Abstract
What could be more useful in this era of lightning-speed alerts, Tweets, bloviating windbags and nonjournalist-generated journalism than a book that breaks down and analyzes what passes for “the news,” these days? What could be more helpful than a toolkit for taking apart these pieces of “journalism” to determine their veracity and value?
News veterans Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tempt us to believe that their book—Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Bloomsbury 2010)—is just what consumers need and crave in this new era of news delivery.
The authors of the seminal “Elements of Journalism,” used in many journalism classrooms, Kovach and Rosenstiel lay out in understandable ways “the tradecraft of skepticism,” to enable news consumers to make more conscious and intelligent decisions about what to believe about “the news,” in all its guises.
Published in 2010 and given a new afterword in 2011, the book springs from the authors’ deep understanding of the ways news delivery and consumption have changed since the golden era of three networks—the good old days when Walter Cronkite told us what was worth worrying about, newspaper readership was strong, and there were few alternatives for being informed.
Consumers of news now have access to news and information virtually anywhere, anytime, and the quality of the sourcing of that news most of the time is difficult, if not impossible, for the average person to assess. The book addresses that media literacy deficit and is based on the assumption that readers want to know what’s true and need only be trained to become their own editors, capable of separating the useless from the useful. This, in turn, will make them better citizens, helping journalism meet its fundamental responsibility of informing the citizenry.
The method is fairly straightforward and begins with a primer for evaluating the kind of content the news consumer is encountering; the traditional journalism of verification, which “puts the highest value on accuracy and context”; the journalism of assertion, the 24/7 news culture begun by CNN, which values quantity over quality and is, often to the detriment of the public, “less of a filter and more of a conduit”; the journalism of affirmation, which tells its audience members what they want to hear and is rewarded with high-advertising revenue (think Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz); and interest-group journalism, which looks like news but is funded by special interests rather than news organizations.
These models are useful for laying the foundation for classroom discussions about news content for journalism majors. The authors do a particularly good job of laying bare the duplicity of the purveyors of the journalism of affirmation: Rush Limbaugh, the emerging media personality of the 1990s, may not have initially claimed to be a journalist. ‘I’m proud to be an entertainer. This is showbiz. At the same time, I believe everything I say,’ he has said among various self-descriptions of his role.’ But his followers in the new century, from Hannity to Olbermann, sometimes have claimed journalistic mantles.
There’s also the problem of blur in sourcing, a topic the authors take up in what is probably the book’s most useful chapter for journalism educators, especially those who teach reporting. With so many cooks in the information kitchen—people with access to information, smart phones, and Twitter accounts—the challenge for educators is to teach future reporters and editors the best ways to evaluate information piece by piece, skeptically and with a hard-nosed resistance to the pressures of speed and competition. “Where Did This Come From?” is, indeed, possibly the most important question an editor asks, or a good reporter asks herself, when a story is being born.
But is it a question the average news consumer can be taught to ask himself, as the self-editor the authors hope to create? That’s a far greater challenge and one of the weaknesses of the book. It doesn’t make a case that the average news consumer wants to know or even cares what’s true. On social media, people group themselves with their like-minded friends, acquaintances, and social contacts. In their story selection as self-editors, many news consumers search for only the topics they’re interested in reading about. They may have already created their own tradecraft of skepticism: one that disbelieves everything that doesn’t come from one or two trusted friends (who may themselves be utterly unreliable, terrible editors by any measure).
As a supplemental text for media literacy, reporting, and editing courses, “Blur” offers some much-needed clarity. But the book’s other intended audience is the average news consumer, and there it falls somewhat short both in substance and in style. The book is a little dry and, though engaging enough for journalism insiders, it would have benefited from more lively and recent examples and a fuller discussion of the social media effect. One can’t help but dream of “an app for that,” a PolitiFact-like tool for helping the news consumer suss out the snake oil. The authors make a better case for the need of such a tool than the desire for one.