What exactly do the people have the right to know? I ask this question because journalists often say they should have access to all kinds of information to report them to the people that have the right to know.
Well, maybe the people have
the right to know all there is about their public figures, but do they really
want to know everything? If the answer is no, not everything ... well then, who
decides what the people should be told and what they should not be?
The role of the news
organizations in society has preoccupied Richard W. Rahm so much, he wrote an
article about his concerns under the title: “Incompetence and ignorance run
rampant through news organizations,” and the subtitle: “Media dumbed down and
politicized.” The article was published on October 26, 2020 in The Washington
Times.
To be sure, journalists have
several sayings that govern their behavior.
One saying goes like this:
“When dog bites man, that's not news. When man bites dog, that's news.” It
means that news must inherently be outlier oddities. But this cannot always be
true because the press is supposed to mimic ordinary life. And in real life,
when people met before there was a telephone, they told each other news that
was not always odd. And today, where social media is dominant, people don't
just tweet the unusual things they experience; they pour their heart out with
all kinds of little occurrences, and their friends cannot have too much of
them. They want more, and they dish out more,
Another saying that governs
the behavior of journalists goes like this: “If it bleeds, it leads.” In
television, this means that calamities are considered so important, they must
be the first item, treated at the start of the broadcast. In print journalism,
it means that calamities make it on the front page, usually with a big picture
that accompanies a big headline. But this is valid only to the people in whose
community the calamity happened. The truth is that people in Buffalo, New York,
for example, do not care about a building that collapsed in South Korea as much
as they would if it had collapsed in Buffalo.
And then, there is the matter
of responsibility the journalists have to make sure that what they report is accurate
if it is news, or fair and balanced if it is opinion. Of course, nobody is
perfect, thus errors are committed in this department all the time, but where
injury to someone has resulted, the outlet that's responsible must rectify its
error. However, is it enough for a news organization to just say it was wrong
before, it is sorry now, and here is the truth as we now believe happened?
Yes, say the news
organizations, which are motivated by yet another saying they explain by
telling the following short story: “When we make a mistake, we make it in full
view of the public. When medical doctors make a mistake, it is taken by the
patient to his grave.” This is not always true, of course, because doctors are
often caught for the mistakes they make and held responsible. Their mistakes
are quantified, and the punishment they receive fits the malpractice they
committed.
As to the journalists, it is
almost always impossible to assess the damage that a false information has
caused a person or a community. In addition, journalist have something they can
hide behind that doctors do not have. It is protection under the freedom of
speech law, stipulated in the First Amendment of the American Bill of Rights.
They interpret it to mean that true or false, deliberate or inadvertent, they
can say anything they want, and they will not be prosecuted.
Obviously, therefore, there
are serious problems with the profession of journalism, and they need to be
addressed. To do that, we must identify the underlying reasons for such
problems to exist in the first place. Fortunately, Richard Rahm has done his
homework, and here is what he said in this regard:
“News organizations have been
politicized, meaning that political correctness became more important than
competence. Publications used to fact check the stories submitted by their
reporters –– including double checking quotes with the source. As cost
pressures increased, fact checkers were dispensed with as an avoidable cost ––
and so did accuracy. Broadcast media has always underinvested in original
investigative reporting. Newsrooms are now filled with young, woke,
know-nothings –– because they are cheap”.
What this suggests in the
final analysis, is that news organizations must be deterred from making those
kinds of mistakes. The way to do it is to paraphrase the saying: “The cure for
the ills of democracy is more democracy,” and state that, “the cure for the
ills of journalism is more journalism”.
To put this into practice is
to pass a law that says, if a news outlet publishes information about someone,
and it cannot prove its accuracy, in addition to a monetary compensation, the
outlet will give equal space to the plaintiff who will correct the
misinformation the outlet published about him or her in the first place.
Bear in mind that if a news
organization is not bothered too much for being ordered to pay a monetary
compensation to a plaintiff, it is horrified by the thought of being ordered to
make space available to a plaintiff that will correct the mistakes made by its
employees.
And that will force them to be careful not to make mistakes to the extent that they can avoid it.