QUALITY QUESTIONS.

A couple weeks ago, Esther Thorson from the University of Missouri was here to give a talk about the decline of American newspapers. Like most such talks in the academy, it was full of concerns over structural changes in American political media and awful it is that nobody wants to have a civil discussion anymore, etc. In the Q&A, one of our professors raised the idea that perhaps we're not turning away from the traditional press because we want an ideologically-driven one, but because we don't really care about "the news" and we never have. This comment got me wondering something else -- why don't these discussions ever contain any suggestion that there has been a dramatic drop in the quality of American political reporting over the past two decades?

There are perfectly understandable practical reasons for this, to be sure, the big one being that even the most scientifically rigorous analysis will be at least a little bit subjective, and thus open to being dismissed by partisan critics. But so what? Social science findings are frequently controversial, both inside and outside the academy.

I'm posting this because a couple recent comments by Matthew Yglesias have really gotten me thinking closely about the quality issue and the extent to which journalists and the audience view it differently. As he notes as part of an ongoing debate about why cable news channels spend so much time on tabloid stories -- the common answer seeming to be that it's because they bring in ratings -- there is no allowance for the idea that these news organizations are doing nothing but produced lots of useless crap:

Given that the country adds over two million people a year to its population, the fact that the audience seems to have stalled for years at around 1.5 million hardly suggests a wildly successful programming model. Indeed, it seems to me that in some ways the worst damage financial pressures have done to journalism is to let so many people get off the hook by using it as an excuse. It's considered sacrilege in the business to suggest that low quality might be a cause of declining circulation for newspapers or audience for network news broadcasts. Instead, we're supposed to believe that it's the reverse -- problems are all caused by cutbacks which, in turn, are caused by the audience's stubborn unwillingness to cooperate and subscribe.

As for the news organizations themselves, they also like to place the blame on the viewers by occasionally doing stories about how much the public likes these tabloid affairs, so jeez, what else can they do? When anybody complains about the content of their rare political reporting, they point fingers in both directions and declare, "Both sides are complaining, so we must be right!" But then they do things like correctly quoting Fred Thompson claiming that Medicare Part D cost $72 trillion, rather than the actual figure of $72 billion, without noting Thompson's error. Yglesias:

Now you're walking around thinking a $72 trillion commitment was made. You read it in the newspaper, after all. Except it's wrong! But you shouldn't be un-learning things when you read the paper.

The problem here is that, as Yglesias says, people now believe the incorrect figure to be true, because a legitimate newspaper printed it without making note of Thompson's mistake. But the reporter would likely say that there was nothing wrong with her story because, hey, Thompson said "$72 trillion," and that's what she printed. Pointing out his mistake wouldn't have been objective, since it would mean, I guess, taking a position on whether or not Medicare Part D cost $72 billion or a thousand times that much. This inability to apply standards of truthfulness in even the most objectively supported situation is the number one problem with modern American journalism, and it should be a scandal in journalism education.

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2007:10:13:21:24