The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated by Bill Kovach

Author:Bill Kovach [Kovach, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3679-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

INDEPENDENCE FROM CLASS OR ECONOMIC STATUS

The question of independence is not limited to ideology. It may, indeed, be easier to deal with here than in other areas. The solution to bias, as we outlined in chapter 4, on verification, is to develop a clearer method of reporting. Yet to fully understand the role intellectual independence can play in gathering and reporting news, it is important to look at other kinds of conflicts and interdependencies.

As journalists in the twentieth century became better trained and educated (and in certain quarters better paid), another complication to the concept of independence set in. New York journalist Juan Gonzalez, who worked as a columnist for the New York Daily News and was president of the Hispanic journalist group, was also a thought leader about the impact of class on journalistic perspective. “The biggest problem … is that the American people feel there is a class divide between those who produce the news and information and those who receive it. That the class divide manifests a class bias toward most Americans whether they are conservative or center or liberal: if they’re working class and they’re poor, they’re considered less important in the society. I think that’s the principal bias.”13

Richard Harwood, who held many top jobs at the Washington Post, including being its ombudsman, agreed. “Journalists, as members of [the] cognitive elite, derive their worldviews, mind-sets, and biases from their peers. Their work is shaped to suit the tastes and needs of this new upper class. I must say there’s a lot of evidence that the mainstream press is staking its future on this class because it’s increasingly going upscale … and rejecting or losing working people, lower-income people.”14

Tom Minnery, a former journalist who later became vice president of Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has argued that this class bias helped accelerate commercialization of the news. “The direction of coverage … is a distortion of the way life is lived in the United States by a vast, broad middle of the country’s population,” Minnery argued. “In the United States, 1 percent of the population owns 35 percent of all the commonly traded stock. You would think from watching the evening news or reading newspapers that we are all at home watching the streaming ticker across the bottom of CNBC.” Or, he continued, watch the morning network shows “and see extensive, lovingly detailed coverage of the latest gizmos and googaws.… The confluence of commerce and news coverage is now so deep and profound that we can’t even see the edges of it anymore.”15

In short, Harwood and Minnery were arguing, the commercialized media had begun to serve consumer society rather than civil society.

Some argue that the Web has largely fixed this, democratizing information, auto-correcting falsehood, creating a wiki culture of accuracy, fairness, and contextualization. But it isn’t that simple. There remain digital divides, class divides, digital competence divides, as well as divides in how active and influential different people are in different spaces.

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