter is being useful to us but not to the senator, and her editor will wonder why Foghorn’s bill funding a new highway was in all the other papers first.

If NPR’s understanding of what it really means to report catches on, the news is going to get a lot more useful and interesting. It will also lead to some ugly battles between politicians and corporate shills accustomed to the idea that they have some right to pump any kind of nonsense through the media, and real journalists trying to do their jobs. And keep their jobs in a world where reprinting press
releases and sending a reporter to stand in the rain on camera to tell us it’s raining somewhere is more and more all the industry can afford. Until we fix the broken business model for content, things may get even worse before they get better, but NPR is on the side of the angels (and on ours) here.



http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/npr-tackles-false-equivalence/253712/
NPR Tackles 'False Equivalence'
James Fallows

[Skinner]

1. It's amazing it took so long for someone to think of this.

Good on ya, NPR.

[Jim Lane]

6. It's not new, but it takes guts to do it.

Decades ago, some editor recommended that editors continue to publish lies from Senator Foghorn and his ilk, but follow each one with a bracketed statement "This is not so."

As the OP notes, though, you then have the problem of dealing with Foghorn in the future.

Another problem is that there are plenty of newspapers and other media outlets in this country that would themselves lie. Without the standard of objectivity (even if given only minimal adherence), they'd be reporting an Obama speech and then adding that the economy is not in fact improving, or whatever.

[Riftaxe]

2. NPR now to emulate MSNBC

and Fox news...would be a more accurate and succinct headline.

[librechik]

3. Halleluia! But will (RW ) NPR like the results? WTF changed?

[saras]

4. We can read the publicity ourselves. The job of the news is to tell us how accurate it is.

[FailureToCommunicate]

5. This comes up every time on a subject like Climate Change...

There are a 1000 scientists to one saying Global warming is manmade, but by always including one guest "for" and one "against"
it makes it seem like the issue is about balanced at 50/50

Maybe NPR will shake things up, maybe not. But it's worth debating.

[Danascot]

7. So perhaps NPR has woken up to the fact that

it's pandering to the right for the last decade in hopes it wouldn't get its funding cut to zero wasn't such a brilliant strategy?