Journalism and Partisanship: Voices from the Field
Kyle Chang writes:
In attempts at discovering the effects of social media on the traditional media:
I began with the thought that social media would create feedback for traditional journalists and that the journalists would adapt to the political landscape as described by the social media; in effect, they would change the way they reported to improve their ratings, at least that’s the hypothesis.
I contacted a few reporters at the Washington Post and three of them responded–unanimously saying that they did not pay attention to social media when deciding what to write and that they tried to keep an objective view on the news that is of “interest to readers of all political persuasion.”
I should revise my hypothesis because I was too cynical to begin with: there are journalists that maintain journalistic integrity, at least the semblance of it. A revised hypothesis would read that some media will adapt to its readers by monitoring social media and the ones that do will see higher ratings–whether this occurs or not is up to the individual media sources.
This hypothesis relies heavily on the idea of selective exposure, i.e. choosing what media sources to view based on preexisting biases. Its existence is controversial but Natalie Stroud contends that selective exposure depends on the topic of study because it is possibly motivated by maintaining an emotional state. Thus, topics that hold higher importance in an individual’s life will be more likely to produce selective exposure of media; politics is one of these topics. Even when it comes to scientific studies, it was found that people have a tendency to believe research that affirms preexisting biases; this is more a test of selective belief than selective exposure but the two are presumably linked if maintaining an emotional state is the end goal for selective exposure.
One of the Washington Post journalists noted that any partisan figures tended to get more views from the public, articles covering Sarah Palin, for instance. John Avlon, a senior columnist for Newsweek, writes that partisan media is plainly profitable (his article references Fox News specifically).
Within the extant body of literature, there’s also a strain that claims that objective media is impossible to begin with. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, writes in his blog that the very act of framing an issue provides a bias for news, whether the bias conform to conservative, liberal or undefined ideals. Thus it’s impossible to adhere perfectly to the objective journalist standard that journalists strive for. Rosen goes on to discuss the ethics of this conclusion, which also informs the ethics of my topic of media partisanship. He writes that it’s more plausible, and more truthful, to acknowledge one’s own biases than to claiming to be perfectly objective because the latter is misleading and impossible to achieve while the former gives audiences the power to judge sources critically .
The internet contributes to this realization because audiences are accessing multiple news sources that don’t always agree in their framing, which makes them realize the subjectivity in what they read. If Rosen is right, then media partisanship only comes in degrees and its apparent badness may be mitigated through transparency.
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