There is a long history of “blaming the media” with, well, just about everyone. No, seriously, everyone has blamed the media at one point or another, right? It’s OK, you can own it.
Such critiques are rooted in most everyone’s belief that they can do a better job than almost any journalist out there.
That belief comes from several places including that you don’t need a specialized degree to be a journalist. While advanced degrees certainly help, you don’t need what a doctor or lawyer needs in order to do the job. Nor do journalists require any sort of certification. Journalists do operate by codes of ethics — codes that many in the public don’t know about or understand. One of the most fundamental tenets in any journalistic code of ethics is conflict of interest — a discussion I’ve been having with my journalism students lately. I tell students that the bottom line is that you do not want to appear to be influenced in your coverage by any number of factors. Yet, every day journalists are accused of being biased or of taking part in the mythical “fake news.”
Critiques of journalists are nonstop from all corners of coverage. I was listening to an NPR interview with Robin Wright the other morning about the reboot of “House of Cards” and her relationship with Kevin Spacey and a comment she made about “second chances.” She took exception with the reporter’s paraphrasing of her comment … so she then read the entire paragraph of the story where the quote appeared … which in the end wasn’t substantially different from what the reporter had said. Yet Wright was put off because she felt she had been misrepresented by the Big Bad Media.
We’ve seen this script a thousand times.
Celebrities and politicians have had infamous relationships with journalists over the years. Which is ironic since much of the success of those same folks is partially, if not wholly, reliant on the coverage provided by journalists.
Which brings us to our celebrity president and his unrelenting attacks on journalists. Now he’s pointing to journalists and media coverage for somehow being to blame for the recent series of pipe-bomb mailings. This, after the threats against The Boston Globe, the attack and killings of five journalists at The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, the “body-slamming” of a journalist by a Congressman, the death of a Washington Post journalist and the pipe-bomb threat against CNN.
So, I would ask you to take a moment before you bash journalism today. You can’t do the job of a journalist — even though you might believe you can. And it’s a job that’s becoming increasingly dangerous. Here. In the United States.
Steve Fox is a senior lecturer in the University of Massachusetts Journalism Department and is the director of the Sports Journalism concentration.