Newsgathering Assignment #1

In a speech at the Women’s Caucus during the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Sheila Johnson, the nation’s first black female billionaire and co-founder of the BET network, declared, “I am dismayed by the direction, the tone, and the scope of this year’s coverage [of the presidential primaries by the media].” Johnson may be in entertainment television, but she knows bad news coverage when she spots it. She criticized the media for having “totally missed the point” in this election by focusing on the fact that the candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties are members of three often-slighted demographic groups—women, African Americans, and the elderly. The issues of most interest to the constituents (in the Women’s Caucus, health care, education, and reproductive rights lead as rallying points) were overshadowed by discussions of being black or not black enough, being too old to survive the presidential term, and being too much a woman, or too little of one, to effectively lead a nation.
Johnson wasn’t stumping for Hillary Clinton, but the coverage of Clinton’s campaign provides some of the meatiest fodder for examples that failure to stick to the issues. When Clinton up on the campaign trail in Connecticut in January, it made Newsweek and drew make-or-break-the-campaign discussion. Then the neckline of one particular outfit drew a full-on media assessment in the Washington Post when it violated her standard “desexualized uniform.” The discussion rolled over to MSNBC to consume almost 24 minutes of air time between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET on July 30, according to Media Matters .
The address of that subject matter smacked of sexism the way the Facebook group “Hillary Clinton stop running for president and make me a sandwich!” does. Which is depressing, because historically, the role of the media has been charted for a higher moral ground than that of a propaganda machine or rumor mill.
In his 1920’s book Liberty and the News, Walter Lippman wrote, "The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy." A free media was prescribed to this nation in the Bill of Rights because a free, honest, and critical media is a necessary function of a democracy. Nowhere do we see those needs more clearly illuminated than when the news is on the democratic process.
Journalists are public servants, and their role in democracy is to serve as a watchdog organization, asking the questions the public has of its elected officials, and delivering those answers to them. While the public may be discussing the rumors and myths and fears associated with having a woman in the highest executive office in our nation, the media’s privilege and responsibility is to ask the questions that dispel the rumors and illuminate the facts that will or won’t qualify her for that job. Not spend half an hour debating about whether her neckline was too racy for the Oval Office.
Lippman is right that selecting and ordering the news falls to journalists as a sanctified duty. The public trusts the media to lay before it the information they need and want to know about their world, and, with the exception of certain media watch groups, the media does this basically without supervision. They have a largely unquestioned loyalty from the public, perhaps because the media exists precisely to perform the role Lippman described—a filter that pushes facts through to the public, while letting fiction fall aside. The role may not take the position of a “priestly” moral authority Lippman describes, and a label centered on education and information dissemination might be more appropriate, but when a news outlet fails to follow through on its duty, it’s a failure with more ramifications than losing the media consumers to daytime soap operas, Facebook, or the latest Cosmo.
And it’s not just women like Johnson, who has fought for equality in and out of the sports arenas, who were disappointed by that failure. There’s a nation of viewers, readers, and listeners who were poorly served by a media that provided for an interest in shock value, and treated voters as if their ballot were cast by whether or not a woman can hold back her tears in public. Clinton was back up in the public eye, and it's interesting that this week the person who's tears are being discussed in the New York Times is not Mrs. but Mr. Clinton.