Reporters: Informing Readers vs. Minimizing Risk

Hoisted from comments: Jay Rosen:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Dana Milbank vs. Helen Thomas: From Brad's Where Are the Heirs of Walter Lippman?: "Note that my examples are budget examples. I'm one of the budget people. But I have peers in other issue areas. They see the same deficiencies. Whether they are bombs-and-bullets people, striped-pants-diplomacy people, welfare-and-social-policy people, science-and-technology-policy people--they all see the same patterns." http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/where_are_the_h.html

Brad: Those "patterns" begin to find some explanation when you realize that categories like "hard news" rather than "analytical piece" are simultaneously serving as a reality-reporting system, and a risk-reduction method. Hard news is supposed to be lowest risk, not necessarily harder information. It's lower risk to just say what happened ("Rove said...") without saying what's true. An "analysis" piece means you can speculate about motives and what might happen from here. Slightly higher risk, but not necessarily more "analytical."

Or let's take the classic in press watcher frustration... He said this happened, she said that happened. It tries to inform you in a half-hearted way, but it secures protection from being wrong in a full-throated way. "I'm just telling you what they said." It's not truthtelling but innocence-establishing behavior-- see? no agenda.

Here's the catch: officially, journalists only engage in truthtelling. That they would the choose the more innocent account over the more truthful one contradicts the professional self-image. So it doesn't happen, even though it does. When what journalists are doing makes no sense at all to you on the reality-reporting scale, switch yourself over to the risk-reduction (or "refuge") scale and measure it there.

Why don't journalists work together and coordinate their assaults to get a better answer from the President? Might make sense on the reality-reporting front, but fry the circuits on risk reduction. They'd open themselves to "cabal" charges, or so they think. Why didn't Leonard Downie join with Bill Keller and Dean Baquet in their joint op-ed explaining the need to report on classified programs sometimes? (He was asked.) He didn't want to risk the impression that news organizations act together to "get" something.

For we are dealing not only with the risk of being wrong, but of coming under effective attack in the culture war's politicized theatre of news. Outside actors can influence the news by raising the perception of risk.

Posted by: ay Rosen |July 18, 2006 at 03:26 PM

Comments

[andres]

Jay Rosen's comment is a good start for a microeconomics-focused dissertation: a game-theoretic model of journalistic analysis vs. neutral narrative. That is, journalists are not fools, they are simply rational optimizers/agents who realize that their principals _don't_ want any sort of objective analysis and prefer simple stenography in order to stay out of trouble.

That the risks and negative payoffs involved in truly objective analysis are so high is an indication either that the wrong principals are setting the incentives or that the politicians in effect have too much principal power over newspapers, enough to start treating editors as agents, including negative payoffs if the editors displease the politicians. It's time for serious reforms to increase the _independence_ of the mainstream media, as I really don't agree with Brad that it's just an issue of insufficient quality control among journalists.

[Kate G.]

I realize this thread is long over but I want to post here that at a dinner with Howard Dean the other night (blush) he said more or less the same thing about politicians generally. Its part of his stock speech about politicans being risk averse--he argued that its a good strategy for individuals but a lousy strategy for a party. This is actually something that has been heavily discussed over at Kos and Hullabaloo, I believe, the necessity for individual politicans to "take one for the team" in order for the position of the party (or in this case the press) to be made crystal clear to future voters/readers. Of course the republicans have (and I didn't get to say this to governor dean because I'm not as quick in person as I am in print) mastered this divide between what is good for the individual and what is good for the group by buying up and paying off their failed politiicans with new jobs. The dems let their own people sink or swim and refuse to support them after failed runs. In the case of the press it is, of course, the editors and publishers who should be fighting to support agressive reporting but who won't. You might argue that the blogs serve some of the same function of giving real news an outlet when the regular media won't print it. I'm thinking here of David Neiwert's astonishing run as an independent journalist over at Orcinius. Alas, it may have come to an end but while he is publishing over there one is getting the benefit of journalism without compromise tha tlinks the factual and the analytic.

Kate G.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6699&u=96|9|...

Barn Swallow Feeding Fledgling
Oceanside Marine Nature Study Area--Long Island.

Accept for being slower in person than in print, which I choose to claim is being discrete, and do not dare to argue the point, I agree completely :) Nicely done.