Outrage is the currency of modern America. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “An extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.”
Every day, another statement, joke or action provokes anger, shock and indignation against the hapless offender.
A dentist hunts a lion in Africa. Outrage! A woman tweets a joke before boarding a plane bound for Africa. Outrage!! A white cisgendered male op-ed writer mentions Africa in three different outrage examples. OUTRAGE!!!
It’s exhausting just to read about the outrage, so it must be debilitating to those peddling it.
Why do people get so offended?
I’ve never understood why people get offended by, well, anything. Even if someone attempts an insult, it’s up to you to choose whether to accept it as such. Just as you shouldn’t give others the power over your emotional state, you can’t be offended without your consent.
Or as some fancy-pants old white cisgendered male said, “Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.”
Epictetus wrote that in The Enchiridion, Greek for “the handbook,” which means I have appropriated Greco-Phrygian culture. And if you’re offended on behalf of that extinct ethnicity, you need to keep reading.
Let’s reinterpret this 2,000-year-old dead white male for modern audiences. When a thin-skinned audience member shouts “I’m offended!” at a stand-up comic, it only reveals the heckler’s fragile psyche and low self-worth.
Insult me? Then you must be an idiot
If you’re insulted when a co-worker holds the door for his female associate, you are projecting your hang-ups on what is most likely a simple act of politeness. If a Swedish bongo player sports blonde dreadlocks and you’re offended instead of amused, you have more baggage than a deposed Haitian dictator fleeing to Paris.
Perhaps I’m an outlier, but if someone tries to insult me, I don’t feel badly about myself — I just conclude that they’re an idiot. Some might find this attitude arrogant and they’re probably right. But if some humorless scold attacks me for being a white cisgendered male, that’s their problem, not mine. In fact, I pity them for not appreciating the single-malt, double-barreled awesome that I’m bringing.
Here’s an interaction I had on Twitter, the Algonquin Round Table of the digital age. One interlocutor noted that vaccinations might cause autism. (They don’t.) Another wondered if a government can mandate immunization. (Sure.) But shouldn’t parents have the right to say no? (Not if they put the community at risk; at least that’s how I see it.)
All fair questions and a fine debate to have. And on it went until one person replied with what he felt was the trump card: “That really offends me!”
To which I said, “So what?”
This doesn’t help you win an argument
A brusque response, but the anonymous stranger’s taking of offense is not my or anyone else’s concern; public health is. Harrumphing “that offends me!” has no bearing on any argument, pro or con. It’s a non sequitur revealing naught but a delicate constitution.
I don’t intend to argue the pros and cons of vaccination; that specific debate isn’t the point. As our culture has slid to the so-called “social justice warriors” of the left and the trolls of the “alt-right,” activists on all sides believe that their being offended carries some sort of moral authority as a victim. Does their sense of grievance make their arguments more compelling? It does no such thing.
British comedian Stephen Fry said it best:
It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that,” as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase.
“I’m offended by that.”
Well, so [bleeping] what?
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The number one song today in 1965:
Three years later, the singer of the number one song in Britain announced …
Today in 1976, Chicago released what would become its first number one single, to the regret of all true brass rock fans:
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The number one song in Britain today in 1964 was brought back to popularity almost two decades later by the movie “Stripes”:
That same day, the Kinks hit the British charts for the first time with …
This was, of course, the number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
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Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin:
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There were two more reminders of the passage of time this past week.
One was reported by Rolling Stone:
Glen Campbell, the indelible voice behind 21 Top 40 hits including “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Wichita Lineman” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” died Tuesday. He was 81. A rep for Universal Music Group, Campbell’s record label, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone. During a career that spanned six decades, Campbell sold over 45 million records. In 1968, one of his biggest years, he outsold the Beatles. …
Campbell was a rare breed in the music business, with various careers as a top-level studio guitarist, chart-topping singer and hit television host. His late-career battle with Alzheimer’s—he allowed a documentary crew to film on his final tour for the 2014 award-winning I’ll Be Me—made him a public face for the disease, a role President Bill Clinton suggested would one day be remembered even more than his music.
“He had that beautiful tenor with a crystal-clear guitar sound, playing lines that were so inventive,” Tom Petty told Rolling Stone during a 2011 profile of Campbell. “It moved me.”
Campbell was a hugely popular singer, which may have obscured his guitar talent.
The other is reported by Channel3000.com:
Phyllis Leckrone, 81, the wife of UW Marching Band director Mike Leckrone, and the woman known to band members as “band mom” has died.
UW Marching Band spokesperson Jay Rath said, “She was a mother to generations of band students and her impact will live on in those countless lives.”
“She loved the whole Badger Band Family. She was known to many alumni members as the band mom,” a post on the UW Band Alumni Association Facebook page said.
A native of North Manchester, Ind., Phyllis and Mike met in junior high school and became childhood sweethearts. They were married 62 years. Phyllis taught with the Middleton-Cross Plains school district for more than 25 years, according to a news release.
Leckrone died early Tuesday morning surrounded by family after a long illness, Rath said. She is survived by her husband, five children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren. …
In lieu of flowers, the family asked that memorials be made to Phyliss’s favorite charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, www.stjude.org/donate.
The first thing to know about the Leckrones is that they were married for 61 years.I saw Phyllis a couple of times every year — on the two epic road trips we took, to the Hall of Fame Bowl in Birmingham, Ala., and Las Vegas, and at the annual UW Marching Band banquet in the Memorial Union. (Three words: “Fudge Bottom Pie.”) Compared to performance Mike, she was quiet. For that matter, non-performance Mike is quiet compared to performance Mike. I went to their house a couple of times as a rank leader; the Leckrones invited band leaders to their house before rehearsals began.
I also have become Facebook Friends with some of their kids. The only consolation I can offer is that it is the natural order of life that parents die before their children; no one who is a parent wants the reverse to happen. (There are, sadly, several people I marched with who have since passed away.)
Mike Leckrone became the UW Band director in 1969. So Phyllis had to share Mike with 200 to 250 college students every year for nearly 50 years. We remember Phyllis fondly.
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We begin with a non-musical anniversary, though we can certainly add music:
On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
(Clearly the photo was not taken on this day in 1919. Measurable snow has never fallen in Wisconsin in August … so far.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
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While political geeks were obsessing over Foxconn and the state budget, Eric Bott writes:
Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin are once again showing conservative reformers nationwide how to get the job done. This month, lawmakers sent Walker the first state version of the REINS Act to be passed by a legislature, and Walker, who has championed the reform, is expected to sign the bill soon.
The REINS Act, introduced by state Sen. Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and state Rep. Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee), restores much-needed transparency to the rule making process by requiring that the costliest of regulations receive approval from the full legislature before taking effect. The need for this reform is clear.
Our jobs and our businesses have become so heavily regulated by unaccountable government agencies that a 2016 survey of U.S. small business owners revealed that an average of “4 hours per week is spent dealing with government regulations and tax compliance, which totals to over 200 hours per year.”
This growing regulatory burden at the federal and state levels represents a threat to both our economy and our democratic institutions.Under the REINS Act, any regulation costing businesses, local governments or the public $10 million or more over a two-year period will require approval by the legislature.
It’s a change that’s long overdue.
In 2010, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources promulgated strict new limits on phosphorous released by factories and wastewater treatment plants. The “Phosphorus Rule” is now estimated to cost more than $7 billion over the next 20 years.
According to the state’s economic impact analysis, “When fully realized, the cumulative impact of these additional costs are expected to result statewide in lower Gross State Product (“GSP”), reduced wages, fewer jobs and a smaller statewide population.”
No elected official ever had the opportunity to cast a vote on a regulation that will cost Wisconsinites billions of dollars and directly affects some of Wisconsin’s biggest industries, including cheese making, food processing and paper mills.
Had the REINS Act been in place, this rule would likely have been stopped, or at least made less costly and more effective. And any legislator who approved it would have been held accountable to voters.
The REINS Act also allows the Wisconsin legislature to request independent economic impact analyses to ensure that state government cost estimates for proposed regulations are accurate. This is key to preventing rogue agencies with their own agenda from gaming the system.
By limiting the power of state agencies to unilaterally impose costly rules, these reforms will provide long-term regulatory certainty to Wisconsin businesses. Over time, an improved and honest regulatory environment will attract new investment and jobs.
Gov. Walker deserves tremendous credit for championing this bill. It’s rare for a governor to acknowledge that the executive branch has become too powerful and return power to the people – but that is exactly what Gov. Walker is doing.
As a further check on executive overreach, the bill gives the legislature the ability to indefinitely suspend existing administrative rules. Thanks to these measures, future governors will not be able to circumvent the legislative process and enact their costly agendas by executive fiat. …
The bill will do much to restore democracy to the administrative rules process, improve transparency and allow citizens to better hold elected officials accountable.
It will also serve as a model to other states seeking to cut red tape. No American should be subject to the arbitrary whims of the regulatory state, and legislation like the REINS Act can help counter this growing threat.
Walker signed the bill into law yesterday, saying, “One of our top priorities for Wisconsin is ensuring government services are effective, efficient, accountable, and operate at good-value for the citizens of our state. This bill allows for more input from citizens and stakeholders before a new rule is drafted, ensures expensive or burdensome rules are subject to legislative scrutiny and approval, and creates additional oversight over state agencies.”
The reason this law is grossly overdue is explained by the MacIver Institute:
A brand new report has found that Wisconsin’s administrative code contains nearly 160,000 regulatory restrictions. The report was published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a market-oriented academic research center.
It would take the average person 667 hours, or almost 17 weeks, to read the 2017 Wisconsin Administrative Code, assuming that person spent 40 hours per week reading at a consistent rate of 300 words per minute. Utilities, food manufacturing, and chemical manufacturing are the top three most-regulated industries in Wisconsin, according to the report.
Law through administrative rule is one of the worst features of state government because the Legislature never has an opportunity to vote on the law. That is fundamentally unconstitutional, regardless of what the administrative rule is. If it’s a needed rule, the Legislature should vote on it.
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Matt Kittle reviews the proposed Foxconn agreement:
A new memo from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau details a hefty state commitment to the mammoth Foxconn economic development plan with a lengthy break-even schedule.
But the LFB acknowledges it has no way of accounting for all the potential positive economic impacts the proposed Foxconn manufacturing campus could bring.
The analysis, released Tuesday, was among state agency memos breaking down the fiscal impact of the proposed $3 billion in incentives tied to the estimated $10 billion project.
Foxconn would receive a total of $2.9 billion in tax credits over the 15-year lifetime of a specially created Electronics and Information Technology Manufacturing Zone (EITM) – if the world’s largest manufacturer of liquid-crystal display panels comes through on constructing its first North American plant in Wisconsin and fills all of the proposed 13,000 jobs, at an average annual salary of $53,875.
An incentives package bill introduced last week in the Assembly provides Foxconn with refundable tax credits for each job it creates paying between $30,000 and $100,000. The credit would be based on 17 percent of the company’s payroll in the EITM zone, for a total of up to $1.5 billion in tax benefits.
As the LFB points out, Foxconn plans to have about 1,000 permanent positions in Wisconsin this year (at an estimated payroll of $13.8 million), with plans to increase its workforce to 13,000 positions and a total annual payroll of $700 million by the beginning of 2021.
State payments of the payroll tax credit are estimated to begin in 2018-19, at $2.4 million, rising to $119.1 million annually between fiscal years 2023 and 2033. That assumes Foxconn’s workforce remains at 13,000 from 2021 through 2033.
And Foxconn would be eligible for a refundable credit of up to 15 percent of its capital expenditures in the zone. Aggregate payments for the capital tax refund could not top $1.35 billion. Credits would be paid from the state’s General Purpose Revenue appropriations.
State capital tax credit payments to Foxconn would total $192.9 million annually in fiscal years 2020 through 2026, according to LFB.
“The company would receive the full amount of credit, even if it has little or no Wisconsin income or franchise tax liability,” the LFB analysis states.
The state Department of Administration projects the “cost” of the refundable state tax credits under the incentives package would exceed the potential increased tax revenue until fiscal year 2032, when the last EITM payroll credit is paid.
But as project supporters note, the tax benefits wouldn’t exist without Foxconn building and hiring in Wisconsin. They call it a “pay-as-you-grow” economic development proposal.
In that vein, Foxconn and its contractors would save $139 million through a sales and use tax exemption, according to the LFB report.
“However, since it is highly unlikely that Foxconn would locate in the state without the incentives provided under the bill, this amount should not be viewed as a state revenue loss,” LFB notes.
In a Break-Even Analysis, the DOA projects the state wouldn’t begin making money on the Foxconn deal until 2042. The Fiscal Bureau notes such a timeline must be viewed cautiously.
“(A)ny cash-flow analysis that covers a period of nearly 30 years must be considered highly speculative, especially for a manufacturing facility and equipment that may have a limited useful life.”…
The Fiscal Bureau memo cautions that its analysis focuses on the impacts of the Foxconn project on the state treasury. It does not take into account the other “benefits to the state’s economy and residents.”
While Foxconn would receive up to $1.5 billion in capital expenditure tax credits and sales tax exemptions, the incentives would “induce private investment of $10 billion from Foxconn alone, for a leverage ratio of $6.70 of private investment for each $1 of public outlay. The payroll credit would spur a leverage ratio of 5.9 to 1. And those ratios climb higher when indirect and vendor-related jobs associated with the project are factored.
“Most state expenditures do not result in private investments of this nature,” the LFB report states. “The project would also provide greater employment opportunities for the state’s present and future workforce, and add a new sector to the state’s manufacturing economy.”
Then there are the trades jobs needed to construct a dozen or more buildings on the proposed 20 million-square-foot manufacturing footpad. DOA estimates peg an average annual employment of some 10,200 construction workers and equipment suppliers earning average total compensation of $59,600 during the four-year construction period. Total income is estimated at $2.4 billion.
Another 6,000 indirect and related jobs are estimated to be created during construction, with average compensation of $49,900, according the Fiscal Bureau report. The total increased state tax revenue – primarily income and sales taxes – associated with the construction period is estimated at nearly $190 million.
DOA estimates a total of 22,000 indirect jobs and those secondary positions (suppliers) supporting Foxconn’s operations will be created, with combined annual wages of $1.1 billion per year beginning in 2021.
“The way to judge this project is not by government revenues, not by government figures. It’s what it means to our overall economy,” said state Rep. Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee), chairman of the Assembly’s Jobs and Economy committee. The committee held a hearing on the bill last week.
Foxconn “will grow our GDP, it will have a tremendous impact on our economic activity in the state. A lot of people will benefit because of this incentives package. We have a situation where we will be attracting talent instead of losing it,” Neylon added. “It’s a mistake to think that government revenue is the end goal. The ultimate goal is economic benefit, not how much more state government can take in and spend.”
Neylon said his committee still plans to vote Thursday on the bill, with amendments. The lawmaker says he has received at least 50 amendment ideas on the legislation since the bill was introduced last Tuesday, from technical matters to more significant issues such wetland relocation.
“I think reading these new fiscal analyses reaffirms a lot of what we were told during the public hearing and what we were led to believe,” Neylon said. “It also exposes some areas we are working on to clean up or clarify or make sure there are safety nets in place within the language of the legislation.”
Facebook Friend Christopher Scott replies:
who is going to be the first Wisconsin Conservative blogger/ Radio show host to point out. That you have Democrats politicians who swore up and down how great of deal the Buck’s arena is, but are the same ones now telling us the FoxConn deal is bad. When the FoxConn deal has a higher return in our investment. I am waiting for SOMEONE, ANYONE in this state to knock that one out of the park right now. It’s right there for the taken. Show the world how slimy these democrats are.
Well, wait no more, Christopher. We’ll even throw in this graph comparing Foxconn and, perhaps, Foxconn Arena:
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Brigham Young University may not be known as a powerhouse journalism school. But given the state of journalism these days, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, BYU Magazine has interesting insights from its faculty and alumni about the state of journalism today from a more, well, flyover-country perspective than the navel-gazing you’re likely to read from the sophisticates on the coasts:
Journalism has a lofty goal—one epitomized by the career of R. John Hughes.
The emeritus BYU professor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his coverage of an attempted communist coup and its bloody aftermath in Indonesia. Over his career as a writer for and then editor of the Christian Science Monitor, he covered revolutions and interviewed world leaders.
“Journalism was almost like a religion to me, to get the story, and get it right, to help evince change,” Hughes says. “It’s a kind of love affair for most journalists, shining light in dark corners.”
Journalists call themselves the watchdogs, the truth seekers. The press is dubbed the Fourth Estate after all, the final check on all three branches of government. Democracy requires informed citizens; the press make up the informants. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” goes the new Washington Post tagline.
That’s the why of modern journalism.
The how—being objective, non-partisan—“is rather a new phenomenon in the history of news,” says Campbell.
It has always depended on who’s paying.
Wealthy traders and merchants underwrote the first news in the Americas, and it was all route intel. In the colonial period political parties footed the bill for most papers—party organs that were far more partisan and acrimonious than what we cry foul at today. It wasn’t until the penny-press era—the 1830s on—that a new funding model developed: scale up the circulation, then sell readers’ attention to advertisers. That advertising revenue could bring the cost of the paper down to something many could afford.
Writing to a mass audience, publishers began to recognize there was a market for real, honest news that could cross political divides and speak with a relatively neutral voice. This paved the way for professional journalism standards. And for most of the 20th century, it made newsrooms the information power brokers.
Then the internet smashed the model.
“For the last decade, we have seen a steady erosion of the advertising economy for newspapers,” says Campbell. That’s the nice way of saying it. Revenue streams have been gutted.
Department stores and auto malls, the go-to advertisers, cut back on ads, facing their own disruptions: e-commerce competition and recession. Craigslist happened to the classifieds. And reader eyeballs, once concentrated among a few media outlets, are now diverted to Facebook, YouTube, and that thing you just Googled—and the bulk of advertising has followed them.
As they say in the industry, the digital transition traded print dollars for digital dimes and, in turn, digital dimes for mobile pennies.
One thing is certain: it’s a fascinating time to study the news. Alum Seth C. Lewis (BA ’02) holds the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media at the University of Oregon and is a leading scholar on the digital transformation of journalism.
“We’ve gone from media monopoly to media disruption and ubiquity,” says Lewis. And in ubiquity, no one gets a sizable piece of the economic pie.
Lewis suggests that maybe the last century of advertising-based news subsidy—which fostered these objective, non-partisan notions—“was just a happy accident. Maybe instead we’re returning to other forms of funding and thinking about the news.” …
Jon M. Du Pre (’85), anchor of ABC’s KTBS 3 in Shreveport, Louisiana, used to pass a day creating stories for the 6 and the 10 o’clock news. Now it’s the 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10 o’clock—plus posting on five digital platforms and Facebook Live-ing throughout the gathering process.
“It’s sometimes physically impossible to . . . feed all those beasts,” he says. It’s the hardest job he’s had in 32 years in TV.
Gone is the production cycle where a reporter would work on a story all day, turn it in, and see it published the next morning. Event coverage has to be up immediately, even if it’s just three paragraphs, the rest written via updates.
Accuracy—or, at the very least, thoroughness—has become a casualty, contends Lewis. “You cannot have your news instantly and have it well done,” he says. “More content created by fewer people makes the likelihood for mistakes and problems greater.”
That’s the story at the news organizations that still exist. Countless others have been forced to close.
The hardest hit: local news, the most important news, in Campbell’s eyes. “That’s where we need watchdogs,” he says—most government money is spent locally.
“We’ve moved from deathwatch to life support,” Campbell says of the local-news survivors. Yet the equation remains: “To do in-depth—to give it context, to really understand a community—costs money.” The budgets for watchdogging, more and more, don’t exist.
And then there’s lost turf. A majority of Americans now get news from Facebook and the like, making social-media giants the new gatekeepers and distributors. In addition, the boundaries of the journalism profession are blurring: anyone with a Twitter account can disseminate news, and institutions of all sorts now post their own articles rather than leave their narratives to the press.
Lewis says this leaves consumers wading through an overabundance of sources. “News now populates spaces you might not have expected, and we haven’t really understood how to interpret news we see in those places. This has led a lot of people to throw up their hands and tune out, to say, ‘Because I can’t trust much of what I see, therefore I can’t trust anything.’”
Americans once took in news by appointment—making time for it at the breakfast table or watching the evening newscast before bed. Appointment reading fostered breadth—maybe a baseball story caught your eye, but you got bits on Iran and EPA regulation along the way.
“That used to be a great function of newspapers, the serendipity of falling into something,” says Edward L. Carter (BA ’96, JD ’03), director of the BYU School of Communications.
News consumption now is largely incidental. We seek it out less; our attention span for it is shorter. On a given day, it may be reduced to what pieces of journalism are trending in our social media streams. “And the stories that catch on social media are different,” says Sarah Cannon Weaver (BA ’94), editor of the Church News.
Incidental consumption online pits the news against the juggernauts of Internet clicks: cute babies, cat videos, and all the other stuff Facebook has deemed “news” to you. There have always been things competing for our attention—but never so many on one screen at one time.
In the fight to be heard, journalists now turn to search-engine optimization (SEO)—tagging every story with its most trend-worthy terms. They bend stories into clickbait.
It’s a trend that can’t be ignored, says D. Hunter Schwarz (BA ’12), coauthor of CNN’s Coverline, a politics–pop culture mash-up. “Your average person is not watching a bill progress,” says Schwarz. And so his newsletter and podcast weave Britney Spears and the Kardashians into the political coverage.
Because of the all-mighty click, story selection and presentation are changing: newsrooms are increasingly chasing the stuff we like.
“It’s eye-candy journalism,” says Campbell: sports, “list-icles,” the slideshow of 10 things. “The eyes stay with them a long time. They make money.”
It’s celebrity anything, says alumna Marti Johnson, a freelance reporter for the Associated Press and a C-SPAN announcer. “[Americans] just hoover up information on celebrities.”
Whatever it is, it represents a seismic shift in journalism. “We’ve gone from where news editors selected what they wanted the public to see to where now the public says, ‘No, this isn’t what I want to read about,’” says Weaver. “You can’t make people interested in city council. . . . We can’t thrust it upon them the way we used to.”
Further complicating the news mix: the fact that most traditional news outlets are now owned by publicly held corporations—companies that answer to stockholders. “They care about profit,” says journalism professor Dale L. Cressman (BA ’85, MA ’89), “not news.”
Advertisers can see in real time exactly what catches the audience’s eye, putting the press at the public’s mercy.
There’s no other way to say it, says Campbell: “SEO and analytics are driving a stake into the heart of journalism.”
Suspend the question of media bias for a moment (we’ll get there) and allow the journalists to turn the table:
“Are the consumers of the products we produce biased?” asks Du Pre.
At least on this point—in an America more polarized politically than at any point in recent history—the answer is clearly yes.
Du Pre says that no matter how straight the attempt, there is no longer a news topic that isn’t a lightning rod. “You do a story on crime, it turns into a political debate,” he says. “The environment? Political debate. Health? Somehow, it turns into a political debate.”
Meanwhile, for news outlets desperate for traffic to translate into ad revenue, polarization creates tempting target audiences.
“Some practitioners of journalism . . . have taken to an entirely different business model,” says Du Pre. “And that is ‘Which audience do we want to seek out?’”
Fox News, for example, set up shop as an alternative to mainstream media. A slew of outlets have taken root on the left and right. Where there used to be just a handful of TV and radio broadcasts, newspapers, and magazines driving the national news agenda, there are now scores of websites, each trying to carve out a niche and then pander to it relentlessly. For Fox and MSNBC, it seems to pay the bills.
This model is reinforced by—and fuels—another internet phenomenon: the echo chamber. The term describes how, in our online worlds, we are interacting more with the information we like and less with information that challenges us.
McKay A. Coppins (’10), who covers politics for the Atlantic, says many aren’t even seeking truth anymore—they’re seeking confirmation of their beliefs. “They can kind of ensconce themselves in an information and media bubble where that’s all they hear,” he says. “Whatever little media bubble you’re in is telling you the rest of the media is wrong.”
Some of this selective credulity is deliberate: readers tend to pick media teams and loyally drown out other news sources. Some of it, however, comes courtesy of social media and search engines, which get to know you better with every click. Based on your interests, views, and likes, Facebook algorithms serve up your Daily Me.
On your streams there is no equal airtime for different views. “These systems we interact with really have no function for saying, ‘Maybe that’s enough extremism for you today,’” says Lewis.
Research is digging into the effects of the social media echo chamber: we share stories without reading more than a headline, place more trust in who is sharing the story than who produced it, and clearly give our time to stories that reinforce our own views. …
The First Amendment is pretty clear that all can have their say, agree the experts. Carter says, “At BYU we teach the ‘marketplace of ideas,’”—the philosophy that embraces discordant voices under the premise that the best ideas rise to the top. “The function of journalism is to help us sift through them.”
But he says there’s a catch: “The marketplace ultimately depends on the wisdom of the people, that they won’t be deceived.”
It would be easier if bias were found only at outlets with an obvious bent. Bias seeps in across the board, in varying amounts, concede our experts.
But, they caution, it’s not as one-sided as we might think.
The claim that the mainstream media are liberal, says Cressman, first gained traction in the civil-rights-era South. “Southerners did not like national media coming in and reporting on segregation.” The liberal-media accusation was lodged then—and countless times since. More journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans, says Cressman (though even more identify as independent). But he suggests that what is judged as bias may be merely core journalistic values.
“Part of journalism’s ethos is giving voice to the voiceless, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” Cressman says. “Those can be perceived as liberal ideas.”
Also at play, says Coppins, are cultural and geographic biases. With the collapse of newspapers nationwide, there’s been a sort of coastal-ization of news; the national news, especially, is made in urban enclaves. “Readers and viewers increasingly don’t see their values represented,” says Coppins. “They increasingly feel like they are getting news from people who are sort of outside their world, and it can often feel condescending and patronizing.”
The quality of reporting in the mainstream media ultimately comes down to the individual reporter, says Campbell. And while the goal is to pursue truth as objectively as possible, our experts say journalists can’t help but approach the truth with their own predispositions.
“The whole idea of journalistic objectivity is a false god,” says Coppins. “No human being is truly objective.”
Though journalists cannot be impartial, their methods, like the scientific method, can, says Cressman. Through a rigorous discipline of verification and transparency, a consistent method of testing information, journalism can uncover not just facts, but the truth.
“The best we can do,” says Du Pre, “is practice journalism as best we can, telling every story in a way that’s true to the facts and fair to the people involved and the people who are impacted by that story. And then hope there are enough people who are enlightened enough that they recognize it when they see it—and then they demand it.”
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Today, this would be the sort of thing to embellish a band’s image, not to mention provide material for an entire segment of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” Not so in 1959, when four members of The Platters were arrested on drug and prostitution charges following a concert in Cincinnati when they were discovered with four women (three of them white) in what was reported as “various stages of undress.” Despite the fact that none of the Platters were convicted of anything, the Platters (who were all black) were removed from several radio stations’ playlists.
Speaking of odd music anniversaries: Today in 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the entire Beatles music library for more than $45 million.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 