News

The Politics of Illusion, Tenth Edition

W. Lance Bennett

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226345055
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over thirty years, News: The Politics of Illusion has not simply reflected the political communication field—it has played a major role in shaping it. Today, the familiar news organizations of the legacy press are operating in a fragmenting and expanding mediaverse that resembles a big bang of proliferating online competitors that are challenging the very definition of news itself. Audience-powered sites such as the Huffington Post and Vox blend conventional political reporting with opinion blogs, celebrity gossip, and other ephemera aimed at getting clicks and shares. At the same time, the rise of serious investigative organizations such as ProPublica presents yet a different challenge to legacy journalism. Lance Bennett's thoroughly revised tenth edition offers the most up-to-date guide to understanding how and why the media and news landscapes are being transformed. It explains the mix of old and new, and points to possible outcomes. Where areas of change are clearly established, key concepts from earlier editions have been revised. There are new case studies, updates on old favorites, and insightful analyses of how the new media system and novel kinds of information and engagement are affecting our politics. As always, News presents fresh evidence and arguments that invite new ways of thinking about the political information system and its place in democracy.

1

News in a Changing Information System

Over the past two decades, economic, cultural, political and technological changes have challenged the stability of the existing media regime . . . raising questions such as the relative merits of Saturday Night Live, CBS Evening News, Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times as sources of political information.

—Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini1

I don’t know anything about the newspaper business. . . . I went through a few gates before deciding to buy The [Washington] Post. Is it hopeless? I didn’t want to do it if it was. The Internet has radically disrupted traditional newspapers. The world is completely changed.

—Jeff Bezos2

Around the time the first web browsers sparked the Internet boom of the 1990s, Nicholas Negroponte envisioned the coming of a virtual news experience that he termed The Daily Me.3 As the name implies, such an information system delivers what each of us wants to know about, when, where, and how we like it. Negroponte, a founder of the MIT Media Lab, called the old mass media system The Daily Us because it brought people in society together around pretty much the same reporting of common problems, threats, and triumphs (and still does when something really big happens). We now live with both media systems in play. People born after 1980 have been termed “digital natives”4 because they have or will come of age in a highly personalized digital media environment. These digital generations are more likely to experience The Daily Me, as they get information through Facebook and Twitter and by surfing the web. Many other citizens live comfortably within both information systems, combining personalized online sources with what we now call “legacy” news sources such as TV, radio, and daily papers. Meanwhile, another segment of citizens (primarily those over 55) live mainly with The Daily Us of newspapers and broadcast news—but the size of that “us” is shrinking, as the legacy media generation grows older. While we are not likely to see the legacy news media disappear, the dominance of that system is being challenged by new forms of content production and distribution that involve more audience participation and even bypass traditional journalism in content creation. A source of friction at the interface of these two systems is that much of the serious news that continues to circulate through the digital sphere is produced by legacy news organizations that are having trouble generating revenues as advertising money follows prime younger demographics online.

As these changes play out, the emerging information order still retains some echoes of what we once thought of as news: important information delivered in timely fashion to people who want to know it. Yet more information is automated, digested by machines, and delivered through highly personalized channels. Consider, for example, how the reader of this book may encounter important local news in the not too distant future:

Jan is in her self-driving car on her way to a meeting in a city nearby, when a severe thunderstorm hits her hometown, spawning a small tornado. Jan’s smartwatch issues a storm warning, then alerts her that her daughter’s school is in lockdown. The smartwatch asks Jan if she wants more details. “Yes, neighborhood news,” Jan replies. “Car display.” . . . Real-time posts from her neighborhood appear with details of damage and with photos. Jan’s house sends a message that the power is out. A request for a map of her town shows the path and real-time location of the tornado. It also shows which neighborhoods have power and which schools are locked down. Road closures and traffic jams appear as red lines.5

The information in this scenario seems intuitively like news, in that it is timely and important. However, this information is produced and distributed largely by machines, not journalists and news organizations. Even in this simple weather scenario, it is not clear how people would learn what public officials are doing or whether their response seems adequate. Many local news organizations that would report such political information are struggling to stay in business as audiences migrate to an array of digital information sources. The advertising dollars that once supported local news media are flowing to digital platforms such as Google that target consumers in more refined and personalized ways.

As journalism organizations struggle to find stable niches within this complex information environment, many critics worry that the quality of reporting is deteriorating, contributing to the growing numbers of citizens who have stopped following news produced by conventional journalism organizations.6 Among those who continue to use legacy news sources, the average time spent each day on those sources declines dramatically across each generation from retirees to young adults.7 As the balance tips toward The Daily Me, social media sites are increasingly popular as news feeds, with some 30 percent of the public getting news from Facebook. Compared to people who go directly to an online news site, those referred by Facebook spend only one-quarter as much time on each story, while encountering just one-sixth as many total stories. Entertainment is the most popular type of news on Facebook, favored by 73 percent of the site’s news seekers. National political news comes in fourth, regularly encountered by 55 percent of the Facebook news audience, while international news comes in ninth at 39 percent.8 In addition to providing a sketchy impression of the day’s events, social media news feeds enable people to select their own versions of just the topics that interest them, resulting in scattered public attention mixed with polarization of views on critical problems.9

Will publics in this mixed information environment be less in the know, more polarized, and less able to come together to decide what to do about important issues? Motivated by these concerns, many communication scholars and journalists lament the decline of traditional news based on investigations by journalists and distributed by news organizations as what citizens need to know about their world. Meanwhile, others argue that the legacy news media have seldom lived up to the watchdog journalism ideal of holding officials accountable. Besides, there is so much information available online that it is easy to become informed if one really cares. But how do we establish the accuracy of much of what passes for political information online? Or, is The Daily Me based on what people want to believe, making facts and evidence less important?

No matter where one falls in these controversies, one thing is clear: we will not return to anything like the mass media news system and its large “captive audience” of the last century.10 The legacy news organizations that anchored that system have suffered a number of shocks that include competition from an explosion of mobile apps and specialized online platforms that growing numbers of people find more in tune with their lifestyles. When people share the information that pulses through their devices, they often edit and add commentary to help it travel over particular social networks. This involvement of audiences in producing and distributing information changes the neat one-to-many communication logic that defined the mass media era. Social media employ a many-to-many logic that involves people more interactively in the communication process. Jay Rosen has argued that this shift is so significant that we need a new terminology for “the people formerly known as the audience.” He even published a mythical manifesto from them telling the mass media people:

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not, we want you to know we’re here.11

During such a time of change, it is best to resist defining news as only that content produced by journalists and formal news organizations. Bruce Williams and Michael Delli Carpini propose a set of grounding questions that point us beyond the changing world of journalism in thinking about the political role of information media: “Do the media provide us with the kinds of information that helps individual and collective decision-making? Do media provide us with enough of this information? Do we trust the information provided by the media?”12 The answers to these questions given by ordinary citizens do not bode well for the legacy media. For example, roughly one-third of people surveyed have dropped a legacy news source because of declining quality.13 Public confidence in print and television news is hovering around 20 percent, with surprisingly little difference across age, education, or gender.14 Some of this discontent is surely due to an overriding discouragement with the mean tone of politics today—a tone that inevitably saturates conventional news reporting. Beyond the negativity of politics and the tendency of journalists to get caught up in it, there are many other factors affecting the quality of our political information system today. Let’s begin with why so many observers argue for finding ways to save or reinvent journalism.

Why Journalism Matters

The struggles of the legacy press system may not worry most people because there appear to be so many outlets for information that it is hard to keep up with them. One only need enter a topic in a search engine to find hundreds or thousands of sites with information about it. Yet many of the blogs, webzines, and online news organizations are merely recycling the shrinking journalism content produced by increasingly threatened news organizations. Consider a revealing study of one news microcosm: the “news ecosystem” of the city of Baltimore. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a study of where information about politics, government, and public life came from in that city.15 The study looked at various media, from newspaper, radio, and television to blogs and other online sites. Although this information system seemed rich and diverse, with some 53 different outlets for news, tracking the origins of actual news items showed that 95 percent of the stories containing original information “came from traditional media—most of them from the newspaper.” Even more distressing was a look back in time showing that the sole surviving paper, the Baltimore Sun, reported 32 percent fewer stories between 1999 and 2009, and 73 percent fewer than in 1991.

In his sweeping look at the creation (and demise) of the modern media, Paul Starr argued that if these trends continue, the growing ignorance of the citizenry and the diminished public accountability of officials will surely be accompanied by a great wave of public corruption.16 Indeed, many citizens already see corruption in government as a major problem. For example, a 2008 poll on the roots of the financial crisis showed that 62 percent strongly agreed with the statement that political corruption played a major role in the crisis, and another 19 percent agreed “somewhat” with that statement.17 By 2013, 76 percent of Americans felt that the political parties were the most corrupt institutions and that the problem was growing worse.18

Despite evidence that problems with accountability or watchdog journalism began long before news organizations encountered financial problems or lost audiences, many proposals focus on improving the financial health of existing journalism organizations. While remedies such as putting up paywalls for access to online information may work for specialized publications such as the Wall Street Journal, they do not seem destined to save journalism in general. The immediate problem is that as long as there are free news outlets, those charging for the same information will not likely attract many paying customers. Whether or not there is truth to the popular Internet mantra that “information wants to be free,”19 it is also equally true that those who produce quality, independent information want to be paid.

Despite these perceived limitations, a strong case can still be made that independent journalism is the only hope for regular and reliable information about what those in power are doing.20 Without it, say proponents of this view, the lights go out on democracy, meaning that government is left to police itself while promoting its own activities through public relations, propaganda, or spin.21

Can the News Be Fixed?

In the view of scholars like Thomas Patterson, the answer is for journalism organizations to return to their core values of informing the public with timely and accurate information about government and public life. He notes that studies of what kinds of news Americans follow most closely put topics like wars, economic problems, and policy issues at the top (along with bad weather and natural disasters), while scandals and the lives of celebrities are at the bottom.22 The problem, according to Patterson, is that even when journalists try to cover important issues, they often get caught in tedious battles between politicians that shift the focus from the underlying issues to power struggles and spin. Since controversy and fights are thought to be good for drawing audiences, news organizations often amp up the political drama at the expense of more useful information.

However, before we decide that fixing the news is a simple matter of returning to core values, we must address a serious problem that stands in the way: a commercial media system that has been in a downward spiral of declining audiences, revenues, and product quality for several decades. News organizations in modern America were unusual businesses in the sense that they produced a public good (the news) through commercial transactions involving selling audiences to advertisers.23 Until fairly recently, the ethics of professional journalism maintained something of a “firewall” between the journalism and the advertising sides of the business, with the result that advertisers had minimal direct control over what the news side did. At the same time, advertisers generally cared little about whether their money helped support a news bureau in Berlin or paid for reporting a story about the effects of climate change in Bolivia. There were, of course, times when commercial sponsors clashed with reporting decisions, as we will see in chapter 7. However, the current system has become bent on finding content that delivers desired consumers to advertisers, often to little avail. Online information sites can deliver advertising images in far more personalized ways to each individual, so that different people see different ads in the same article, and even different articles on a site. When the Internet suddenly offered cheaper and more precise means of targeting both ads and content to audiences, advertisers and audiences began to drift away from conventional media formats, leaving the news itself as an odd piece out in the media picture. Who would pay to produce that story on climate change? Who would pay to watch it? Most other democracies (including America in earlier times) have better understood the benefit of protecting such a valuable public good by figuring out how to support it through public subsidies, much in the way defense, public safety, education, and health care have been variously supported or subsidized as public goods.

In response to these fundamental problems with the legacy press, scholars such as Robert McChesney...