HOW
JOURNALISTS
AND THE PUBLIC
SHAPE OUR
DEMOCRACY
From Social Media
and “Fake News”
to Reporting
Just the Facts
HOW JOURNALISTS
AND THE PUBLIC SHAPE
OUR DEMOCRACY
From Social Media and “Fake News”
to Reporting Just the Facts
Written and Researched by
Marcus E. Howard
Grady College of Journalism
and Mass Communication,
University of Georgia
.
Georgia Humanities
Atlanta, Georgia
© by Georgia Humanities Council
All rights reserved. Published in .
3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Marcus Howard would like to thank the University of Georgia Main
Library in Athens, where much of the research was conducted, as well
as the following media experts and professionals who provided sub-
stantial assistance: Carolyn Carlson, Kennesaw State University pro-
fessor of communication and retired journalism program director;
Nathaniel J. Evans, University of Georgia assistant professor of adver-
tising; Keith L. Herndon, University of Georgia professor of prac-
tice in journalism and director of the James M. Cox Jr. Institute for
Journalism, Innovation, Management and Leadership; Peter Charles
Hoer, University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor of
History; Janice Hume, the Carolyn McKenzie and Don E. Carter
Chair for Excellence in Journalism at the University of Georgia;
Monica Kaufman Pearson, retired WSB-TV Atlanta news anchor;
Jonathan Peters, University of Georgia assistant professor of journal-
ism and communication law; Adam Ragusea, journalist in residence
and visiting assistant professor at the Mercer University Center for
Collaborative Journalism; Christina C. Smith, Georgia College assis-
tant professor of mass communication; and Sonja R. West, the Otis
Brumby Distinguished Professor of First Amendment Law at the
University of Georgia.
Thanks also to Kelly Caudle of Georgia Humanities and Lauri
Strauss of the Atlanta Press Club for their work on the project, and to
Georgia-Pacic for printing this book.
Publication of How Journalists and the Public Shape Our Democracy
has been made possible through a collaboration between Georgia
Humanities, the Atlanta Press Club, and the Grady College of Journalism
4
and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. The Georgia
First Amendment Foundation has also provided support.
This media literacy guide has been produced as part of the “Democracy
and the Informed Citizen” initiative, administered by the Federation of
State Humanities Councils. The initiative seeks to deepen the public’s
knowledge and appreciation of the vital connections between democ-
racy, the humanities, journalism, and an informed citizenry.
We thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous
support of this initiative and the Pulitzer Prizes for their partnership.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Monica Kaufman Pearson
The Importance of Journalism in a Democracy
The History of “Fake News”
How “Fake News” Is Legally Allowed
Opinion, Bias and Leaks
Native Advertising
The Internet and Social Media
The Absence of Local News
The Public’s Responsibility in an Informed Democracy
Works Consulted
Look It Up! Resources for Verifying What You Read
7
FOREWORD
What is your source for news? That answer can vary according to
your age. Generally, millennials rely on social media like Twitter and
Instagram, blogs and podcasts. Many baby boomers still have the
newspaper delivered to their homes or online subscriptions. Others,
such as Gen-Xers, fall in between and may prefer as their news source
all-news radio, talk radio, local news or national news programs on
cable and network TV.
Social media, blogs and traditional news sources all provide infor-
mation and news but determining what is fact and what is fake has
become a major concern. Journalism’s old “Five ‘W’s” of providing the
“Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where” and “Why” of a story is not enough
anymore; add an “F” for fact or ction.
Because of the many news sources available these days, people tend
not to sample them all, but listen to, watch and read those sources
that feed into and support their point of view. When what is reported
rubs the wrong way, some people question the validity of the story and
others go to the extreme and question the place of a free press in a
democracy.
That’s why this media literacy guidebook is so important. It is a win-
dow to the ever-changing world of news, including how news is cre-
ated, the legalities involved in online content and how social media
empowers citizen journalists, whose stories sometimes end up in
mainstream media and lead to social movements.
Most important, I hope this guidebook will help you to view, listen
to and read news in a way that allows you to analyze the information
you receive. Interpret it clearly and logically. Then evaluate it before
you share it or take action.
8
Hopefully, what is learned from this guidebook will help you under-
stand and support freedom of the press and its role in maintaining our
democracy.
It is perfectly clear to me that without freedom of the press, there can
be an abuse of power and an abuse of people. What you don’t know can
hurt you. That is the lesson I’ve learned over my years as a reporter
in radio, newspaper and television.
The role and responsibility of reporters and news organizations is to
be where citizens can’t always be and to tell stories that inform, enter-
tain and educate. We uncover stories about corruption, crime, mal-
feasance, pain and suering. We should always tell the story through
the voice and eyes of the people who are aected, showing humanity.
Done correctly, news stories can lead and have led to changes in laws,
policies and lives.
The primary role of media is to provide information to help people
make decisions about their lives and the lives of others. This requires
freedom to do our job, but we must do it professionally and cor-
rectly, as outlined in the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional
Journalists. It states, “Public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice
and the foundation of democracy.” There are four principles to be fol-
lowed: “Seek truth and report it; minimize harm; act independently
and be accountable and transparent.”
I’ll sum it up another way, using the slogans from local TV stations.
It is media’s responsibility to be “dedicated, determined and depend-
able; holding the powerful accountable; giving you coverage you can
count on.” We must be fair, balanced and accurate; proactive and less
reactive; thorough and persistent and always keep in mind the needs
of the reader, listener and viewer.
That’s our job, but your job is just as important. We need you to care
and be involved. Reading and then using what you’ll learn from How
Journalists and the Public Shape Our Democracy is a beginning.
Monica Kaufman Pearson
Retired WSB-TV Atlanta news anchor
June ,
9
THE IMPORTANCE
OF JOURNALISM IN
A DEMOCRACY
In January Thomas Jeerson, while serving as minister to
France in Paris as other Founding Fathers worked to create a new
Constitution for the United States of America, wrote an acquaintance
back home a letter in which he expressed his thoughts about journal-
ism in a democracy: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should
have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a gov-
ernment, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
One hundred and seventy-ve years later, President John F. Kennedy
was asked by NBC, during a December interview, whether he was
as avid a news reader as he had been before entering the White House.
Kennedy replied, “Even though we never like it, and even though we
wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t
any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a
very, very active press.”
Neither Jeerson nor Kennedy were immune to press criticism
in their respective eras. Both men had experience, however, ghting
against countries where questioning those in power could lead to
dire consequences. As their quotations suggest, each understood the
importance of having a public voice to speak truth to power.
The term “Fourth Estate”—often attributed to th-century British
statesman Edmund Burke, who praised the mission of the press gal-
lery during a parliamentary debate—refers to the press serving as the
fourth branch of democratic government, keeping citizens informed
and observing the political process as an additional check on govern-
ment. This role as the watchdog of power is enshrined in the First
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which, to paraphrase, says
Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press.
10
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black rearmed this principle in New
York Times Co. v. United States, a landmark case on the First
Amendment. “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the
free press the protection it must have to fulll its essential role in our
democracy,” Black wrote in his decision. “The press was to serve the
governed, not the governors.”
Without the freedom to question and report on the actions of gov-
ernment, journalism risks becoming a tool to advance the agenda of
those in power. As the American Press Institute (API) notes, journal-
ism—impartial and independent of political and economic interests—
is indispensable to democratic societies. Journalism’s rst loyalty is to
citizens.
The API, a nonprot educational organization, provides a straight-
forward denition of journalism: the activity, and product, of gather-
ing, assessing, creating and presenting news and information. Its most
important function is to convey information through accuracy, fair-
ness, balance and transparency. In conveying information, journalism
provides transparency in a representative democracy. If the people do
indeed rule in a democracy, then they should be informed about the
decisions made on their behalf.
A Journalist’s Role in a Free Society
In director Frank Capra’s The Power of the Press, a American silent
lm starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fairbanks plays an ambitious cub
reporter stuck on his newspaper’s weather desk. One day he catches a
politician’s daughter leaving the home of the murdered district attor-
ney. Stop the presses! The next day’s headline reads: “Candidate’s
Daughter Involved in Murder of District Attorney.”
The tragic story is the type of scoop that can catapult a journalist’s
career. But the newsroom’s newest star reporter eventually learns he
got the story wrong. He then seeks a retraction of the story, works to
restore the woman’s reputation, and in true Hollywood fashion, nds
the real killer.
The lm’s underlying lesson is a core principle of journalism—jour-
nalists must be committed to doing the research and seeking the truth.
11
It is the foundation upon which all else in the profession is built.
In their book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should
Know and the Public Should Expect, rst published in , journal-
ists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel pointed to the truth as the rst
obligation of journalism. What they termed “journalistic truth” is more
than accuracy. It is a “sorting-out process that takes place between
the initial story and the interaction among the public, newsmakers,
and journalists,” wrote Kovach and Rosenstiel. “This rst principle of
journalism—its disinterested pursuit of truth—is ultimately what sets
journalism apart from other forms of communication.”
In other words, “journalistic truth” is not an all-knowing or absolute
truth, but an ongoing process subject to revision as facts are assembled
and veried. It is the most fair and reliable account of known facts.
This helps to explain the importance of transparency to journalism.
There are limitations to all journalism; and journalists, whenever pos-
sible, should share their sources and methods to allow audiences to
form their own conclusions. It has been said that a journalist should
be a seeker of knowledge, not its guardian.
Thus, Kovach and Rosenstiel explained, journalism’s primary com-
mitment is to citizens; the public must know that it is being served,
not exploited.
Transparency allows the public to contribute to the process of nding
the truth. As Kovach and Rosenstiel observed, the search for truth is
made “more powerful when journalists and the public are knit together
in a way that mixes the structure of traditional journalism techniques
and authority with the power of the networked community.”
For example, after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in pub-
lished its rst story about suspicious test scores in Atlanta schools,
some teachers contacted the newspaper to report cheating at their
schools. That information proved valuable, as it led journalists to sus-
pect a widespread problem, which led to additional investigative work
and stories.
In his book, What Are Journalists For?, Jay Rosen of New York
University recounted the eorts of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in
Columbus, Georgia, to encourage more residents to get involved in civic
activities in the late s. After an impressive series of articles about
12
the city’s challenges and its future were published with little public
response, the newspaper decided to do something drastic. Employees
hosted town meetings and private gatherings to bring the racially seg-
regated community together. Meanwhile, the newspaper continued to
report on the shortcomings of the city’s agenda for the future. In turn,
residents used the reporting as a springboard for further discussions
and action.
Not everyone, especially outside journalists, were comfortable with
the direct way in which the newspaper had inserted itself into the city’s
political aairs. After all, journalists are supposed to cover the news
and not become part of the story.
While the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer case is an atypical example of
journalists and citizens working together for the public good, it gets at
the heart of a long debate about the extent to which journalists should
become involved in the communities they cover. Should they be far-
removed observers of news and events or actively engaged community
partners?
An advocate of cooperation between journalists and citizens, Rosen
gave an empathetic response to this question, if perhaps not an
endorsement.
“Behind the Ledger-Enquirer’s initiative was also a moral proposi-
tion: that it is wrong for communities to drift without direction when
the future is closing in on them,” he wrote. “In a democracy, the remedy
for this wrong is politics, undertaken by citizens prepared to deliberate
and to act. To get this kind of activity going was the cause the newspa-
per took up.”
Changing Expectations of Journalism
Around the year , Johann Gutenberg of Germany invented the
movable type printing press. This transformative mechanical device
allowed more books to be produced at lower cost. No longer would
published works—and knowledge by extension—be possessions solely
of the rich and powerful.
In the New World, newspapers played a critical role in informing
American colonists about life inside and outside their provinces.
13
Readers of Georgia’s rst newspaper, the Georgia Gazette, could nd
information in its four pages about the murder of an overseer on
statesman John Milledge’s Savannah plantation, maritime-related
news, a steamy court case in Boston, the king’s latest proclamation
and plenty of advertising. It was rst published in Savannah in
by a Scotsman named James Johnston. In pre-revolutionary America,
Johnston also served as royal printer. He somehow managed to be
the government’s ocial printer, while printing news viewed as unfa-
vorable to the government, such as opposition to Britain’s Stamp Act
of .
“The most likely conjecture is that Johnston realized he must print
what his readers wanted,” wrote Louis Grith and John Talmadge in
their book, Georgia Journalism: 1763-1950. “He saw no inconsis-
tency in attempting both jobs.”
Even today, the press is tasked with communicating the policies
of the government to inform the public and scrutinizing the govern-
ment’s decisions with informed analysis as part of its job as a watchdog
of power.
Journalism scholars David Sloan and Julie Williams made the case
in their book, The Early American Press, 1690-1783, that colonial
Americans had more sophisticated expectations of the press than what
many historians give them credit for. That newspapers might pick a
side in a public controversy did not seem to bother them as much as
extreme viewpoints, argued Sloan and Williams. This, they proposed,
was because Americans understood the written word as an important
instrument for persuasion. “One of the fundamental assumptions of
early Americans was that the press should be closely involved with the
concerns of society, rather than being at a professional distance, as it
is today,” they wrote.
After around , journalism became highly partisan and mainly fea-
tured essays and letters about politics, Michael Schudson of Columbia
University said in a scholarly article in the journal Media, Culture
& Society. That began to change in the early s. “In the s, as
both political combat and commercial competition increased, leading
urban dailies began to hire reporters to gather news,” wrote Schudson.
“With the coming of the commercially minded ‘penny papers’ of the
14
s, reporters covered local news as never before, especially news
from the police and the courts.”
By the late th century, many cheap penny newspapers—no lon-
ger dependent on political patronage—practiced “yellow journal-
ism,” which emphasized sensationalism over facts to sell newspapers
to mass audiences. Target audiences included new immigrants who
could more easily understand cartoons and simple English words.
But by the s, political partisanship, sensationalism and yellow
journalism had also taken a toll, and the trustworthiness of journal-
ists suered for it, said Leonard Ray Teel, a Georgia State University
media historian, in his book, The Public Press, 1900-1945: The
History of American Journalism. The press began to adopt the idea
that facts alone were insucient for an increasingly skeptical public.
Furthermore, the growth of public relations and wartime propa-
ganda (in which journalists participated) around this time convinced
many journalists to see that facts can be subjective and do not sim-
ply speak for themselves, said Schudson in his book, Origins of
the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions: Studies in the History of
American Journalism and American Law, 1830-1940. In response,
newspapers added more signed bylines on stories, emphasized explain-
ing the meaning of news, put events in context and created political
columnists to help audiences understand complicated issues better,
said Schudson.
More important, journalism began the adoption of the concept of
objectivity as an ideal. A useful denition of objectivity, provided by
Schudson, is the “view that one can and should separate facts from
values.” Facts, he proposed, can be understood as assertions that can
be independently validated, while values can be viewed as conscious or
unconscious preferences for what the world should be.
As in other industries at the time, including professional baseball
and the movie industry, journalism began adopting industry-wide
professional and ethical codes to raise standards and avoid any gov-
ernment regulation, according to Teel. He said it was believed that
public criticism and professional condemnation were deterrents for
journalism misconduct.
15
In the American Society of Newspaper Editors created an
ethics code that addressed nine areas: responsibility; press freedom;
independence; sincerity, truthfulness and accuracy; impartiality; fair
play and decency. The Society of Professional Journalists adopted the
same code three years later. State press associations multiplied, as well
as journalism programs at colleges and universities, which numbered
by , according to Teel. Journalism had matured from a voca-
tion into a profession.
An Adversarial Relationship
In the s Martin Linsky and other researchers at Harvard University
examined the press’s inuence on federal policymaking. Through hun-
dreds of surveys and dozens of interviews with government ocials and
journalists, they found that the press had a signicant impact on policy.
In one of six case studies they reviewed President Jimmy Carter’s
decision to stop production of the neutron bomb after a
Washington Post front page story by reporter Walter Pincus described
the bomb’s capacity to kill humans without destroying the buildings.
Other media outlets picked up the story. Following international out-
rage, Carter scrapped plans for the bomb.
“It may not be possible to prove that the Pincus story killed the neu-
tron bomb, but without his story, there might have been no issue at all,”
Linsky wrote in his related book, Impact: How the Press Aects
Federal Policymaking.
The press and government have distinct roles in society but share
a common interest to serve the public. How they do that can create
tensions between the two institutions. The push and pull over the dis-
closure of information between the press and government has led to it
being described as an adversarial relationship.
In informing the public, the press regularly exercises its constitu-
tional right to serve as a check on government. In creating policies,
the government sometimes relies on the press to communicate ideas.
Understandably, ocials also want to control the messages being
communicated.
16
In reviewing Linsky’s book, journalist Edward Hawley wrote in the
Chicago Tribune that while this tension suggests the relationship is
adversarial, day-to-day interactions between journalists and govern-
ment ocials are not necessarily strained. “Wary respect might be a
better generalization,” he suggested.
Since the birth of public relations in the early th century, journal-
ists have viewed press agents for governments and businesses with sus-
picion, said Schudson, the Columbia professor. Newspapers that had
once “fought against ‘the interests’ now depended on them for hand-
outs,” he wrote in Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions,
and added, “The publicity agents played no favorites, protected their
employers from direct contact with reporters, and turned news into a
policy rather than an event, a constant stream rather than eddies and
rapids and whirlpools.”
The founder of modern public relations is widely considered to be
Ivy Lee, who handled press relations for the Pennsylvania Railroad
and oil titan John D. Rockefeller at a time when many corporations
didn’t feel the need to answer to the public. A native Georgian who
was educated at Emory College and Princeton University, and worked
for three New York newspapers, Lee opened his own agency around
, and remained committed to the ideals of journalistic integrity,
according to Michael Turney of Northern Kentucky University. In
Lee issued his inuential “Declaration of Principles,” in which
he alluded to transparency and adherence to facts in supplying the
“press and public of the United States prompt and accurate informa-
tion concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public
to know about.”
Carolyn Carlson, former director of Kennesaw State University’s jour-
nalism program, has studied the challenges today’s journalists face in
obtaining public information and believes the government has strayed
far from Lee’s original advice. Carlson, a former journalist and political
press secretary, has conducted several national surveys of journalists
and public information ocers (PIOs) that indicate government agen-
cies are dedicated to not only providing information but also ensuring
that stories journalists report reect positively on them.
17
Since the turn of the century, Carlson said, a convergence of trends
has led to concern that government PIOs have gained the upper hand
in censoring the messages going to the public to hide the negative
and promote the positive. “The news media, charged by our Founding
Fathers with being the watchdogs over government with the power of
freedom of the press, have been stied by a sharp downturn in adver-
tising dollars that has decimated reporting ranks and left the few
remaining reporters with little time to counter the propaganda cam-
paigns,” she said.
“Meanwhile, the government, which had hardly any press ocers
years ago, has created a large public relations arm, with every agency at
every level having a public information oce with multiple PIOs who
are hired by the political head of the agency with instructions to make
the agency look good, as well as to inform the public.”
The ideal situation, Carlson proposes, would be for reporters to be
transparent with the public when they are able to freely report on issues
with input from a variety of government sources, and most important,
when their stories are hindered by government ocials.
The federal government, states and District of Columbia do have
laws, commonly called sunshine laws, which require public agencies to
respond to records requests and hold certain meetings in public. These
laws are meant to ensure government accountability. Without these
regulations, many news stories would not have been possible.
Following reports by the Savannah Morning News, Georgia’s attor-
ney general in determined the Savannah City Council had violated
the state’s sunshine laws by holding closed-door meetings with job
candidates during its city manager search. The person the city eventu-
ally hired later resigned after months, following a series of reports
by the newspaper that utilized sunshine laws to unearth numerous
violations and costly failures.
In the Macon Telegraph newspaper in Macon, Georgia, pub-
lished a list of stories it would not have been able to report without
sunshine laws. Story topics included the public school system’s pur-
chase of technology equipment and services without competitive bids,
an abandoned house that racked up pages of code violations thus
18
illustrating government red tape problems and the circumstances
surrounding the deaths of three Robins Air Force Base airmen in
Okinawa, Japan.
So, what does this mean for the public? It means news consumers
must be as skeptical as ever of stories about government that appear
to be based only on statements from agency news releases and spokes-
persons, Carlson said. She advises news consumers to look for inves-
tigative stories that go beyond press releases and inform the public
about what is really going on. And demand more from your elected
ocials, Carlson added.
Press Criticism in a Democracy
In his seminal book, Public Opinion, which provides a critical
look at democracy, Walter Lippmann wrote, “All the reporters in the
world working all the hours of the day could not witness all the hap-
penings in the world.” Of course, journalists are not crystal ball read-
ers. Lippmann’s statement was used to support his assertion that the
press is incapable of performing the Fourth Estate role as a watchdog
of power and provider of truth. He was skeptical that journalists could
distinguish between what was news and what was the truth. He was
also concerned that the press was being manipulated by government
and corporations.
Lippmann was an editor and what is now known as a media critic.
Media criticism is essential to defending the integrity of journalism
against the claims Lippmann raised nearly a hundred years ago, which
are still relevant. Press criticism holds the press accountable. It acts as
a shield against censorship and what media critic James W. Carey once
called “media’s own power and illusions.”
There is, however, a dierence between press criticism and attacks
on media, Juliette De Maeyer, a University of Montreal media scholar,
warned in a article for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
Responsible press criticism, she wrote, speaks to “concerns about the
role of media in public life, misinformation, and the interplay between
media, politics, and business—but also understands that recrimination
19
and denunciation are not enough.” In other words, De Maeyer said
that press criticism tries to “hold the press accountable—just like any
form of power—while being more than merely adversarial, vitriolic, or
admonitory.”
Some news organizations employ internal critics to hold themselves
accountable. The job of a public editor, also called ombudsman, is to
serve as a representative or advocate on behalf of a news organization’s
readership or audience.
Since rst appearing in at Louisville’s Courier-Journal and
the Louisville Times, said Mike Ananny of the University of Southern
California, these positions have gradually been cut. Media executives
argue that the internet allows readers and audiences to express con-
cerns directly to management at news organizations.
The Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, a former
New York Times public editor, disagreed. “That’s not the same thing as
having an experienced journalist able to go to the top people and get
some answers,” she said in a interview with Harvard.
Adam Ragusea, a journalist in residence and visiting assistant pro-
fessor at Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism in
Macon, is himself an internal critic of public radio. Media criticism,
Ragusea argues, is needed to combat the growing distrust of journal-
ism to which De Maeyer alluded. Much of that distrust, he suggests, is
fomented by those who would prot from public ignorance and mis-
apprehension. But he adds that journalists have earned some of that
distrust through their own bad habits.
“At this moment in history, constructive media criticism is more
valuable than ever, both to guide journalists through the journey of
critical self-reection they must brave to win back the public’s con-
dence,” Ragusea said, “and also to help the public distinguish between
legitimate complaints about journalism and nefarious attacks on the
press that are designed to obscure the truth.”
Ragusea said the internet has empowered people to scrutinize jour-
nalism like never before and much journalism—including work by
reputable news organizations—is not holding up to that scrutiny as
well as it should. For example, he pointed to a New York Times article
20
published on May , , which reported that a senior White House
ocial said if a peace talk between President Donald Trump and
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were to be held, holding it on June
would be impossible. But a transcript of the ocial’s remarks pub-
lished by other news outlets showed that while the ocial expressed
concerns, he did not say holding the meeting would be impossible.
This error opened the door to criticism and other allegations from the
White House.
Jill Abramson, a former New York Times executive editor, has taken
issue with the current tone of journalism, especially that of her former
colleagues when they appear on social media or cable TV, which she
fears borders on personal opinion. “What worries me is that in adopt-
ing all the conventions of the internet, some of the traditional rules
that have served the paper well will be overlooked,” Abramson wrote
in a Columbia Journalism Review article.
“This doesn’t mean holding back stories, mincing words, or publish-
ing bland journalism that equates both sides or makes false equiva-
lencies. It means not taking cheap shots, not publishing biased head-
lines (I’ve been keeping a collection of them), and not overreaching,
which undermines the Times’s authority and makes people dismiss its
coverage.”
News consumers might wonder why journalists would need to hear
critiques from professional media critics, rather than from their audi-
ence, said Ragusea. His answer is that working journalists cannot be
expected to sift through all the arguments, noise and harassment they
are apt to receive. Instead, they should rely on trusted experts to point
them in the right direction.
“Good media critics call out bad reporting wherever they see it,
regardless of ideological backdrop,” said Ragusea. “They work to
empower all audiences to be savvier consumers of all news. Most
importantly, they oer their criticism as a means to help journalists
improve, not as a means to discredit and destroy journalism.”
21
THE HISTORY
OF “FAKE NEWS”
On July , , during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a pipe
bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and
injuring others. Richard Jewell, a security guard, had spotted a sus-
picious backpack and managed to help evacuate the area as the explo-
sion occurred. Initially hailed as a hero, Jewell was identied days later
by media as the focus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI)
probe of the bombing. Jewell was never charged for the bombing,
however, and the FBI later cleared him as a suspect.
Before Jewell was cleared, the hero-turned-villain story was covered
intensely by the throng of media from around the world who were
in town for the international games, and especially by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution and CNN, both based in Atlanta, and NBC,
which had exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. Was this a case
of so-called fake news? The short answer is no.
The media coverage all but certainly inuenced public perceptions
of Jewell as a possible criminal, even though he was only discussed
internally by authorities as one of several people of interest and never
charged in the case. Although the journalists who reported the story
may have gone to print without thoroughly verifying their sources and
the facts, they did not intentionally get the story wrong.
In Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to the attack.
Ronald Ostrow, a journalist and educator, wrote a Columbia
University case study of the story’s coverage in which he claimed there
is no excuse for misreporting facts. “Maintaining high standards of
accuracy, fairness and balance under pressure is the essential of pro-
fessional journalism, just as life-and-death situations are the daily
norm for surgeons,” Ostrow wrote.
22
Bob Steele, a journalism ethics scholar, was more direct in his
assessment for the Poynter Institute, a nonprot research organiza-
tion. “The watchdog was wearing blinders,” he wrote. Exercising trans-
parency about what was veriably known and unknown may have gone
far in mitigating the press’s assumptions and speculations.
What Is “Fake News”?
A larger issue the Olympic bombing case raised is trustworthiness. It’s
important as a critical consumer of news to recognize that the jour-
nalists who covered the story did not fabricate information, however
imprecise it was. Reporting mistakes are not the same as lies. Those
journalists in Atlanta did not engage in “fake news.” We must not
forget that journalists are humans who are prone to make mistakes.
When that occurs, journalists have a professional duty to admit errors
and correct the record as soon as possible. At stake is not only the rep-
utation of those involved but also the condence of the public.
As Ostrow indicated, there is a lot of pressure for media to “own” a
story, that is, to be the rst to report breaking news and new develop-
ments. Undoubtedly, the Atlanta-based media outlets felt more pres-
sure because the Olympic bombing incident occurred in their back-
yard, so to speak.
While some journalists erred in their initial reporting, they did so
while making good-faith attempts to nd out the truth about a signi-
cant and dangerous matter, which the public had a right to know.
There has been much discussion about “fake news,” a controversial
term based on the faulty premise that mainstream journalists report
misinformation in order to deceive. The use of the term became polit-
ically charged in the lead-up to the presidential election, when
it was regularly employed to question news reports from traditional
news organizations. “Fake news” is a misnomer, because unlike
news, it is not information supported by facts. Some communication
experts believe the term should not be used at all. Claire Wardle, exec-
utive director of First Draft, a nonprot research group at Harvard
University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy,
23
argues that specic words should be used instead, such as “misinfor-
mation” to describe mistakes, or “disinformation” to refer to deliber-
ately false information.
“It’s being used as a weapon against organizations like CNN and
others,” Wardle told CNN in a interview. “When it’s being used
as a weapon against the news industry, and it’s just being co-opted, we
have to think much more carefully about the power of language. And
it’s damaging the industry. The free press is what we stand for.”
It is critical to understand what “fake news” is and what it is not,
because it can mean dierent things to dierent people. America’s
trust in news media peaked at percent in , following import-
ant investigative journalism about Watergate, a political scandal that
resulted from a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the
Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the Vietnam War, accord-
ing to Gallup polling. Those stories inspired a generation of journalists
who wanted to be the next Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the
renowned investigative journalists who covered the Watergate story.
Public trust in news media began steadily falling after the early
s when it was in the low- to mid- percent range, Gallup
reported. Since , most Americans have shown little to no trust
in news media. Attitudes about news media are now deeply divided
along partisan lines, a Pew Research Center poll found. Only one-
fth ( percent) of American adults say they trust information from
national news organizations “a lot.” Slightly more people ( percent)
say the same about local news organizations.
So exactly what is “fake news”? Researchers Hunt Allcott of New
York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University
proposed a workable denition of “fake news” in a Journal of
Economic Perspectives article: “news articles that are intentionally
and veriably false, and could mislead readers.” This denition speaks
to a deliberate attempt to mislead by spreading false information
known to be untrue.
Allcott and Gentzkow excluded what they call close cousins of “fake
news,” such as unintentional mistakes; rumors; conspiracy theories;
satire like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, a news satire program;
24
false statements or spin by politicians and biased reporting that might
be slanted or misleading, but is not outright false.
Instead, “fake news” includes fabricated news reports and news
reported from satirical sources that do not disclose that they are not
factual, they said. One example of the former changed journalism.
On September , , the Washington Post published “Jimmy’s
World,” a story about the struggles of a local -year-old heroin addict.
The heart-wrenching, front-page story raised public concerns. It went
on to win one of journalism’s most prestigious awards, the Pulitzer
Prize. The author, Janet Cooke, was a young news reporter who had
arrived at the Post about nine months earlier. But soon, questions
arose about Cooke’s résumé, and editors began to suspect the story was
not true. When they pushed Cooke to locate the boy, she was unable
to nd him. Eventually, she admitted she fabricated the story. The Post
returned its Pulitzer in shame.
The episode and Cooke’s name have since become infamous as
symbols of fraudulent journalism. It was a blow to the credibility of
the press, and as the New York Times put it, prompted doubts about
news stories with anonymous sources and spurred media outlets to
strengthen their procedures to prevent similar occurrences.
In his autobiography, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other
Adventures, Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post, said one of the
biggest lessons he learned from the Cooke scandal was to encourage
his sta to express reservations about stories. For big national secu-
rity stories, he made it a point to assign a sta member to play devil’s
advocate.
“The credibility of a newspaper is its most precious asset, and it
depends almost entirely on the integrity of its reporters,” Bradlee said
in a Post report about the Pulitzer Prize board’s withdrawal of
its award. “When that integrity is questioned and found wanting, the
wounds are grievous, and there is nothing to do but come clean with
our readers, apologize to the Advisory Board of the Pulitzer Prizes, and
begin immediately on the uphill task of regaining our credibility.”
Cooke’s fabricated story sowed confusion and cast doubt on the
credibility of legitimate news stories. It accomplished the opposite of
the intent of journalism, which is to inform.
25
The scandal “signaled the beginning of a radical change in the role of
the media in American life,” said a Columbia Journalism Review
article. “We live now in an age when no one fully trusts the media.”
Fortunately, such incidents are rare in journalism.
Neither “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation nor propa-
ganda are recent phenomena. What is new is the low cost of publish-
ing information online, which means anyone can disseminate lies. It
also means there is no need to build trust with readers and audiences
when the cost of producing such material is so low. This had led some
observers to believe “yellow journalism” is back.
Yellow Journalism
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still put-
ting on its shoes,” is an old saying often and erroneously attributed to
the author and humorist Mark Twain. Research shows it more than
likely originated from the works of another satirist named Jonathan
Swift, perhaps best remembered as the author of Gulliver’s Travels,
rst published in .
Truth, like the saying and its history suggests, is not always revered or
free from untidiness. The press’s relationship with the truth was a con-
cern long before the United States was created. During the American
Revolution, fake propaganda stories were spread about King George III
sending thousands of British soldiers to slaughter colonists. There also
were “fake news” reports about crimes and uprisings by slaves, accord-
ing to Jacob Soll, a University of Southern California historian.
“It has been around since news became a concept years ago with
the invention of print—a lot longer, in fact, than veried, ‘objective’
news, which emerged in force a little more than a century ago,” Soll
wrote in a Politico Magazine article about “fake news.”
Before objective reporting became a model in journalism, “yel-
low journalism,” which emphasized sensationalism over facts to sell
newspapers, became a popular style of reporting in the late th cen-
tury. Yellow journalism, like the penny press—newspapers that sold
for just one cent to make news more obtainable for all citizens—was
meant to appeal to mass audiences. Not unlike its modern ospring,
26
supermarket tabloids, it was characterized by its obsession with crime,
sex, gossip, pseudoscience and tragedy. The truth became a casualty in
the war for the public’s attention.
David Spencer, a journalism scholar and author of The Yellow
Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power,
wrote: “With the concept of commerce comes competition, and just
as we see today, advertising rates and readership were intertwined in
the late Gilded Age. It was not enough to report the facts of the day’s
events; those facts had to be interpreted and placed in a setting where
readership could be attracted and retained.”
Perhaps the biggest purveyors of yellow journalism were the pub-
lishers William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal and Joseph
Pulitzer of the New York World. They vied aggressively for circulation
supremacy. Some historians cite their sensationalism of the sinking of
an American battleship in Spain’s Caribbean colony, Cuba, with insti-
gating the Spanish-American War in .
Not only did sensationalism sell papers, but an explosion in adver-
tising, following post–Civil War manufacturing growth, helped yellow
journalism become a protable enterprise, argued media scholar Ted
Smythe, author of The Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900. By nearly
percent of the revenue of daily newspapers came from advertising.
Though sensationalized news was popular, not everyone enjoyed it.
In , when Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times, he added
the paper’s slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” It was a subtle dig
at his rivals. In prioritizing objective journalism, Ochs tapped into the
changing mood about journalism at the turn of the century, said Soll.
“For the rst time, American papers hired reporters to cover local
beats and statehouses, building a chain of trust between local, state
and national reporters and the public,” Soll wrote in Politico Magazine.
The transition, however, was not without its hiccups, he said.
Propaganda
Like misinformation and disinformation, propaganda diers from news
in that it’s not necessarily concerned with facts. It uses a systematic pro-
cess to encourage a particular response from the spread of information,
27
ideas or rumors. Americans have often viewed propaganda as some-
thing that happens in other countries. But history oers plenty of
examples whereby the government engaged in propaganda campaigns.
Unfortunately, the press has not always resisted these attempts.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson created a federal
agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI). It sought
to curtail press freedom by manipulating journalists and censoring
news coverage, as Christopher Daly of Boston University explained in
a article for The Conversation, a nonprot news site. Daly said
the agency blanketed journalists with press releases, starved them of
information only to satisfy their hunger with ocial stories packaged
as news, pressured editors who failed to abide by its voluntary newspa-
per guidelines and published the government’s own newspaper called
the Ocial Bulletin.
“The CPI was, in short, a vast eort in propaganda,” wrote Daly.
“The committee built upon the pioneering eorts of public relations
man Ivy Lee and others, developing the young eld of public relations
to new heights.”
After the war, Edward Bernays, an Austrian-American public rela-
tions pioneer and nephew of psychologist Sigmund Freud, published
his book, Propaganda, in which he described propagandists as an
“invisible government” who truly run the country.
“The media through which a political campaign may be brought
home to the public are numerous and fairly well dened,” wrote
Bernays. “Events and activities must be created in order to put ideas
into circulation, in these channels, which are as varied as the means of
human communication.” In Bernays’s eyes, writes Mark Crispin Miller
of New York University, propagandists were a “benign elite of rational
manipulators.”
Decades after World War I, the press was accused with being lulled
by government propaganda into uncritical coverage of President
George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in . Howard Kurtz, a
media critic, called it the press’s “greatest failure in modern times.”
Indeed, the government’s primary claim for war, that Iraq dictator
Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was
later proved incorrect.
28
In the tense aftermath of the September , , attacks, did jour-
nalists hold the government accountable by aggressively question-
ing and rigorously investigating that claim and other rationales for
war? Not by a long shot, answered Ray Hiebert, former dean of the
University of Maryland College of Journalism, in a academic
article titled “Public Relations and Propaganda in Framing the Iraq
War: A Preliminary Review.”
In its one-sided framing of issues, embedding of nearly jour-
nalists with troops, showy press briengs, and emphasis on visual and
online media, the government waged a successful propaganda cam-
paign for war with little media pushback, Hiebert argued.
“The Weapons of Mass Destruction story line, nuclear, chemical,
and biological, probably worked in the U.S. because mainstream mass
media raised few questions about it, even though media in most of the
rest of the world remained highly skeptical,” he wrote. “Adrienne Aron,
a Berkeley psychologist, points out that the ultimate success of pro-
paganda techniques depends on whether the information target has
other sources that counter the propaganda.”
Deepa Kumar of Rutgers University came to a similar conclusion in
a scholarly article in the journal Communication and Critical/
Cultural Studies. The year after the invasion of Iraq, she pointed out,
politically left-wing blogs saw a signicant increase in trac, and lm-
maker Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 set a box-oce record for doc-
umentaries, as people sought alternative sources of information.
“In democratic societies, the media have to maintain a semblance of
independence so as not to appear to be obviously subservient to elite
interests,” Kumar wrote. “In the months following the war when the
reality blatantly contradicted war propaganda, such as when WMDs
were not discovered, the media were forced to acknowledge this
discrepancy.”
Tips for Consuming News and Getting Facts
All messages have an agenda. Some messages are intended to convey
useful information, while others are meant to mislead. Knowing who
to trust, especially when the internet has made publishing accessible
29
to anyone, has become more dicult. Reputation builds credibility,
which in turn leads to trust. Journalists and the news organizations
who employ them spend years building their reputations to gain cred-
ibility with the public. As expressed by Ben Bradlee of the Washington
Post, mainstream news outlets take their credibility seriously by work-
ing hard to report facts and being forthcoming about errors.
In encountering any information, it is important to be skeptical
and check the source to validate its credibility. Ask yourself, is this a
widely trusted source? This is especially true concerning alternative
or non-established media organizations. Here are a few best prac-
tices when reading news online that Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter
Institute and Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College provided to
National Public Radio:
Pay attention to the domain and web address (URL)
Established news organizations have standard web addresses that are
likely familiar, such as “.com” or “.org” (e.g., wsbtv.com). Untrustworthy
sites often create misleading web addresses that are similar to those
of established news outlets but with unusual endings like “.com.co”
(e.g., the former website ABCnews.com.co), which is a warning to dig
around more to see if they can be trusted.
Read the “About Us” section
Most websites share information about the news outlet and its leader-
ship. If the description of itself is unrealistic or seems overblown, be
skeptical. Also, you should be able to nd out more information about
the news outlet’s leaders in places other than that site.
Look for the quotes in a story
Or rather, look for the lack of quotes. Most news outlets rely on mul-
tiple sources in each story who are professionals and have expertise in
the elds they talk about. If it’s a serious or controversial issue, there
are more likely lots of quotes. Look for professors or other academics
who can speak to their research, which should be searchable.
Examine the source
Is the quote from a reputable source with a title that you can verify
through a quick Google search? If an article claims the president said
30
he wants to take everyone’s guns away, read the quote carefully. Since
the president is an ocial who has almost everything he says recorded
and archived, search online for that quote. Find out what the speech
was about, who he was addressing and when it happened. The same
quote will likely be referenced by other mainstream news outlets.
Check the comments
A lot of fake and misleading stories are shared on social media plat-
forms. Headlines are meant to get the reader’s attention, but they are
also supposed to accurately reect what the story is about. But some-
times headlines containing exaggerated language that is meant to mis-
lead will be attached to stories about a completely dierent topic or to
stories that are just not true. Such stories usually generate comments
on Facebook or Twitter. Although some comments posted on social
media sites may be unrelated to the article topic or not factual, many
good citizens will use the comments section to call out fake or mislead-
ing details, quotes or arguments.
Reverse image search
A picture should be accurate in illustrating what a story is about, but
this often does not happen. It is unlikely that people who write “fake
news” stories leave their homes or interview anyone for their stories,
let alone take their own pictures. Do a little detective work and con-
duct an online reverse search for the image using Google Images. If the
image appears on a lot of stories about many dierent topics, there is
a good chance it is not actually an image of what it says it was on the
rst story.
31
HOW “FAKE NEWS”
IS LEGALLY ALLOWED
In a civil rights group placed a full-page advertisement in the
New York Times criticizing the treatment of black protestors in a “wave
of terror” by police in Montgomery, Alabama. It was designed to raise
money for the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legal
defense. Though he was not named, L. B. Sullivan, the public safety
commissioner, took oense to the ad and led a libel suit against the
newspaper for spreading false claims he said defamed him. The ad did
contain some errors. And the Alabama Supreme Court upheld a jury’s
$, judgement in favor of Sullivan.
But upon appeal by the Times, Supreme Court justices unani-
mously held that public ocials need to prove actual malice on the
part of the press. That is, they must prove that a newspaper knew
information it published was false or that it demonstrated reckless
disregard for the truth.
The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan () case has since become
a cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence. The decision
increased the burden of proof for public ocials and public gures
who pursue libel or slander cases against media. In addition, it freed
up news organizations to pursue hard-hitting stories, according to Ken
Paulson, dean of the College of Media and Entertainment at Middle
Tennessee State University.
“The large media companies always had high-paid attorneys, but
Times v. Sullivan gave weeklies and small newspapers the condence
to report things they might otherwise not have,” Paulson told the
American Bar Association Journal in .
This brings us to the legality of “fake news.” Courts have been hes-
itant to encroach upon First Amendment protections and have given
32
the media and others much leeway in making publishing and broad-
casting decisions. When President Richard Nixon’s administration
tried to prevent the New York Times and the Washington Post from
publishing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which detailed America’s
involvement in Vietnam, the court held in that the government
could not censor stories before publication.
Sticking to our denition of “fake news,” if information is allowed to
be published or broadcast that is intentionally and veriably false, and
could mislead readers, then what can be done legally about it, after
it is published or broadcast? Not much, according to Eric Robinson,
a University of South Carolina law professor, in a article for the
South Carolina Press Association.
Most “fake news” involves public gures, he said, which means
plaintis must meet the burden of actual malice. Additionally, it is
challenging to prove a false statement was meant to be true if it was
presented as satire. Likewise, Robinson said, a statement oered as
an opinion is tough to demonstrably prove as true or false. “In short,
it would be dicult to stem the proliferation and distribution of ‘fake
news’ under the law, and would be similarly dicult to use the law
to stem charges that particular information is ‘fake news,’” Robinson
wrote. “Under [First Amendment] principles, the way to combat false
or misleading speech is with more speech, oering rational, factual
information,” Robinson added. “The idea—the hope?—is that from
this Tower of Babble, accuracy and truth will win out.”
A Legal Perspective of “Fake News”
If “fake news” is used by public ocials as a term to describe critical
news coverage about themselves, then the legal status of such reports
is clear, according to Sonja West, a University of Georgia law profes-
sor. “It enjoys full First Amendment protection,” said West, a consti-
tutional and media law scholar. “In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has
stated repeatedly that the discussion of government ocials and gov-
ernment policies is at the heart of our First Amendment rights. The
Constitution, moreover, specically recognizes the important role of
the press in scrutinizing the government.”
33
“Fake news,” as previously mentioned, also can refer to deliberately
made-up news accounts that are created with the goal of fooling read-
ers, often for political or economic gain. This type of disinformation is
also mostly protected by the Constitution, West said, but there can be
some instances where it might cross a legal line. “The First Amendment
protects a great deal of speech that is of questionable value or is actu-
ally harmful,” said West. “This includes speech that is knowingly false,
immoral or hateful. The Constitution instead asks us to make our own
determinations of the merit of the speaker’s assertions and, if we dis-
agree, to respond with our own speech.”
In some cases, however, it might be possible for someone who is the
subject of a fabricated news report to sue for defamation. “Defamation”
is an untrue statement that damages the reputation of another person.
But even defamatory statements enjoy some First Amendment pro-
tection, said West. She said to win a defamation case, the Supreme
Court has held that public ocials and public gures must show that
the defendant made the false statement with actual malice, the afore-
mentioned concept of making false statements knowingly and with
reckless disregard for truth.
Private gures have it a little easier, said West, but states like
Georgia require them to establish that the defendant was negligent
about whether the statement was true. The plainti also must prove
the story was about him or her individually. Therefore, more gener-
alized fabricated news stories about groups or policies would not be
legally defamatory, West said.
The practicalities of suing for defamation the creators of fabricated
news, like web bloggers or social media content creators, for example,
also can be dicult, said West. To bring a suit, she said, the plainti
needs to be able to identify the right person to sue and could face prob-
lems if the story was posted anonymously online or if the author lives
in another country.
“Furthermore, defamation lawsuits are expensive and time-consum-
ing to litigate whereas fabricated news stories are inexpensive and easy
to publish,” West said. “Thus, even if a defamation plainti wins in
court and is able to have a defamatory story or website taken down,
another could immediately pop up to take its place.” Finally, said West,
34
defamation lawsuits can often bring more unwanted attention to the
very fabricated news story the plainti wants to disappear.
How “Fake News” Spreads
On January , , an article was posted online with the following
headline: “% of black men in Atlanta are Homosexuals, study says.”
According to this article, a group of Georgia State University students
conducted a study to assess the sexuality of Atlanta’s male population.
Using such categories as “black,” “white,” “Asian” and “oreo” to divide
the population, the study supposedly found that percent of Atlanta’s
black males are gay. The statistic, the article said, was expected only to
increase “due to the large amount of men unwilling to openly admit to
being anything other than straight in our society.”
As can be expected with any supposed scientic study that uses
“oreo” as a racial category, the article was fake. Yet, its false claim has
circulated for years on websites that share disinformation. In a review,
PolitiFact Georgia, a fact-checking website, gave the article’s claim a
“Pants on Fire” rating, its most untrustworthy. It essentially labeled
the website that published the article, Viralactions.com, as a “fake
news” site. “Viralactions.com’s website doesn’t feature a page describ-
ing its mission or who’s behind it, and to anyone visiting the site,
there’s no easy way to tell if its stories are real or not,” wrote Miriam
Valverde, a PolitiFact sta writer. She pointed to Viralactions.com’s
social media accounts as evidence. For example, its Twitter page, listed
under the username @FolksRtalking, states: “Folks don’t want to be
INFORMED they want to be ENTERTAINED. #InfoTainment News
at its Finest! #NYC.”
A report that originated from a Yale Law School workshop on
“fake news,” featuring leading national experts, conrmed that social
media plays a key role in the spread of misinformation and disinfor-
mation. People often interpret retweets and shares as a proxy for cred-
ibility, especially when those with whom they most often interact share
similar viewpoints, according to the report. Programmed algorithms,
called “bots,” are often used to promote inaccurate information and
35
create the false sense of a grassroots movement. The many shares and
retweets are automatically treated by platforms like trending news,
lending inaccurate stories credibility.
“People retweet or share an article based on its headline and with-
out ever having clicked on—and therefore without ever having actually
read—it,” the report stated. “This allows misinformation to be seen,
accepted, and promoted just as much, if not more, than higher quality
information.”
A study published in the journal Science analyzed every veri-
ed true and false news story on Twitter since the social media plat-
form was created in (about , stories tweeted by million
people) and found “fake news” spreads farther, faster, deeper and
more broadly than true stories. “It seems to be pretty clear [from our
study] that false information outperforms true information,” Soroush
Vosoughi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology data scientist who
led the study, told the Atlantic magazine. “And that is not just because
of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
Can the Government Prevent “Fake News”?
The term “fake news” may be used to describe truthful stories that a
person simply dislikes, as well as fabricated stories dressed up to look
like truthful ones, often with the intent and eect of being shared
virally on social media, said Jonathan Peters, a University of Georgia
media law professor. Peters said, “The latter is the correct way to think
about ‘fake news,’ seen by many policymakers and commentators as a
problem urgently in need of a solution. The well-founded concern is
that ‘fake news’ makes people less informed and therefore less capable
of eective self-governance.”
That said, there is little the government can do to regulate “fake
news,” he said. “The First Amendment oers expansive protection to
socio-political speech, and, perhaps surprisingly, it oers some protec-
tion to false speech,” Peters said.
For example, said Peters, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (),
the court held that public ocials could not sue for libel over damaging
36
and factually false statements about them unless they could prove
the statements were made maliciously or recklessly. The court later
extended that rule to public gures.
In the case United States v. Alvarez, the court struck down a
federal law that made it a crime to represent falsely that you received a
military decoration or medal, said Peters. “Notably, the Alvarez opin-
ion observed that ndings in other cases, mostly dealing with libel and
fraud, supported government regulation of factually false statements
if they caused cognizable harm to people, or were likely to do so,” said
Peters. “But the court ruled that there was no categorical rule that false
statements lack First Amendment protection.”
As the court put it: “Permitting the government to decree [false]
speech to be a criminal oense, whether shouted from the rooftops or
made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government author-
ity to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are pun-
ishable. That governmental power has no clear limiting principle. Our
constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s
Ministry of Truth.”
That does not mean false statements may never be regulated. Again,
it just means they are not categorically unprotected, said Peters. He
explained that if the government wants to regulate such statements, it
must have a strong rationale to do so and a regulation narrowly tailored
to its ends. But that, he added, is a heavy burden the government rarely
can carry, which is by design. “There is a general interest in keeping the
government out of the business of prescribing the truth. That is con-
sistent with various American theories of free speech, among them the
marketplace of ideas, in which falsehoods are to compete with truth
until the truth prevails,” Peters said.
“That applies today to ‘fake news’ and its many hosts, because, as
a federal court once remarked, the internet is ‘the most participatory
marketplace of mass speech that this country. . .has yet seen.’” All of
which is to say there is little the government can do more broadly to
regulate “fake news,” said Peters. “The most suitable sources of reform,
then, are internet service providers, especially social media compa-
nies that host content,” he said. “They have a long way to go and are
37
struggling in this respect, but they are starting to take greater and
more serious eorts to police their platforms and ensure that they are
not incubators for false and harmful information. It is now up to us, as
the users, to hold them accountable.”
Do Victims of “Fake News” Have any Legal Recourse?
Shortly after the presidential election, a North Carolina man
went to a popular pizzeria in Washington, D.C., and opened re with a
military-style assault rie. Edgar Maddison Welch, who was later sen-
tenced to four years in prison, wrongly believed online stories about
there being children trapped at the pizzeria in a sex-slave ring led by
Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. The conspiracy theory was
known as “Pizzagate.”
James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, wrote in a
Washington Post op-ed that rumors about a child-slavery ring in the
basement of his pizzeria began in October , when WikiLeaks, a
website that publishes information from anonymous sources, released
hacked emails from a Democratic ocial in which the ocial and his
brother invited him to cook for a Clinton fundraiser. Anti-Clinton
conspiracy theorists and online trolls, he said, decided the words
“pizza” and “cheese” that appeared in the email were code for pedo-
philia, a lie which was then spread by media provocateurs to their
large audiences.
“I was inundated with death threats, sometimes many a day. Comet’s
Facebook and Yelp pages were ooded with obscene ‘reviews.’ The
restaurant’s phone rang o the hook, with people calling and screaming
at the hosts. First, we answered only local area codes, then unplugged
the phones,” wrote Alefantis. “Online, we were labeled as criminals—or
worse. They posted our pictures, links to personal social media, even
our home addresses. Our community of food runners, hosts, bussers,
waiters, customers, artists we display, bands that performed, my god-
children, surrounding businesses and my mother all were harassed
by self-proclaimed ‘investigators.’” Unfortunately, once a story is pub-
lished, there is no way to unpublish it.
38
But victims of “fake news,” such as Alefantis, who are willing to
hire an attorney and go to court may have grounds for a civil law-
suit, under defamation law, against those responsible for such stories,
said Derigan Silver of the University of Denver. “Fake news sites are
clearly a situation where they’re engaging in a defamatory statement,
a false statement about another that damages that person’s reputa-
tion,” he told National Public Radio in . “In that situation, that
is certainly actionable.” Silver went on to say that anybody who has
communicated the defamatory statement to someone else can be held
accountable, including the individual who originated the defama-
tory statement as well as those who repeat it under what is called the
republication rule. “Now simply retweeting a defamatory statement
is probably not going to be enough to qualify for republication, but
passing on information that you heard from somebody else certainly
is republication,” said Silver.
A traditional rationale for freedom of speech is something called
the marketplace of ideas, which holds that left to their own devices,
rational people will believe truth over falsity. The rise in “fake news,”
however, has challenged this thinking, Silver said. “And that’s kind of
making us rethink these kinds of basic premises behind freedom of
expression,” he said. “Are we in a situation now where truth no longer
matters, and people are not able to sort these things out?”
39
OPINION, BIAS AND LEAKS
On October , , Ralph McGill opened his daily newspaper col-
umn for the Atlanta Constitution by grieving the bombings of a Jewish
temple in Atlanta and a racially integrated high school in Clinton,
Tennessee, both of which occurred that month. He then quickly turned
his grief to anger at the environment that produced such hatred and
violence. He described it as a “harvest,” sown with bigotry, inam-
matory rhetoric, deance of court orders and passiveness by leaders
and fellow journalists. “You do not preach and encourage hatred for
the Negro and hope to restrict it to that eld,” he wrote. “It is an old,
old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the
wolves of hate are loose on one people, then no one is safe.”
In , the Pulitzer Prize Committee singled out the column, titled
“A Church, a School,” when it awarded -year-old McGill with its
prize for editorial writing. The committee praised his “long, coura-
geous and eective editorial leadership.”
As an opinion columnist, McGill conveyed his personal thoughts
about a range of topics, but southern politics was among his favorite
subjects. He was a Tennessee native, although his family members were
“Abraham Lincoln Republicans” who remained loyal to the Union during
the Civil War. Their politics undoubtedly inuenced his viewpoints. So
too did his experience covering Nazi Germany. From the s to the
s, McGill often spoke out against racial injustices and supported
the causes of the civil rights struggle, which gained him a reputation as
the “conscience of the South.” His positions also drew the ire of white
supremacists who burned crosses and red bullets at his home.
“Throughout his editorial career he saw himself as a mediator rather
than a crusader,” wrote Barbara Barksdale Clowse in her book,
40
Ralph McGill: A Biography. “Asking readers to consider all sides of the
race question exposed him to unending attacks.” Despite the attacks
from fellow southerners, McGill continued to challenge the region’s
social norms as his audience expanded with the national syndication
of his column. President John F. Kennedy appointed him as a special
envoy to Africa and to two presidential commissions.
“In McGill’s mind, none of his involvements in government posed
a journalistic conict,” wrote journalists Gene Roberts and Hank
Klibano in their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Race Beat:
The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.
“He was, after all, a columnist who took sides on issues. He had the
title of publisher of the [Atlanta] Constitution but no control over the
newsroom or business operations.”
Opinion versus News
Columnists like McGill are journalists who are given space to freely
express their personal opinions about whatever issues they choose
to write about. Editorial writers, reviewers and cartoonists also fall
into this realm. In that respect, they are dierent from reporters, who
are tasked with providing objective facts with context and analysis.
Nonetheless, columnists, editorial writers, reviewers and reporters are
bound to the truth, as all journalists are. The best opinion writing and
commentary is well researched, balanced, insightful and persuasive
while maintaining civility. “A good editorial consists of a clear position
that’s strongly and persuasively argued,” said Andrew Rosenthal, a for-
mer New York Times editorial page editor. “It’s based on principle, but
it’s also based in fact.”
Most news organizations are divided into two parts: news and edito-
rial. Most of what the public reads, views or hears is news, those objec-
tive reports that traditionally cover local, national and international
news. In contrast, editorial is much smaller and focuses on opinion.
Editorials are produced by a publication’s publisher and its editorial
board, which is largely comprised of editorial writers. They contribute
writings only for the editorial page. In a collaborative eort, they meet
41
regularly to determine the publication’s ocial positions on issues that
are expressed through subjective editorials.
Before Joseph Appel became an advertising pioneer, he worked in
the s as a young reporter for the Philadelphia Times and learned
a valuable lesson about the dierence between opinion and news from
his editor, Alexander McClure. “As he recalled, his rst meeting with
McClure was not auspicious,” wrote Michael Schudson in Origins of the
Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions. Schudson explained, “McClure
waved a newspaper column at Appel and asked, ‘Young man, young
man, did you write this?’ Appel replied that he had. McClure then said,
‘Well, I want you to know and I don’t want you ever to forget it, that
when the Times expresses an editorial opinion I will express it and not
you—go back to your work.’”
It’s a longtime practice in many newsrooms to separate the stas of
news and editorial geographically to reinforce the sense of separation.
(The same goes for advertising departments, which will be discussed
later.) Whereas an executive editor or editor-in-chief manages a pub-
lication’s news departments and answers directly to the publisher, an
editorial page editor is in charge of a publication’s opinion pages and
answers to the publisher.
In the New York Times pioneered the op-ed page as a forum for
other voices outside the paper. Its name reected its physical location
in the newspaper—opposite the editorial page. Op-eds were designed
to counter the arguments of the paper’s editorials to provide a balance
of perspectives. An op-ed is usually written about an issue by contribu-
tors with expertise or experience with that matter. They usually appear
alongside the writings of the paper’s own columnists. Letters from the
public can often be found there as well.
In television and radio, programs sometimes feature pundits who
are not necessarily journalists, but individuals knowledgeable about
a subject or eld who are called upon to give their opinions. They are
often given such titles as “commentator,” “contributor” or “analyst.”
Unlike print and digital mediums, which can geographically separate
their opinion commentary from their news reports, it can be dicult
for viewers to dierentiate who on TV and radio is and isn’t a pundit.
42
That was not always so. On-air editorials by station management were
once common on television, as a result of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC)’s Fairness Doctrine, which deemed opposing
viewpoints on controversial issues to be in the public’s interest. The
FCC repealed the doctrine in .
Today, broadcasters, especially cable networks, rely on former elected
and appointed ocials as well as political advisers, who are typically
under contract, to share their views about the news, according to a
Columbia Journal Review article. “Philip Mudd and Will Hurd aren’t
reporters. Yet from their perches on CNN or Fox or MSNBC, in the mix
of a developing news story, they both certainly look like part of ‘the news
media,’” observed Paul Farhi, a Washington Post media reporter.
In the past, said Farhi, TV producers placed opinion commentary at
the end of a program. With the advent of cable news in the early s,
however, they found the panel format featuring politicians, authors
and other guests made for livelier television, he wrote in a March
article. The -hour cable news business model requires a constant
ow of programming. In between news coverage from reporters sent
into the eld, it made nancial sense to round up a few pundits in a
studio to ll up airtime, Farhi said.
“News reporters bristle when critics tar them as liberal or conserva-
tive. They’re quick to insist that they have nothing to do with the opin-
ion side of their organizations,” he wrote. “And yet panels with multiple
talking heads arguably make the situation more fraught for them by
lumping them with former politicians, think-tank scholars and opin-
ionated party hacks—a blending of news reporting and commentary
that’s bound to leave some viewers confused.”
Farhi added that he has seen more newspapers put editorials and
reviews on their front pages and online homepages. Moreover, in the
digital age, he said, stories that appear on social networking platforms,
like Twitter and Facebook, make it a challenge to decipher whether
they originated from news or editorial.
43
Media Bias
Seventy-two percent of Americans believe news media tend to favor
one side in presenting political and social issues, according to a
survey by the Pew Research Center. Media bias has long been consid-
ered a problem in journalism. With the varied and countless internet
sources of information, it is likely this issue will continue to be a point
of contention.
But what does media bias mean? Walter Lippmann, the early
th-century media critic, wrote in his book Public Opinion that the
world is so vast and complex that people rely on their prejudices to
interpret the information they receive to make sense of it all. People,
including news consumers, tend to be conicted, or at least suspicious,
about new information that contradicts their point of view.
Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as cognitive dissonance.
Former Newsday editor Howard Schneider, dean of Stony Brook
University’s journalism school, said research shows people often dis-
tort contradictory information. Schneider advised news consumers
and his journalism students to think not emotionally but analytically
when they come across information, and to be open to information
that challenges their biases and assumptions. Otherwise, he said, they
will spend their lives only accepting information that conrms what
they want to believe.
The accusation that all mainstream media are biased is both
unfounded and too simplistic. Such accusations often reect the
strong ideological biases of the accusers. Most journalists on most
days perform their jobs in the journalistic tradition of objectivity,
fairness and balance. But even the best of them sometimes fall victim
to unconscious personal biases. When that happens, they jeopardize
the important responsibility the press has in our democracy to keep
Americans informed.
“Bias in the news is important because it speaks to the quality of
the informational environment in the United States, and whether
Americans are able to form coherent, meaningful opinions regarding
the political system,” wrote Anthony DiMaggio in his book, The
44
Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern
Era. According to DiMaggio, a political scientist at Lehigh University,
media bias is observable in at least two ways: when journalists distort
reality and provide an incomplete impression of what is happening
in the world, and when journalists systematically favor one viewpoint
over another.
Americans seem to have a collective nostalgia for the golden age
of network news, when serious-looking men on black-and-white TV
screens explained what was happening in the world. Georey Baym
of Temple University places this era between the s, when most
households had a TV, and the s, when cable news was born. Baym,
a former TV producer and author of From Cronkite to Colbert: The
Evolution of Broadcast News, argues in the book, published in ,
that there are institutional reasons for why people consider that period
to be a time when news was unbiased.
CBS, NBC and ABC had a monopoly over airwaves due to federal
protections, like the Communications Act of . The networks used
evening news programs to help satisfy public aairs programming
mandates. Audiences from all backgrounds were equally exposed to
these few channels, and the networks made a clear distinction between
their Los Angeles–based entertainment and their New York-based
news, which aired at predictable times.
Baym contends this formulaic approach to news had its drawbacks.
“Network news produced a singular worldview that limited the range of
understandings about the nature of the political domain and the ways
in which it could be represented,” he said. “Reproduced each day, this
worldview was taken as the self-evident expression of common sense.”
Media face accusations of bias in many ways, from class bias and
corporate ownership bias to racial bias and regional bias. But perhaps
most of the bias debate revolves around accusations of political bias.
The debate about whether media have a liberal bias or conservative
bias is never-ending and may never be resolved. Even researchers dis-
agree about how media may be biased. Therefore, it’s perhaps more
helpful to examine how journalists should attempt to avoid biases and
to report news objectively.
45
Objectivity and Fairness
Since beginning her broadcast reporting career in Atlanta in ,
Judy Woodru, PBS NewsHour anchor, has covered news and politics
for more than four decades. That experience, she said, has taught her
that journalists are not objective creatures. “We’re all human beings
with the sum total of our experiences—where we grew up, whether
we’re male or female, where did we live, where we traveled, our fam-
ily experiences, our professional experiences,” Woodru said in a
Georgia Public Broadcasting interview. “None of us comes to what we
do with a blank slate. A piece of paper is objective, but a human being
isn’t. So the best we can do is try to be fair, open, reect all sides of a
story and that’s what we try to do here at the NewsHour.”
Objective journalism, wrote scholar David Spencer in The Yellow
Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power,
has long been thought of as the “reporting of news in which the facts
that appeared on the printed page were totally separated in terms of
human value from the person who collected those facts.” Readers had
the responsibility to decide the truth, he said.
Though objectivity has become a relatively stable tenet of jour-
nalism since the early th century, Woodru is not alone in her
belief that complete objectivity is an untenable goal for a journalist
or any person. After all, reporters are not stenographers who merely
transcribe what is happening in the world around them. Not every-
thing is news, and thus, they must make some subjective decisions
about what to report and not report. We should not, said Brent
Cunningham, expect them as humans to be as detached as the “aura
of objectivity” implies.
Cunningham, the former managing editor of the Columbia
Journalism Review (CJR), suggested in a CJR article that the
common misperception of the concept of “objectivity” as synonymous
with “neutrality” can aect journalists’ ability to uncover the truth.
The aim of journalists is to present fairly both sides of a story,
but this aim may prevent them from properly scrutinizing powerful
sources, such as the CEO of a company or an elected ocial, and may
46
dissuade them from getting to the truth of the story. It may even lead
to hesitancy in the reporting of rarely covered issues.
In a debate about objectivity with former New York Times
executive editor Bill Keller in Keller’s Times op-ed column, Glenn
Greenwald, a journalist for The Intercept, said the only real metric of
journalism should be its accuracy and reliability. Objectivity, he argued,
has weakened the profession. Greenwald—who went on to share a
Pulitzer Prize for reporting the leaks of classied information
by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden—
took oense to the decision by the Times (which was not alone) not
to use the word “torture” to describe interrogation techniques during
President George W. Bush’s administration.
“A failure to call torture ‘torture’ because government ocials demand
that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demon-
strably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism
of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul,” Greenwald wrote.
In The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and
the Public Should Expect, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel noted that
the original concept of objectivity has been misunderstood since jour-
nalism rst borrowed it from social science. It was not meant to imply
that journalists were free of bias, they said. “The call for objectivity
was an appeal for journalists to develop a consistent method of test-
ing information—a transparent approach to evidence—precisely so
that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of
their work,” wrote Kovach and Rosenstiel.
Objectivity, they said, is not the absence of a point of view. The voice
of neutrality that denes much of newswriting and speaking, they
argue, should be considered a tool instead of fundamental principle.
Rather, objectivity means journalists should be fully conscious of their
biases and strive to report information with thoroughness, accuracy,
fairness and transparency.
Given this understanding, what should objective reporting look like
in practice? Many people, including some journalists, confuse objec-
tivity with the concept of equivalence that suggests all points of view
are inherently equal, according to Andrew Seaman, chair of the Society
of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) ethics committee.
47
Following the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August ,
which involved a clash between white nationalist demonstrators and
counterprotestors, Seaman contended that journalists should not shy
away from calling out discrimination, opposition of which is a main-
stream value.
That said, journalists should be professional and treat their sources
and subjects as human beings deserving of respect. But a “neither side
is right or wrong” approach to news does not serve to inform the pub-
lic, Seaman suggested in Code Words, the SPJ ethics committee’s blog.
“The answer is that we objectively know that discrimination based on
sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, dis-
ability and other inherited traits is wrong,” wrote Seaman. “Journalists
should feel free to say so and forcefully challenge people who believe
otherwise.”
The Press and Government Leaks
In April Jay Carney, who served as President Barack Obama’s
press secretary, addressed the issue of government leaks during a talk
at Yale University, where he is a Poynter Institute Fellow in journalism.
A news “leak” happens when secret information (or information meant
to be released at a later point in time) is shared with a journalist.
Carney, a Time magazine journalist before entering public service,
denounced the practice of government ocials sharing condential
information with the press, even though he admitted that he depended
on leaks for stories during his journalism career. “The press always
wanted more than we could tell them,” recalled Carney, according
to a Yale communications report. “It was a frustration that we were
running a tight ship….” Leaks, he claimed, confront all presidential
administrations and risk damaging national security.
More than million people have various U.S. government security
clearances, which includes nearly . million individuals who have
the highest level of security clearance, “top secret,” according to data
from the Oce of the Director of National Intelligence cited by USA
Today. Leaks to the press reect a fundamental tension in American
democracy between secrecy and transparency. The Constitution gives
48
government the dual responsibilities to protect the nation and pre-
serve civil liberties.
This tension has recently played out in the prominent leak cases
of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, each of whom disclosed
classied government information. Some view them as heroes who
exposed wrongdoing, while others see them as traitors who broke the
law. Regardless, an important question to consider as a news consumer
is what gives media, which are unelected and privately owned entities,
the right to decide whether government secrets should be published?
Certainly, there is institutionalized leaking, which regularly occurs
between ocials and journalists. This is reected in stories that men-
tion such sources as a “high-ranking ocial” or a “person close to the
investigation.” There remains no sure way for news organizations to
know if a story they publish, based on secret information, will not
cause harm.
Journalists counter that leaks help them get around bureaucracy to
hold government accountable. They argue that they take precautions
such as conrming the accuracy of leaks and are careful not to publish
information that may compromise the safety of individuals. “I’ve come
to believe that unless lives are explicitly in danger. . .almost all of these
stories should be brought out in public,” said Jill Abramson, former
New York Times executive editor, during a speech at Columbia
Journalism School. She said she regretted holding two secrets about
Iran’s nuclear program and the National Security Agency’s warrantless
eavesdropping on American citizens. The latter story won a Pulitzer
Prize after its eventual publication.
For their part, courts have indicated that the government has expan-
sive legal authority to prosecute its employees who leak, but mini-
mal authority to stop journalists who publish leaks, David Pozen, a
Columbia law professor, wrote in a Harvard Law Review article
about leaks. Based on only a dozen or so leak cases the government has
ever prosecuted since passage of the Espionage Act in , it seems
courts require the government to prove a journalist’s actions threat-
ened grave, immediate harm to national security interests, according
to Pozen.
49
His central argument is that the rare enforcement of laws against
leaking, coupled with the government’s selective authorization of
leaks to serve its self-interests, have contributed to a gray area where
journalists are concerned. Regularly criminalizing leaks would only
further muddy the waters, let alone raise First Amendment issues,
he said. “Even though particular leaks may cause real damage, an
accommodating approach to enforcement has in the aggregate sup-
ported, rather than subverted, the government’s general policymak-
ing capacity as well as many dierent policymakers’ discrete agen-
das,” Pozen wrote.
When the Obama administration increased criminal investigations
into leaks, which included going after journalists, the Committee to
Protect Journalists, a nonprot that promotes press freedom, peti-
tioned for a federal shield law to protect the newsgathering process.
Journalists and press freedom advocates contend that forcing media
to disclose condential sources or unpublished materials disrupts the
free ow of information and obstructs the public’s right to know.
A slight majority of states have statutes, called shield laws, to protect
journalists from disclosing or testifying about condential sources or
their reporting. Their protections vary from state to state. Georgia’s
shield law has some qualications or exceptions, according to the non-
prot Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. There is, how-
ever, no federal shield law.
In the end, the tensions surrounding leaks in American democracy
should not be about resolving them, but balancing them, said the edi-
tors of Whistleblowers, Leaks, and the Media: The First Amendment
and National Security, a book examining leaks. “It’s about man-
aging them, living with them, and accommodating the competing val-
ues to the maximum extent practicable,” they wrote.
50
NATIVE ADVERTISING
Although the term “native advertising” may be unfamiliar, chances
are good that you have been exposed to this type of advertising by read-
ing or viewing news in print or online. Native advertising is any paid
advertising designed to resemble news content, and can take many
forms, such as an article, video or infographic. Also called sponsored
or branded content, native advertising has become an alternative to
traditional advertising in journalism.
Native ads appear on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social
media platforms. Traditional media such as the Wall Street Journal,
USA Today and Time Inc. also run native ads, as do new media com-
panies like BuzzFeed.
Advertising is the primary source of revenue for news organizations,
but revenue from traditional print ads and even online display ads
has steadily declined. Advertisers have found that today people pay
less attention to online ads, compared with an earlier era, when print
media had a virtual monopoly on readership.
Native ads were developed to break through to readers who ignore
ads. Because native ads have been shown to be eective, news organi-
zations typically charge advertisers more for them, which has grown
into a multi-billion dollar industry. They are not just popular among
national media companies, some of which employ their own in-house
content agencies. More than half of local online news sites publish
native ads, according to a report from the City University of New
York’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.
Native ads are designed to blend in with news content, with the
exception of accompanying disclosure labels that may say “sponsored
51
content” or “presented by.” Otherwise, it can be challenging to distin-
guish between editorial content and paid content.
Researchers at the University of Georgia found this to be true when
they conducted two experiments involving eye-tracking to examine
whether news consumers could tell the dierence between news sto-
ries and native ads. They published their ndings in a academic
article in the Journal of Advertising.
In one experiment only percent of participants could distinguish
between news stories and native ads, and in another experiment just
percent of participants could do so. Researchers found that ads
designed with straightforward disclosure labels like “sponsored” and
“advertising,” placed in the middle, improved participants’ ability to
distinguish them from news.
How Native Advertising Threatens Journalism
The experiments’ ndings, as well as results from other studies, sug-
gest native ads can be deceptive to news consumers who are not made
aware of their purpose. Thus the use of native ads has the potential to
erode consumer trust or compromise journalism’s long-standing wall
between editorial and advertising, referred to in the industry as the
“wall between church and state.” As previously discussed, the press is
supposed to be independent from outside inuences. Dressing up paid
advertisement to appear as journalism raises serious, ethical questions
about that independence.
“In my opinion, the biggest challenge native advertising poses to
journalism is the erosion of trust,” said Nathaniel Evans, an adver-
tising scholar, who co-authored the University of Georgia study. He
pointed to another study on which he worked, published in in the
Journal of Interactive Marketing. This study found that people who
are able to identify article-style native ads as advertisement are likely
to question the credibility of and hold negative attitudes toward the
news organization that published them.
“Another challenge posed to journalism is the nding that as con-
sumers better recognize native advertising, they exhibit reductions in
52
advertising-related outcomes such as attitudes toward the brand or
company and sharing intention,” Evans said.
One of the biggest ethical concerns associated with native ads, Evans
said, is the growing reliance on so-called inuencer marketing, which
uses celebrities and other popular gures to sell products. What makes
it problematic is that native ads leverage the trust their followers place
in such opinion leaders, he said.
“In turn, these followers might perceive Instagram testimonials or
YouTube video reviews about—insert brand here—as objective and
trustworthy, when in reality such inuencers were paid to create often-
times favorable content,” said Evans.
In members of the Kardashian family, some of America’s most
popular reality TV stars, were reported to federal regulators by Truth
in Advertising, a consumer watchdog group, for using more than
social media posts as paid product placements without clearly disclos-
ing them as endorsements.
In the Federal Trade Commission released guidelines for native
ads, which includes clear and understandable disclosing endorsements.
However, they are largely ignored because there is little enforcement,
said Jake Batsell of Southern Methodist University.
“This concept isn’t all that dierent with respect to legacy pub-
lishers whose tangible value rests in consumers’ perceptions of trust,
credibility and objectivity,” said Evans. “The use of native advertising/
sponsored content, in both journalistic and newer inuencer contexts,
obfuscates what is and isn’t editorial content.”
Aording consumers the opportunity to recognize or understand
content before they begin reading or viewing it is important, and many
academic researchers and regulators would probably agree, said Evans.
“What is more dicult to agree on, and players in the advertising
and publishing arenas would probably attest to this, is we do not have
a solid grasp or consensus on the best ways to help consumers recog-
nize or understand native/sponsored content,” he said. “Furthermore,
future native advertising or sponsored content executions are bound
to appear in new and unforeseen ways.”
53
Distinguishing News from Native Advertising
The best way to spot native ads is to look for disclosure labels, which
can vary, but use terms like “sponsor generated content,” “paid post”
and “promoted by.” They typically appear under the headline but not
always.
Melanie Deziel, a content strategist, said native ads are meant to
take on the form and function of the content it is surrounded by. So,
for example, if a native ad appears in a newspaper, it would proba-
bly look like a news article, with a headline and perhaps byline or
photograph. Deziel said in an interview with the Native Advertising
Institute, a Denmark-based think tank, that while she advises brands
and marketers to take lessons and best practices from journalism, they
should not simply impersonate journalists.
“All of this is also contingent upon the fact that there is a neces-
sary separation between those who report and create editorial content
and those who report or create branded content,” said Deziel, who has
worked for news companies. “Someone trusted by readers to produce
unbiased content about an industry should not also be paid to write
branded content for that same industry; it would create clear prob-
lems for readers’ ability to trust either type of content they create.”
In a Nieman Reports article, Batsell, the SMU professor, oered
four ways to bring ethical clarity to native ads. Ground rules for how
paid content is reported should be claried to prevent any confusion,
he said. He suggested not only reporters but also production staers,
like page designers, should not work on both editorial and advertis-
ing content. News organizations, he said, need to ensure reporting
decisions are not made by advertisers. Finally, he said labels need to
be understandable and perhaps accompanied with a link or button to
describe the content’s purpose.
“As native advertising becomes more journalistic in approach and
news outlets beef up their branded content studios, it’s important for
the news industry to prioritize trust by creating, disseminating and
following best practices in this emerging area,” wrote Batsell.
54
THE INTERNET
AND SOCIAL MEDIA
On December , , people were fatally shot and others
wounded in the middle of a training session and holiday lunch orga-
nized by the county health department in San Bernardino, California.
The assailants, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik,
died hours later in a shootout with police. It was then considered the
deadliest terrorist assault in America since the September , ,
attacks.
To investigate why and how it occurred, law-enforcement authori-
ties wanted to analyze the couple’s electronic devices, including their
computers and phones. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
was unable to unlock an Apple iPhone that belonged to Farook. When
agents sought help from Apple, the company refused, out of fear that
doing so would set an unwanted precedent for its customers. The
battle that ensued set o a national conversation about government
access to encrypted data. Eventually, the FBI paid a third party to
crack the smartphone’s security. Still, a larger debate about whether
public safety outweighs personal privacy remains to be resolved.
The internet, which can be thought of as computer networks con-
nected across neighborhoods, cities and the world, has become such
an integral part of our lives that it’s easy to forget how much we rely
on it, from emailing co-workers and online dating to posting family
pictures to social media and accessing news.
In fact, two-thirds ( percent) of Americans say they get at least
some of their news from social media, according to a survey by
Pew Research Center. Facebook is the most popular social networking
site for accessing news, followed by YouTube and Twitter.
55
An important part of media literacy is understanding how media
works. It’s especially important to have some understanding of what
happens when we use the internet, because it serves as a major source
of information—for us and others.
For instance, about half of American smartphone owners say they
check their devices several times an hour or more frequently, a
Gallup survey found. But do the messages, pictures, passwords, web
browsing history and more that we access through personal devices
really belong to us?
One might reason there is an expectation that this data is private
and thus for our eyes and ears only. But the government’s statement
in March about the San Bernardino iPhone dispute suggests the
government might have other ideas.
“It remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforce-
ment can obtain crucial digital information to protect national secu-
rity and public safety, either with cooperation from relevant parties,
or through the court system when cooperation fails,” said U.S. Justice
Department spokeswoman Melanie Newman. And the government is
not alone in staking a claim to our personal data.
The Architecture of the Internet
Digital technologies not only make more behavior monitorable but also
make more behavior searchable, said Harvard law professor Lawrence
Lessig in his book, Code: Version 2.0. “The same technologies
that gather data now gather it in a way that makes it searchable,” he
said. “Thus, increasingly life becomes a village composed of parallel
processors, accessible at any time to reconstruct or track behavior.”
Everywhere you go on the internet, your computer or mobile device’s
Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique numeric identier, is
recorded as having been there. The same, said Lessig, goes for cookies,
which allow websites to keep track of their visitors.
“They know you from your mouse droppings,” Lessig wrote. “And
as businesses and advertisers work more closely together, the span
of data that can be aggregated about you becomes endless.” This is
56
allowed because the architecture of the internet, which provides some
anonymity, is decentralized and can be accessed around the world.
Nearly billion people, half the world’s population, will soon be
connected online. But the internet’s actual architecture, what it looks
like and how it works, is a mystery to most, said Jonathan Peters, a
University of Georgia media law professor.
While people often use the words “internet” and “web” (short for
world wide web), interchangeably, Peters said it’s important to under-
stand that the internet is dierent from the web.
“The internet links up networks around the world, making it a net-
work of networks. It includes hardware (e.g., cables and servers) and
software (e.g., enabling instant messaging),” he explained. “The web is
an information system that sits atop the internet and allows people to
create, search and retrieve pages featuring text, audio, video and the
like. For example, GeorgiaDogs.com is a web page, and Google.com is
a web browser. Their data are transmitted across the internet.”
In an architectural sense, then, the internet exists on a layered struc-
ture of privately owned web pages, servers, routers and backbones, all
of which act as intermediaries to transport, host and index billions of
pages of content, said Peters.
“Without those intermediaries, the ordinary person would have lit-
tle or no practical ability to speak or be heard online,” he said. As a
result, these intermediaries have a large amount of power, he added.
“They can remove or de-prioritize content, block access to servers
and suspend or deactivate users,” Peters said. “Historically, private
actors have always controlled intermediated content (think bookstores
and mail carriers), but the internet’s deep reliance on them has ampli-
ed their role and importance.”
That said, according to Peters, the internet and the web were
designed to be decentralized so that developers—the people who
wanted to use the internet and contribute to the web—would not be
required to seek the approval of any single authority.
Tim Berners-Lee, widely acknowledged as the creator of the web,
put it this way in : “The primary design principle. . .is universality.
When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people
57
must be able to put anything on the web, no matter what computer they
have, software they use, or human language they speak, and regardless
of whether they have a wired or wireless internet connection.”
“That made it possible in the early days for computer scientists and
academics to build innovative applications that drew in more users,
who created browsers, e-commerce pages and posting boards,” said
Peters.
“The internet and web were truly open, free from the control of a
single entity. But in time private companies like Comcast, Verizon,
Facebook, Google and Amazon have come to monopolize almost every-
thing we do online. They are the internet’s and web’s power players.”
Privacy and Ethical Concerns
Many of the privacy concerns related to the internet have to do with
identity. Each time we use the internet on our personal devices, whether
it be to search for a restaurant, purchase a book, send a message to a
friend or “like” an article on social media, we leave cyber footprints (or
mouse droppings, as Lessig put it). The more cyber footprints we leave
behind, the easier it is for third parties to piece together our individ-
ual identities and to use that data for targeted commercial or research
purposes.
Numerous companies, sometimes called data brokers, collect and
analyze this data to make inferences about us. They then sell it to other
companies, advertisers, research rms and governments that are eager
to learn our habits and other behaviors. This data can be as valuable, if
not more valuable, to them as the goods and services they sell.
For decades, information about consumer behavior has been col-
lected through means like questionnaires, purchase tracking and pub-
lic records. But never has this volume and level of sensitive personal
data been collected. This is because the architecture of the internet
allows our actions to be tracked.
As Julie Brill, who served on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),
told CBS’s 60 Minutes program in , all types of data such as our
purchases, political aliation, income, ethnic background, sexual
58
orientation and medical history are collected and packaged into digi-
tal “proles.”
“I think most people have no idea that it’s being collected, sold and
that it is personally identiable about them and that the information
is in basically a prole of them,” said Brill.
In the FTC released a report about the billion-dollar indus-
try that showed one data broker had , data “segments” for nearly
every American consumer. The information in people’s proles can be
used to place individuals into categories for marketing purposes, such
as dog owner or expectant parent, or in more problematic groups, like
gambler or cancer patient.
Je Chester, a privacy advocate and director of the Center for Digital
Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprot, told National Public
Radio in that little can be done to stop third parties from obtain-
ing personal data. “Because there are no online privacy laws in the
United States, there’s no stop sign, there’s no go-slow sign, there’s no
crossing guard,” he said. “The message is anything goes.”
Some mobile applications, or apps, also contain tracking software
that collect personal information, as well as location and behavioral
data, according to researchers at the Yale Privacy Lab. Much of this
data collection occurs by default when one visits a website, which has
led to calls for better user privacy options and ways to block use of such
data. A primary way to know whether your data is being collected, and
to learn about other policies, is to visit a website’s terms of service.
Technology giants Google and Facebook are arguably the biggest
data collectors, but their stated policies are generally not to share such
information. However, Facebook has come under scrutiny for some-
how allowing the personal data of millions of its users to be acquired
by Cambridge Analytica, a political data rm.
A good rule of thumb when going online is to assume that any infor-
mation can be surveilled and even stolen. “Be aware it is a space that
is watched,” social psychologist Ilka Gleibs of the London School of
Economics told USA Today in .
The ethical challenges raised by online social networks tend to center
around how we use them and how companies manage the information
shared on them. Ironically, a lot of the data collected about us is the
59
result of our sharing personal information on social media platforms.
Users do this for a variety of reasons, including the desire to stay in touch
with family and friends. But not everyone has the same intentions.
For example, social movements have adopted social media to spread
their messages and recruit members. Recall the unrest following
Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in or Arab Spring
demonstrations in the Middle East beginning in . Smartphones in
the hands of citizens are changing news coverage and the way news is
shared.
Ethical issues can arise when content deemed inappropriate or
violent is shared online. In YouTube found itself in hot water
when it declined to entirely remove a video, despite a White House
request, that some Muslims perceived as anti-Islamic. The company
determined the video did not violate its terms of service regarding hate
speech. But that didn’t stop violent protests across the Arab world.
This leads to many questions, including how much responsibility
social media companies have in controlling what is shared on their plat-
forms. It also raises questions about censorship when companies do
decide to remove user content, and about how companies dene such
broad concepts as hate speech, nudity, harassment or violence in order
to determine whether their terms of service have been violated. As soci-
eties evolve with advances in digital technologies, more questions will
surely follow. In a democracy, they force us to rethink age-old concepts
like freedom and privacy in new ways. In places where democracy does
not exist, it forces repressive regimes to think of ways to curb freedom
and gives them tools to further curtail privacy. With that in mind, Peters,
the University of Georgia professor, referenced one commentator who
observed that now is the time to gure out how to use technology to
support the rights and liberties of all the world’s internet users.
Citizen Journalism
In a article entitled “Standing Rock, Orlando, Aleppo: The Year
in Citizen Journalism,” Time magazine recounted the many stories
rst reported that year not by professional reporters but by regular
citizens with mobile devices in hand.
60
The deadly mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
The fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and outside St. Paul, Minnesota, respectively.
The arrest of actress Shailene Woodley, recorded live on Facebook,
while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. The daily life of -year-
old Bana Alabed, tweeted to hundreds of thousands of followers as war
was waged on Syria’s capital, Aleppo.
“The way we see news today is framed by whoever records it rst,”
said the Time article. “No longer are network TV cameramen or news-
paper photographers the only visual sources at crime scenes or in
war zones (and anywhere in between). The ubiquity of smartphones
around the world has made everyone a potential witness and a poten-
tial broadcaster.”
In essence, that is citizen journalism. Ordinary people engag-
ing in journalistic practices, according to Luke Goode’s denition.
A researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Goode
said citizen journalism can include blogging, photo and video shar-
ing and posting eyewitness commentary of current events. He argued
in a article in New Media & Society, an academic journal, that
while traditional journalism and citizen journalism are distinct from
one another, they should not be viewed as completely separate from
each other, either.
Citizen journalists, he said, play an important role in mediating
news, just as traditional journalists have done, dating back to when
the printer James Johnston published maritime and other news for
Savannah colonists in the Georgia Gazette, Georgia’s rst newspaper.
Activist bloggers, smartphone photojournalists and meme creators
can play the same agenda-setting role for public discourse as report-
ers. Citizen journalism has the potential to make newsgathering more
democratic by transforming news and journalism from something
news consumers consume to a conversation in which news consumers
can participate, according to Goode.
In the Hungton Post recruited , citizen journalists
for its coverage of the presidential campaign. One of them, Mayhill
Fowler, a San Francisco Bay Area–blogger, broke a major story in
61
reporting President Barack Obama’s controversial remark about frus-
trated working-class Pennsylvanians clinging to guns or religion.
“The production of news routinely implies a complex and multilay-
ered chain of communication and sense-making: events, issues and
ideas will be subject to the inuence of various ‘lters’ or ‘gatekeepers’
(sources, journalists, sub-editors) before reaching their public destina-
tion,” wrote Goode.
“What blogging, citizen journalism and social news sites yield are
new possibilities for citizen participation at various points along those
chains of sense-making that shape news—not only new possibilities
for citizens to ‘break’ news.”
Still, is what citizen journalists do truly journalism? Can the pub-
lic trust that the information they report has gone through a careful
process of fact-checking and verication, and is not just rumor or
speculation?
In a gathering of journalists, bloggers, news executives, media
scholars and librarians discussed that and related questions at a con-
ference titled “Blogging, Journalism & Credibility: Battleground and
Common Ground,” sponsored by Harvard and the American Library
Association. Blogging and journalism are dierent, though they do inter-
sect, conference attendees collectively concluded, according to a confer-
ence report. Much of blogging is not journalism and does not intend to
be, some said. But many agreed there was room for both in the emerging
media ecosystem. Simon Waldman, then with The Guardian newspaper,
used the Indian Ocean tsunami as an example of the strengths and
weaknesses of citizen journalism. He said the biggest positive was the
many vivid rst-person accounts of the disaster, but a great downside was
the lack of structure, and ultimately, meaning to all those stories.
“The disciplines of traditional media—space, deadlines, the need to
have a headline and an intro and a cohesive story rather than random
paragraphs, the use of layout or running order to give some sense of
shape and priority to the news—aren’t just awkward restrictions,” said
Waldman. “They add meaning. They help understanding. Without
them, it is much, much harder to make sense of what is happening in
the world.”
62
Conference attendees mostly agreed that following journalistic prin-
ciples would make it more likely for citizen journalists to gain credi-
bility. They determined that while transparency is vital, credibility also
depends on building a relationship of trust with readers and audiences.
In the intervening years since the conference, there have been count-
less stories about the rise and downfall of citizen journalism. The same
year Time magazine hailed it, New York magazine published a critical
story with the headline: “‘Citizen Journalism’ Is a Catastrophe Right
Now, and It’ll Only Get Worse.” But citizen journalism doesn’t have to
mean the death of traditional journalism, argued Goode. It does, he
said, mean that there are new agenda-setters, a term related to a the-
ory by a similar name that claims mass media inuences the public by
telling people not what to think, but what to think about.
“The citizen journalism movement does not signal the end of agen-
da-setting by professional or elite media organizations,” Goode wrote.
“Such institutions still break and frame a large proportion of the news
stories circulating through the online sphere and this is unlikely to
change in the foreseeable future. But those institutions must now vie
for attention in competition with a diverse range of alternative news
sources, from hyperlocal sites to unocial and untamed celebrity gos-
sip sites.”
63
THE ABSENCE
OF LOCAL NEWS
William “Dink” NeSmith Jr., a native of Jesup, Georgia, a University
of Georgia graduate and a co-owner of Community Newspapers Inc.
(CNI), is not afraid of a ght. Based in Athens, Georgia, CNI publishes
small town newspapers in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. But
the Press-Sentinel in Jesup, a coastal region town of about , resi-
dents in southeast Georgia, is especially close to NeSmith’s heart.
The twice-weekly published paper traces its roots back to the Jesup
Sentinel, founded the year the Civil War ended, in . Like many
papers across the country that purchased smaller competitors, the
Jesup Sentinel merged with its rival, Wayne County Press, to form
the Press-Sentinel in . It was NeSmith, initially with the paper as
an employee in , who spearheaded the merger, according to the
paper’s website. Since then, he along with its small sta, have guided it
through the ups and downs of the digital age.
In early January , Derby Waters, a part-time Press-Sentinel
reporter, learned that a subsidiary of Republic Services, one of the
nation’s largest waste management companies, had applied for an
Army Corps of Engineers permit to develop acres near its -acre
landll in the county.
The purpose was to build a rail yard to accommodate as many as
railcars that could dump up to , tons of coal ash and other
non-hazardous waste into the landll—per day. Soon after, the paper
ran a story with the headline “Company Plans to Bring Coal Ash, Other
Waste Here,” which warned of the project’s potential environmental
and health dangers, although under federal law, coal ash is permitted
to be stored in lined landlls.
64
NeSmith joined Waters and other staers in wall-to-wall coverage
of the issue. They devoted numerous news articles, columns and edi-
torials to reporting the company’s plans and how they might aect the
community. One story reported that the county commission in
had self-imposed restrictions to regulate Republic.
Concerned citizens wrote letters to the editor and packed commis-
sion meetings. Protests were organized. A Facebook group was cre-
ated. Even second-graders wrote essays in school about the project, the
Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reported.
Republic told the CJR it believed the paper’s coverage was mis-
leading, described NeSmith’s columns as one-sided and questioned
the ethics of his letter-writing campaign appealing to Microsoft’s Bill
Gates, a company board member, for help.
Nevertheless, the permit application was withdrawn more than a
year later, in April . For its eorts, the Press-Sentinel received an
Environmental Championship Award by GreenLaw, a nonprot law
rm in Atlanta. NeSmith, who owns property in the Jesup area, said
it was the job of his paper to defend the interests of the community it
serves.
“I’ve got cypress in my swamp tract that were growing when Jesus
was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane,” NeSmith told the CJR.
“I’m going to leave that land to my children and grandchildren. I don’t
want my great-grandchildren to say, ‘It was real nice of grandpa to do
this for us, but why didn’t he stand up? Why did he let coal ash get
dumped here?’”
The Importance of Local News
Local news serves as an important source for information about mat-
ters that aect us on a personal level, like teacher layos, a local team’s
tournament win, a hike in property taxes, a chemical spill in a nearby
river, a new downtown restaurant or car wreck along our daily com-
mute route.
In an age where information about nearly any topic in the world is at
our ngertips, it is easy to forget that someone has to gather and report
65
that information, including information about local government and
social services, public safety, housing, schools, jobs and community
events.
In some small communities, the weekly community newspaper run
by a dedicated, if small, team of journalists is the only source of local
information for residents. And communities with an absence of local
news sources do suer consequences.
In Pew Research Center asked Americans, “If your local news-
paper no longer existed, would that have a major impact, a minor
impact or no impact on your ability to keep up with information and
news about your local community?” Most ( percent) said it would
have no impact or a minor impact.
“Losing local sources of information would be detrimental to their
communities,” said Christina Smith, a Georgia College professor who
studies community journalism. “Local newspapers are the eyes and
ears of the communities they serve. In fact, in most communities in
Georgia, the local newspapers are the only information sources avail-
able because larger daily newspapers and television stations tend not
to cover routine news in rural communities.”
Smith said research has consistently shown local newspapers are
vital to their communities in the digital age, despite larger newspa-
pers closing their doors due to decreasing circulation and falling ad
revenue.
Georgia, with nearly . million residents, has about newspa-
pers, of which are considered community papers that publish weekly
news about local government, crime, schools, events, sports and peo-
ple. Most are in small, rural towns and have circulations of less than
,, according to Smith. They “matter because local newspapers and
their journalists have the potential to impact, at the grassroots level, the
everyday normal lives of residents across the state,” said Smith.
But why do local newspapers seem to be doing better than their
larger brethren? The answer, Smith said, lies in understanding the
community newspaper approach to journalism. For example, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution serves as the newspaper of record in
Georgia. Like other large daily newspapers, its primary role is to serve
66
as the fourth estate, the watchdog of public ocials and other people
in power, Smith said.
Most journalists at large daily papers trained at a journalism school
and follow journalistic principles like accuracy, fairness and indepen-
dence from sources and advertisers, said Smith. She said content pro-
duced at large dailies traditionally require a certain level of detach-
ment and in-depth investigation.
But the community journalism approach is somewhat dierent,
which is not to say there is no room for in-depth reporting at commu-
nity papers or that their journalists are biased and do not understand
news, according to Smith.
“Community newspapers tend to reect their communities rather
than actively criticize them, and most news produced by small, rural
newspapers would never be reported on by journalists at larger daily
newspapers,” said Smith.
“However, those stories—new roof being installed on a bank, the
summer library reading program set to begin, a civic club’s student of
the month, the recently crowned fair queens, a parking lot closing for
repairs, a hiring of a new band teacher—matter most in small towns.”
Local journalists understand these are the stories that matter most
because they inform residents in the community about their neigh-
bors, family and friends, as well as help shape the community’s iden-
tity, Smith said.
“The relationship between the local press and its audience is ulti-
mately what distinguishes these media sources from larger daily news-
papers,” said Smith. “Simply put, community newspapers remain vital
because they know what their purposes are and who their audiences
are. After all, the journalists who do community journalism actively
live among the people they write about, which creates an intimate rela-
tionship with the audience.”
What’s Driving the Absence of Local News
In today’s changing media landscape, jolted by the explosion in new
digital technologies, like the internet, along with cheaper online ads,
traditional local news sources have faced increased competition from
67
new media, including social media, online news sites and blogs that
often oer free content.
These and other changes have uprooted traditional media business
models. Newspaper and magazine advertising has continued to decline
as many readers migrate to digital media. Meanwhile, Google’s ad rev-
enue grew from around $. billion to more than $ billion between
and , according to Statista, a Germany-based research com-
pany. As a result, print media circulation has dropped dramatically.
“In drawing readers and viewers from a relatively small pond, local
news outlets struggle to attract enough trac to generate ad dollars
sucient to support the cost of gathering the news in the rst place,”
Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reported in .
One result: A steady, years-long decline in local-news reporting, as
newspapers—the largest source of local news—have gradually cut back
their reporting stas. Across all media, including print, digital, tele-
vision and radio, newsroom employment from to dropped
by percent, or about , jobs. In there were , news-
room jobs but by there were just ,, according to Pew.
The biggest driver causing the drop in newsroom employment is
newspapers, where most news originates. Between and ,
newspaper newsrooms in cities and towns across America have shed
more than , jobs, a percent decline, according to Pew.
In there were about , newspaper journalists, according to
the data. Whereas newspaper journalists used to make up percent
of all news media jobs in , they accounted for percent in .
Comparably, employment in television and radio has been more sta-
ble. Meanwhile, digital-only news outlets during the same period have
increased their employment by about , jobs, or percent, which
was not enough to oset the loss in newspaper jobs.
In Georgia, the number of journalists declined by more than
percent from , in to in , said Keith Herndon of the
University of Georgia, citing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“In Georgia, of the remaining reporters and correspondents
are employed in metro Atlanta, which leaves only deployed on
the frontlines of newsgathering for the remainder of the state,” said
Herndon. “That’s a small number considering the size of a state that
68
stretches from Valdosta to the Tennessee border and Columbus to
Savannah and encompasses hundreds of small towns and communi-
ties in between.”
Charles Davis, a former journalist and now dean of the University of
Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, said
the declining numbers of reporters on the front lines of local news is
cause for concern.
“When we lose reporters at the rate we’re losing them, democracy suf-
fers as there simply is less news about local governments and that trans-
lates into less transparency in how our elected leaders carry out their
responsibilities on behalf of the citizens who elected them,” he said.
Many observers had hoped the industry’s move to digital would
result in local digital news sites lling the void left by print, but that has
not been the case, according to Danny Hayes of George Washington
University and Jennifer Lawless of American University, authors of a
study in the Journal of Politics about the decline of local news.
“Indeed, there are virtually no alternative online sources of local
public aairs reporting in the top media markets across the coun-
try,” Hayes and Lawless wrote. “This increasingly fallow news envi-
ronment—part of what some describe as a crisis in American jour-
nalism—raises the concern that without sucient information about
community aairs, citizen engagement in local politics will wither.”
It used to be that big national news outlets routinely reviewed
and absorbed the work of journalists at local newspapers, especially
regional newspapers that excelled at statewide coverage, said Joyce
Dehli, a former news executive. “Today, less local journalism—and less
meaningful journalism—moves through a diminished network,” she
wrote in Nieman Reports, a journalism journal.
Some observers see digital start-up sites as potential game chang-
ers. But not all invest in accountability journalism like those previously
discussed. Moreover, most successful online operations like BuzzFeed,
Politico and Hungton Post, whose reporters are concentrated on the
East Coast and West Coast, tend to overlook local news in favor of
national and international stories.
“The impact can be seen in the reduced coverage of political corrup-
tion and corporate malpractice, environmental degradation and social
69
displacement,” writer Michael Massing said in his story, “How
Not to Cover America,” in the American Prospect magazine.
When national media do decide to cover local news, they do not
always get the whole story. With few, if any, local sources, little knowl-
edge of the area and a tight deadline, journalists who parachute down
from places like New York or California to cover breaking news or an
election in Middle America are at a disadvantage.
“You go in for a few days, take the temperature, write a story and
then you move on to the next,” Massing told C-SPAN. “I feel that is just
not a way to really get at the deep stories.”
The Implications of Fewer Local News Sources
In the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a
report called “The Information Needs of Communities,” which exam-
ined the eects of the changes in media. The alarming decline in local
news led the commission to question whether the press was upholding
its end of the adversarial relationship.
“The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envi-
sioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democ-
racy—is in some cases at risk at the local level,” the reported stated.
There is evidence that suggests government spending increases
when local newspapers close, according to researchers Paul Gao of the
University of Notre Dame, and Chang Lee and Dermot Murphy of the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
“We found that local government borrowing costs signicantly
increased for counties that have experienced a newspaper closure com-
pared to geographically adjacent counties with similar demographic
and economic characteristics without newspaper closures,” Gao wrote
in the Columbia Journalism Review. “Our evidence indicates that a
lack of local newspaper coverage has serious nancial consequences
for local governments, and that alternative news sources are not nec-
essarily lling the gaps.”
Hayes and Lawless, the aforementioned researchers, also conducted
a study, published in in the Journal of Politics, which found that
citizens become less politically engaged and vote less when there is less
70
coverage of local elections. “The fact that we nd eects for everyone—
not just the least attentive—illustrates a critical theoretical point about
the relationship between the changing media environment and citizen
engagement in contemporary American politics,” Hayes and Lawless
concluded.
There is another downside to the absence of local news that does
not get talked about as much, according to media columnist Margaret
Sullivan of the Washington Post. “In our terribly divided nation, we
need the local newspaper to give us common information—an agreed-
upon set of facts to argue about,” she wrote in a column.
She told a story about visiting a community near Scranton,
Pennsylvania, and talking to residents about their media habits. To
her surprise, she said, many of the people maintained an allegiance to
competing local newspapers and local TV stations.
“The most reasonable people I talked to, no matter whom they had
voted for, were regular readers of the local papers and regular watch-
ers of the local news. (The county was one of those critical places that
had voted for President Obama in and , and ipped red to
Trump in ),” Sullivan wrote. “By contrast, those residents who got
news only from Facebook or from cable news were deep in their own
echo chambers and couldn’t seem to hear anything else.”
How News Consumers Can Help Revitalize Local News
The Macon–Bibb County area is home to around , residents in
ve counties who live in a largely rural region about miles south
of Atlanta. In a study, Pew researchers identied local news
sources in the area.
In addition to The Telegraph daily newspaper, there were four local
TV stations, two radio stations, four community weekly newspapers,
four specialty and ethnic news outlets and Mercer University’s The
Cluster student paper, dedicated to original content. Most have a web-
site and social media presence. The analysis did not identify a digi-
tal-only news outlet that regularly reported local news.
In Pew’s case study, “Local News in a Digital Age,” which com-
pared Macon’s media ecosystem with that of Denver, Colorado, and
71
Sioux City, Iowa, Macon stood out in how many residents ( percent)
closely followed news about local schools, the local economy, local gov-
ernment and politics, and local jobs and unemployment.
But a major nding of the study was that Denver, a much larger city
than Macon and Sioux City, has a more diverse media landscape that
includes blogs, nonprot organizations and ethnic media and specialty
publications that provide alternative news coverage of issues tradi-
tional media sometimes overlook for various reasons.
“A larger ecosystem, in other words, is not simply a super-sized ver-
sion of its smaller brethren,” the report stated. “It is also a more diverse
one when it comes to who is providing coverage and how.”
When it comes to news, citizens benet from having a variety of
sources of information. That goes not just for nation-states like the
United States, where an independent and free press is valued, but for
local communities as well. That’s why it is important to not just con-
sume local journalism but nancially support it as well.
By subscribing to local papers, citizens can demand more coverage.
In donating to local public television or radio, citizens contribute more
resources to cover the issues they care about. That new nonprot or
digital-only news start-up that appears in our community needs our
nancial investment to remain independent and answerable only to
the public.
More collaborations and partnerships among journalists from dif-
ferent platforms have begun to emerge. Macon is home to one such
innovation in Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism,
a collaboration between the university’s journalism and media studies
department, The Telegraph newspaper and Georgia Public Broadcasting.
The city’s CBS aliate, WMAZ, recently became a partner.
Backed by nonprot funding, veteran journalists, students and fac-
ulty work in a joint newsroom to provide in-depth coverage of local
issues. Their award-winning reporting includes a seven-part series on
residential blight and a series on pedestrian safety that have led to $
million in local government funding and the formation of a commu-
nity task force, respectively, to remedy the problems.
72
THE PUBLIC’S
RESPONSIBILITY
IN AN INFORMED
DEMOCRACY
Each year, Reporters Without Borders, an international press
watchdog group, compiles a ranking of countries based on the free-
dom that exists for their citizens, journalists and news organizations.
On the World Press Freedom Index, the United States dropped
to number among countries, a recent trend, landing in the sec-
ond-best category, where press freedom is described as “fairly good.”
European nations make up most of the countries in the top category
that have the most press freedom. Norway ranked number , followed
by Sweden and the Netherlands. However, the report warned of grow-
ing “verbal violence” against media in Western democracies, which
had four of the ve largest ranking declines from the previous year.
North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan were ranked at the bottom of
the index.
“More and more democratically-elected leaders no longer see the
media as part of democracy’s essential underpinning, but as an adver-
sary to which they openly display their aversion,” Reporters Without
Borders stated.
America’s Founding Fathers worked to create a society in which
power derived from citizens, not from a monarchy. Citizens would be
equipped with the ability to vote unresponsive leaders out of oce.
Thomas Jeerson and his fellow patriots understood that to exercise
such power properly, citizens needed to be informed, hence the cre-
ation of a free press.
That the world’s oldest democracy nds itself in a “fairly good” cat-
egory on a fundamental freedom enshrined in its Constitution is in
some ways alarming, and in other ways, not surprising. In guaranteeing
73
freedom of the press, said Nicholas Lemann, former dean of the
Columbia Journalism School, the Founding Fathers gave a pass to
“fake news,” because the early American press mainly reported on its
opinions, not on what we today would call news.
“They felt protected against a government that came to power
through misinformation, because the country wasn’t very democratic,
and because they assumed most people would simply vote their eco-
nomic interests, Lemann wrote in a article in the New Yorker
magazine.
We must remember that democracy is something new, not old, said
Peter Hoer, an early American historian at the University of Georgia.
The Founding Fathers did not believe in direct democracy, but rather
in republican governance, that is, representative government. It
was a revolutionary idea. Unfortunately, women, Catholics, Native
Americans, blacks and poor whites were excluded from participation.
Bit by bit, said Hoer, Georgia and the nation have abandoned this
restricted notion of self-government in favor of genuine democracy.
“But the trend now is to return to some of these restrictions, for
example, requiring a photo identication card for voting, in eect a
driver’s license, and asking for proof of citizenship,” said Hoer.
Expanding and not shrinking enfranchisement, after all, as Jennifer
Hochschild of Harvard University has written, makes a nation more
democratic. What is the purpose of citizenship if a citizen cannot vote?
Barriers to citizen participation in democracies can be subtle or obvi-
ous. Education is thus critical because citizens must be informed about
ways their lives can be improved. They can do this by supporting the
work of an independent and free press that provides accurate informa-
tion and holds government accountable. Once citizens are informed,
they must then become engaged in the social, political, economic and
cultural development of their communities. Voting, attending govern-
ment and civic meetings, volunteering for community-based causes
and supporting local news, libraries and other institutions are just a
few ways to become engaged.
James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, once
wrote: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the
74
means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or per-
haps both. . . . and a people who mean to be their own Governors must
arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Hopefully, this media literacy guidebook will serve as a helpful step
in the journey of understanding the importance of media and journal-
ism in our democracy, as well as a foundation for future learning.
Other Ways to be a Responsible Consumer of News
Do your research as suggested in the chapter on “fake news” to be
sure the story is true.
Don’t just read articles or watch cable news stations with like-
minded views. Follow a variety of sources to gain a full perspective
of the news.
Don’t share news stories if you are not sure of the source.
If you see someone sharing something you think may be
“fake news,” speak up!
75
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83
LOOK IT UP! RESOURCES FOR
VERIFYING WHAT YOU READ
Center for Responsive Politics, opensecrets.org
FactCheck, factcheck.org
Fact Checker, washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker
Google Images reverse image search, images.google.com
PolitiFact, politifact.com or politifact.com/Georgia
Snopes, snopes.com
TinEye reverse image search, tineye.com
At Georgia-Pacific we believe our democracy is stronger because of a free press.
Journalism, in all its forms, should be an unencumbered voice and source for truthful information
and opinion. As a core value of our democracy, a free press makes our country better.
FREEDOM
OF THE PRESS
DEMOCRACY
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS ENABLES DEMOCRACY.
DEMOCRACY ENABLES FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
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