Tempering Today's Media Skepticism: A History Lesson

By Robert Schmul   

Navigating the blogosphere, cable-news fare and the talk-radio spectrum, discerning any encouraging words about contemporary journalism is becoming newsworthy in itself.

Traditional sources of civic information now find themselves, as the recent survey for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press confirms, the nation's punching bag and dartboard. According to Pew, nearly two-thirds of respondents think news stories are often inaccurate, and 60 percent see news organizations as politically slanted.

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This survey puts numbers on a growing and worrying phenomenon: the jaundiced perception of Americans about the news media and their work.

Criticism has its place, indeed an essential one. But if unrelenting naysaying becomes the dominant message in discussing journalism, what will be the long-term consequences? In the future, where will citizens turn in making decisions about complicated issues?

Such questions take on greater meaning when you compare them to earlier judgments about news and its significance.

Indeed, what was said about journalism not quite a century ago seems geological ages removed from what we currently read and hear. In particular, two statements from nine decades ago underline the significance of journalism and its function in helping people make sense of their world.

Examining the complexities of "Politics as a Vocation" in a lecture published in 1919, the noted German intellectual Max Weber acknowledged the central place that providers of news and opinion occupy in the political realm. What's fascinating is his fair-minded appraisal -- recognition of shortcomings along with strengths.

"The journalist belongs to a sort of pariah caste, which is always estimated by 'society' in terms of its ethically lowest representative," he remarked at one point. "Hence, the strangest notions about journalists and their work are abroad" in the public's thinking.

Yet, directly after noting that newspeople have always been known to operate on the margins of respectability, he takes a turn to higher ground in language with academic precision:

"Not everybody realizes that a really good journalistic accomplishment requires at least as much 'genius' as any scholarly accomplishment, especially because of the necessity of producing at once and 'on order,' and because of the necessity of being effective, to be sure, under quite different conditions of production. It is almost never acknowledged that the responsibility of the journalist is far greater, and that the sense of responsibility of every honorable journalist is, on the average, not a bit lower than that of the scholar, but rather, as the war has shown, higher. This is because, in the very nature of the case, irresponsible journalistic accomplishments and their terrible effects are remembered."

That same year, 1919, the American journalist and public thinker Walter Lippmann was wrestling with his own post-World War I ideas about the relationship between journalism and public life. In a more sustained manner than Weber, Lippmann used three lengthy essays he brought together in "Liberty and the News" to probe the possibilities and problems he discerned in the press.

As Weber did, Lippmann combined clear-eyed realism with reasoned idealism. Midway through the slim volume (reprinted by Princeton University Press last year) Lippmann writes:

"The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind."

What's missing in so many considerations of journalism today is that sense of balance and the recognition of greater purpose that Weber and Lippmann identified and articulated. Nowadays, complaints about the "media" (a radioactive word in itself), perceived "biases" and their dastardly deeds of commission and omission reverberate in an echo chamber of generalizations. Counterpoints don't even seem to register.

Interestingly (and by another coincidence of timing), exactly 150 years ago, Charles Dickens began his novel, "A Tale of Two Cities," with a string of measured phrases that might well serve as an apt description of our current news environment:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."

As we lurch into the unknowable future of 21st-century communications, three long-dead, low-tech writers help point the way to a fuller understanding of journalism, its role, its place. But we have to take the time to look back and to look ahead without the blinders created by so many less compelling observers.

Robert Schmuhl is Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy.