A common theme throughout the early weeks of the Trump Presidency has been the media reporting, or lack thereof of accomplishments and controversy in the White House.
Much of the reporting has been based on anonymous leaks.
Let’s get two things clear. One, the news media doesn’t exist without anonymous sources. Two, the news media has become completely incapable of policing itself.
Without anonymous sources, the media is a collection of press releases. It only reports what people in government say. It only reports what people in government give them on the record. It is a by-the-book definition of journalism, which is to record a journal of events of the day.
The media hasn’t been satisfied with that role. The media has been called “The Fourth Estate” (a term from England, no less) because it sees its role in shaping policy rather than just reporting it.
To do that, you need to report things before they happen, not after they’re finished. That takes people willing to talk privately to the press without having their names in the newspaper.
Since journalists by and large see themselves just as involved in government decisions as elected officials, there will always be the motivation to get the “untold story”, to stop things and change direction of those in power.
But doesn’t that lead to spin, bias and “fake news?”
YES!
There is no such thing as an unbiased reporter. Every reporter, especially at the national level, has a bias and a network of sources who will talk anonymously. It is that bias, that hunger for involving oneself into the political process rather than just reporting on it, is pervasive in the press.
And that’s was fine when the media effectively policed itself.
Forty years ago, a reporter gets a tip from an anonymous source. Know when it makes print? Probably never. Unless the reporter found a second source, third source and sometimes more who corroborated the tip, the story was dead.
Often times anonymous sources were used to get an “on the record” comment in response. But the times when one anonymous source made a news story were rare, so rare that when the Washington Post’s reporting on Watergate was made up of wholly anonymous sources, other newspapers chided the Post for their shallowness.
But the Post wound up being right, and wound up inspiring thousands of people across the nation to be the next Woodward and Bernstein.
The race to get the story first accelerated after the birth of 24-hour news television and leaped to light speed with the internet, blogs and social media. It’s impossible for the media to self-police anymore. Even the news outlets that still decry the use of anonymously-sourced stories wind up re-reporting the stories of media outlets that don’t.
The problem with anonymous sources are that every last one of them has an angle. It’s either an ax to grind, an agenda to promote, or currying favor with press for future consideration. The press never has clean hands. No information is free of strings. A powerful government official is risking his job to give a reporter access to secret information, and he’s not doing so because he’s philanthropic.
That’s one of the most non-reported aspects of the media and anonymous sources. What is the media promising, implicitly or explicitly, in trade for the inside information? Future favorable coverage? Jobs after the source leaves the government? Frequently that question goes unanswered.
News moves so frequently that the media can no longer vet or corroborate stories like they used to. The hours before a newspaper deadline seems like an eternity today. Once a story is published somewhere, the rest of the media, regardless of their internal rules about sources, rush to report the story, basically trusting sources with which they never spoke or questioned.
Think about that. A news outlet could have very strict rules about sources for its own reporting, but can throw all those rules out the window if they just reprint or broadcast that “Newspaper X is reporting that…” based on sources they don’t even know.
What we have today is the result of that messy rush of journalism. When a news outlet reports a story based on anonymous sources that criticizes another story that was based on anonymous sources, you have a recipe for a clustermess. Watching reporters get into a “my anonymous sources are better than yours” tiff is disconcerting, at best.
And no one has a solution yet. The advocacy press and the speed of social media, citizen political sites and 24-hour news have combined to create a perfect storm with no discernible solution other than the media rediscovering its foundational responsibility to provide the public with a fair and honest representation of the truth with even hands and a respect for ethics.
I’m not holding my breath.