Cross-posted from Medium.
As you make year-end donations and think about which causes to support in 2017, I strongly urge you to consider setting up recurring contributions to organizations that support a free, vibrant, and trustworthy press.
Concerned citizens of all political persuasions will find plenty of causes in need of resources in the coming years of the new administration. But no cause can be well supported if the press does not report on it, and if citizens don’t trust that reporting. That’s why I believe that — above all — we need to support trustworthy journalism.
Our trust in journalism is under threat on a number of different fronts. Changes in technology and business models in the media industry have weakened mainstream newsrooms and strengthened outlets that pander to readers’ predetermined points of view. “New media” (a lumpy term in which I include social platforms as well as new web-based news organizations) have also presented an opportunity for individuals and groups on every point of the political spectrum to publish their views broadly, without the gate-keeping or fact-checking performed by the traditional media. Social media sites also create echo chambers in which our existing beliefs are reinforced rather than challenged. Meanwhile, on the political front, our president-elect repeatedly dismisses pillars of the mainstream media as “failing” and “dishonest,” obscuring truth and spreading confusion, and he has not hesitated to punish outlets when they publish something about him he doesn’t like. Many of his followers agree with this tactic: according to a Pew research poll held just before the election, only 49% of registered voters who supported Trump said that the freedom of news organizations to criticize political leaders was “very important.”
But to hold their government accountable, citizens do need to be well informed — and the sources of our information need to be seen as trustworthy by politically and socioeconomically diverse swaths of that citizenry. If I believe that a racially-motivated hate crime took place because I trust Vox and my neighbor doesn’t because they trust Breitbart, how can we hope to effectively petition our government to stop such atrocities?
This isn’t easy — there isn’t an obvious path forward that simply calls for some political will and some fundraising. Traditional news sources are struggling not just because right-leaning Americans have decided they’re dishonest; they’re struggling in part because they haven’t effectively met needs that social media sites do, and because they’ve stumbled over themselves while trying to find the right business models for the digital age. And more conservative new media outlets have cropped up in part because existing outlets, however strongly they believe in their journalistic ideals, have still failed to be relevant to a large swath of the population.
Meanwhile social media platforms and other news aggregators have distanced themselves from the truth-evaluation game in part because it opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about who gets to decide what truth and news even are — questions that weren’t even easy to answer when that gate-keeping was done by news organizations. (And, of course, such fact-checking and investigating, if done well, is expensive and time-consuming.) Traditional outlets have also floundered on this front, for example when they conflate “balanced” with “truthful” reporting.
But if we have no agreed-upon benchmark for measuring the truth, how can we agree on whether Vox or Breitbart is correct, on which outlet is more credible, on what facts are facts? Alt-right champion Mike Cernovich gleefully calls the resulting vacuum “postmodern” and sees it as an opportunity for a new national narrative; I see it as a deeply troubling mess whose solutions will have to be political, educational, and commercial at the very least.
Still, we can’t let the pursuit of perfect solutions be the enemy of good, solid action. To that end, here are some practical places I urge you to start:
First, support local and national commercial journalism by paying for subscriptions to the outlets you read or consume the most and that support traditional journalistic ethics, be they the New York Times, NPR, or the Boston Globe. (Even more localized news outlets cover issues such as school board matters, local ordinances, and infrastructure decisions that don’t often get covered by national media but have just as much effect on people’s lives.) Again, these more traditional news sources aren’t the be-all, end-all solution to the problem, but they’re certainly organizations that have the responsibility to tell truth to power. If we use them to educate ourselves, we need to empower them to do it as well as possible — and our dollars tell them that we as readers and customers are invested in that outcome.
Another way to communicate that investment is to hold these news organizations accountable when you see that they’re not doing a good enough job. The University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics has a great list of resources for registering complaints and concerns, including links to contact the public editors at major news organizations.
Next, donate to organizations that advocate for and support the free press, investigative journalism, and journalists:
- ACLU — An organization fighting for freedom of the press and other first-amendment rights.
- ProPublica — An independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
- Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) — Their First Amendment Forever Fund is an endowment built to fight for press freedoms. It’s a kind of meta version of their Legal Defense Fund, to which you can also donate directly, and which provides journalists with legal or financial assistance in the cause of defending freedom of speech and press, often to enforce public access to government records.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — It’s like the ACLU for the digital world, defending individual rights of expression and privacy online.
And finally, donate to organizations that support our own education as consumers of information:
- Center for News Literacy — An initiative of the Stony Brook University Department of Journalism, the Center works to teach students and the general public how to read, interpret, and gauge the value of news reports and news sources. A recent, much-publicized study from Stanford showed how much difficulty young people have knowing what to trust online, and it would hardly be a surprise if the same were true of adults.
This is just a start. The issues with our media and with our government’s attitude toward it aren’t going to be fixed just by buying subscriptions or donating to advocacy organizations. We also need to remain ever watchful, creative, and demanding in the days — and years — ahead.
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