Opinion: Truth and accuracy matter most for media

The current controversy over bias at NPR obscures a larger, more important issue: the declining commitment to truth-telling by news organizations and their audiences’ refusal to demand and value truth. This is a chicken and egg issue. The sentence above could also be written this way: The refusal of news consumers to value truth has led news organizations to do less truth-telling.

“I am not in the entertainment business,” my old boss, Jim Lehrer , used to say about his “boring,” highly factual approach to news. He also said a journalist’s role was to offer readers and viewers the intellectual equivalent of a nutritious diet — “We feed them broccoli, even when they ask for dessert.” But in our current media era, the people have placed their order. Dessert is what they demand, and our news organizations are increasingly feeding it to them in the form of punditry, hype and personal essays — masquerading as news. The audience demands it and news organizations, who depend on audience attention for survival, provide it. As the problem grows, any deviation from the dessert menu, in the form of factual reporting, is perversely deemed “biased” or “political.”

In 2004, before social media and other technology platforms fully dominated our media world, authors and media analysts Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson imagined the future we would face when a digital ecosystem would let anyone publish anything and we would only receive “news” based on our own philosophies and fears – “much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational.” But it is “what we wanted, it’s what we chose. And its commercial success preempted any discussion of media and democracy, or journalistic ethics.”

This problem does not originate in newsrooms — it originates in families, neighborhoods, schools, towns and cities across America. In disagreements between neighbors, PTA debates, city council elections and business disputes. In almost every interaction, “winning” the conflict has become more important than anything, especially telling and accepting the truth. But this type of victory is hollow and will be short-lived.

“The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise,” wrote David Bersoff, of the Edelman Trust Institute . “When that goes away, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken.”

Our democratic foundation is currently undergoing an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude. It is being shaken to its core. But this is a man-made disaster, not a natural one, and we have the collective ability to stop it. If we want better news, we must, as a whole people, accept the value of truth and facts in our everyday lives and in all of our interactions, and communication. Then we must vote with our attention and our wallets — to support fact-based reporting, even when it makes us uncomfortable or casts “our side” in a bad light.

The late scholar Hugh Nibley told us this problem is not new but will be fatal if not corrected.

“The disease our world is suffering from is not something peculiar to a uniquely scientific and permissive age, but the very same virus that has finished off all the other great societies of which we have record,” Nibley wrote. “The ancients called it Rhetoric. What it amounts to is the acceptance, for the sake of power and profits, of certain acknowledged standards of lying.”

I advise the student staff of a university newspaper and radio station, and I teach journalism courses. The students have grown tired of my recitation of the first edict in the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics : “Seek Truth and Report It.” A full commitment to that principle, I tell them, answers many ethical questions, and resolves many problems. A reporter may have sympathy for a person, group of people, or cause, but a complete commitment to telling the truth will greatly temper and diminish (though not eliminate) bias. There has always been bias in news. People bring their world views and experience to every endeavor. In the past, this was counterbalanced by a mutual commitment, by journalists AND their audience, to facts and truth. Even with some level of inevitable human bias, truth will shine through, if reported, and the truth is the bedrock of news.

When I talk to students and those in our community about the role of the news media, I often use the Ad Fontes Media Bias matrix as an example. The matrix rates news organizations on political bias — across a left to right spectrum. People are fascinated by the horizontal display — and often carefully begin to consume the chart from left to right, to see where their favorite media outlet sits on the spectrum. But there is another key component to the matrix — the vertical axis — labeled “News Value and Reliability,” i.e., truth and accuracy. That is where we should begin. The chart should be read from top to bottom. Truth and accuracy should be our north star as journalists and as readers, viewers and listeners. Truth and accuracy are more important than political point of view.

A description of the reporting process that has been attributed to legendary newspaper editor Gene Patterson is, “Find out what happened, write it down, and then we will put it in the newspaper.” The other end of that equation is a reader, viewer or listener who cares.

Jason Manning is director of student media at Arizona State University and teaches at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.