Good Journalism, Crap Journalism, and Everything in Between

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On Monday I found myself unexpectedly caring for a pre-schooler all day. It seems there is a holiday in America known as President’s Day. We didn’t have it in Mexico and the last time I remember noticing it was as kid when it was attached to something called “ski week.” Yay, no school!

What is the point of this holiday? Why would we want to honor these morons? Most presidents have been nothing but trouble. What, James Buchanan and George W Bush need a special day? It’s like having a holiday called Children’s Day between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Every day is children’s day, kid.

Freelancers cannot afford to celebrate such silly holidays and I have ignored it all my adult life until I found myself in the parking lot of a pre-school realizing that there were no teachers. No school. Yay.

So, after a full day of sword fights and museums and generally throwing my child around, I was thrilled to be invited to a potluck President’s Day dinner (no doubt commemorating the time that Taft went back for a third helping and realized there was no more food, so everyone chipped in to top him off).

Managing a frenetic child alongside appetizers and wine while having pleasant conversations is surprisingly easier than doing it alone. As I discussed the finer points of the future of journalism while holding a child by one leg who was wildly swinging a lightsaber, I heard an interesting comment.

“We don’t need National Geographic anymore. I get the same information and sense of adventure from blogs.”

I’m paraphrasing, since I didn’t have my notebook and was dodging a light saber at the time. The speaker was a highly educated person who teaches college students. Indeed, their class even begins with a segment on the media.

It was a familiar idea to me because I used to think the same thing before I became a journalist. Information is information. Blogging is just another form of journalism – just as good as all those fancy “professionals.” And then I tried it.

Having watched how the sausage is made for more than a decade, I can tell you there are a thousand ways to do truly terrible journalism that the average reader will never even notice. In fact, I guarantee you you have read some real crap just this week without realizing it.

Good journalists go to the places they are writing about. They talk to the local people and wander around getting confused and lost. Some of them risk their lives and others watch their friends and sources die or get injured or tumble down the well of PTSD.

Good journalists get paid. Paid well enough to do the work but also well enough to raise a family and keep doing the job so that they can become experienced journalists – a rare and precious commodity today. Older journalists are not necessarily better than younger ones but they are usually better than their younger selves. God knows I am.

Good journalism also gets fact-checked. Not by the author, who usually makes the same mistakes the second time through, but by an independent fact-checker. Anyone who has been vigorously fact-checked knows that no matter how solid you think a story is, it’s littered with mistakes.

When I brought up a few of these ideas in between gulping down wine and battling a tiny Sith lord, the teacher casually said the solution is simply to mistrust all media. They’re all biased and crap.

I don’t blame them for their comment – kicking the media is a national sport today. But there is a huge difference between good journalism and bad (having personally done both). And there is good stuff out there; not all sausages are Walmart hot dogs.

Readers just can’t see everything that goes into good and crappy journalism. And we all assume the stuff we read is good. Do you know how experienced the writers of your news are? What they get paid? How many stories they do a day?

How many news stories that you click are created by actual news outlets and how many by vested interests? Are you sure? Do you know how many stories you read that get independently fact-checked? Chances are, very few (certainly not this one).

So, I propose two solutions to this problem. First, I’d like to see some kind of LEED certification for journalism. Criteria would include pay for the journalists, money for travel, real fact-checkers, printing corrections when they are wrong. Are there experienced writers at the outlet or is everyone under 30? How do they get their money? How much time do they have for stories?

These, plus dozens of other issues that we navel-gazing journos wring our hands over will be put into a meat grinder and turned into copper, bronze, silver, gold and platinum ratings. Read this Vice piece if you want, just know that it’s a bronze article.*

In order to vote with our pocketbooks, consumers need an easily digestible guide. I’ve seen it in seafood, human rights, and dozens of other spheres where you think to yourself, “These people would be out of business if their consumers knew what they were doing.”

And the second solution is to give journalists their due. Sure, some of us are simply crappy journalists. Such people exist and every one in the business has met one. But most of us are doing the best we can with very limited means. I’d say we fare better than presidents at least.

So if I have to manage my kid alone for a day in February, let it be for people who actually deserve it. Instead of a day for pampered, selfish, mostly mediocre megalomaniacs, let’s call it Journalists’ Day. And every year, let’s get together and throw a potluck for a local journalist.

Please? We are really very hungry.

*And yes, I’m sad to say that The Last Word on Nothing would not fare well on these measures. Unpaid, unchecked, generally unfettered. But you’d still read us, right?

5 thoughts on “Good Journalism, Crap Journalism, and Everything in Between

  1. There used to be two holidays: Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday, both in Feb. Then, around the time that holidays like Labor day were shifted to Mondays, the two birthday celebrations were merged into one, i.e. President’s Day. We’re not celebrating all Presidents we’re just making it easier to forget two GREAT ones.
    Couldn’t agree more about the value of journalists. Love your LEED idea.

    1. As one old enough to remember when that happened, Washington/Lincoln, I can attest that it happened.

  2. Well, then they should call it Good President’s Day. Or Non-Genocidal-Prick President’s Day. Wait: President’s Day For The Ones Who Didn’t Just Fail Up. Yeah, that’s catchy.

  3. Yes. It would be nice to go back to a day of paid journalism and fact-checking but I fear those days are long gone. In the face of studies showing that the more data you present to people the more they dig in their heels on their erroneous positions, it seems to me that truth & fact are a bygone concepts. When people don’t value “getting it right”, they don’t value journalism. And if something is not valued, it is not paid well.

    To a certain extent, people have always just heard what they want to hear (c.f. the large variety of church denominations). And there is still the concept of “trusted voices”. News sources you listen to regardless of what they say. But, really, when was the last time one of your trusted voices said something contrary to your beliefs? Does that even happen anymore or are we all isolated in our little echo chambers?

    I despair of humanity.

  4. It’s easy to see only Trump right now when you say the word President, but President’s Day is celebrated because of Washington and Lincoln, as others have said so here. These two citizens still inspire the hope that, although many faltered as President, this job can be done in an exemplary manner. One provided leadership when the chaos of war threatened the birth of the nation and the other when it threatened to tear it apart. They were brave, risk takers who were humble. And then there are journalists.

    It’s easy to see only “fake news” today when you say the word journalist but a Journalists’ Day, for victims of Trump’s ire, is not a worthy ambition for us. We are not the news, we simply report it. We have had greats among our ranks, such as Anthony Ripley, who covered the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King and Selma for the Detroit News and Watergate for the New York Times, at a time when the great journalists were great because they observed “the truths” and did not put themselves first but put the ethics inherent in their roles first.

    What are the truths? We remember the famous untruths, such as Willkie Wins! When it was FDR in 1940. The truths are the reporting and editing processes that in a story lead to enlightenment or better understanding among our readers. Without them we are rudderless as a society, as we appear to be at times now.

    Some of the truths are: the 5Ws and 2 Hs: Who, What! Where! When! Why, How and sometimes How much; reporting on both sides of the issue then letting the reader/viewer make up their mind on what it all means; avoiding Red Flag words, i.e., name calling; having common sense in judging character and situations; not prizing the fast-twitch “scoop” at the expense of the facts; avoiding fear mongering—See last week’s NYT op-Ed piece titled, “It’s Time to Panic Over Climate Change”—that is, be aware of your responsibility as a journalist toward the “public good”; the importance of fact checking the entire story before it goes to the editor; focusing on the on the human tragedy of life, love, illness, death, victory, work and whether this great American experience is working for everyone.

    These great journalists still inspire the hope that although many of us get it wrong, this job can be done in an exemplary manner. That means personal opinions get locked up until after work and what remains is what we can present of the hard-won, dazzling truth, to help light the way.

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