Читать книгу The Ethical Journalist - Gene Foreman - Страница 24

This textbook is intended to help prepare aspiring journalists to cope with the ethics issues of the digital age. Given the profound changes that occurred in the profession when consumers began getting their news on the internet, reviewing how those changes came about is worthwhile.

The global computer network known as the internet dates to the 1960s, but it did not become a part of everyday life until a technological breakthrough nearly three decades later. In 1989 the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Switzerland, created the World Wide Web – a name chosen over “the Mine of Information,” among other suggestions.⁶ The web allowed computers everywhere to retrieve information being stored in computers that would, in the new parlance, be called servers. The creation of the web was soon followed by the emergence of browsers, the software applications that simplified the computer connections. Berners-Lee developed the first browser in 1990, but Mosaic in 1993 was the first browser to become popular with the public.⁷ Collectively these developments launched an era of wireless world communications. Ordinary people soon would exchange messages, play games, shop for merchandise and services, watch sports events and videos, and enjoy other educational and recreational opportunities that could only be imagined before.⁸

Digital journalism rapidly gained in popularity among consumers of news. And no wonder: The internet matched radio and television’s speed; it could far exceed newspapers’ depth of content; and it added the unique dimension of an instantaneous conversation with the audience.

Consumer surveys confirm the increasing popularity of digital as a source of news (Fig. 1.1), mostly at the expense of print. In 2018, the Pew Research Center’s Journalism & Media Project found that 34 percent of US adults preferred getting the news online, second only to television (44 percent) and well ahead of radio (14 percent) and print (7 percent).⁹

Students reading this textbook have grown up with digital journalism, and that is how their generation predominantly receives the news. But, in the context of 400 years of journalism history, the digital era is a blink of the eye.

The internet’s most obvious effect on journalism has been to speed the way news is covered. In retrospect, the pace of newsgathering in the twentieth century seems almost casual. Newspapers had only a few daily deadlines, and for morning papers those deadlines were at night, hours after most of the news events had happened. Broadcast reporters usually worked toward a few scheduled newscasts. The only reporters who had a deadline every minute were those who worked for the wire services, whose far‐flung client newspapers might be going to press at any time of the day or night. Now, in the digital era, everybody is on deadline all the time.

The emphasis on speed, conveying an implicit invitation to skip crucial verification steps, is not without cost. A 2013 survey showed that three-fourths of US journalists thought “online journalism has sacrificed accuracy for speed.”¹⁰ To compound the problem, there are fewer journalists to cover the news today. Newspaper staffs, historically larger than those of broadcast outlets, have been hardest hit in the economic fallout resulting from news consumers’ migration to digital. So far, increases in digital jobs have only partly offset the steep declines in newspaper employment. The Pew Research Center estimated that net employment in US newsrooms declined from 114,000 to 88,000 between 2008 and 2019, a reduction of 23 percent.¹¹

The digital revolution occurred only a few years after cable television and its proliferation of news channels, notably CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, had fragmented the news spectrum. In the earlier era, when ABC, CBS, and NBC’s evening newscasts were dominant, average Americans consumed a lot of news, either in broadcast or in print. Although some Americans are consuming even more news today, the media scholar Johanna Dunaway wrote in 2016 that in a broader sense the “high-choice media system has been disruptive”:

It gives people the opportunity to find like-minded information outlets. Exposure to partisan news serves to reinforce bias. … For those who choose to reside in “echo chambers” that tell them what they want to believe, the effect is opinion polarization that can include outright disdain for “the other side.”12

The tendency of news consumers to retreat into those “echo chambers” – favoring news reporting that caters to their biases – has made these consumers susceptible to disinformation, or deliberately planted phony news. Perhaps journalists can help news consumers learn the techniques of “news literacy” to test the authenticity of what they are reading, watching, and hearing in the news spectrum.

As consumers have gone online for news, they have diverged in ways that present challenges for the journalists trying to inform them.

One trend has been the attraction of news on social media. The Pew Research Center found in 2020 that about one in five Americans get their political news primarily on social media – an audience similar in size to cable television’s (Fig. 1.2). After administering a current events quiz, Pew concluded that those who depend on social media “tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories like the coronavirus epidemic and the presidential election … [and] to be less knowledgeable about these topics.”¹³

Another finding by Pew is that nearly twice as many Americans get their news on mobile devices – cell phones and tablets – as on desktops and laptops (Fig. 1.3).¹⁴ This too is a problem for news outlets trying to reach these consumers. “Mobile is different,” Johanna Dunaway wrote, and it is “not as news-friendly.” The mobile screen is smaller, connection speeds and load times can be a burden, and accessing the news can result in extra costs that users may not be willing or able to pay. “A conceivable result,” Dunaway wrote, “is a widening disconnect between those who are politically interested and those who are not.”¹⁵