I often have thought of public communications, particularly journalistic communications, as akin to the weather. It’s hot. It’s cold. It’s windy or snowy. For those of us who aren’t meteorologists or addicted to the Weather Channel, we simply adjust to the conditions and move on. Unless the rain ruins a beach day or the winds destroy our neighborhood, we don’t pay the weather much mind.
Attention to journalism, day in and day out, has generally been as casual — unless an event rivets public attention or news coverage provokes an emotional reaction. But unlike the weather, the communications environment we live in is entirely manmade and sometimes intended to manipulate or deceive us. And it succeeds if it goes unexamined.
In the early years of the republic, the young Congress gave newspapers the postal discount that they still enjoy today because lawmakers believed an informed citizenry was essential to building consensus around a new government. The author Alexis de Tocqueville described stage coaches dropping of two or more newspapers at each, isolated frontier home.
Politics and journalism were entwined. As late as the 1920s, newspaper publishers and editors frankly used their news pages to launch their own political careers. Objectivity only became a widespread journalistic value as newspapers began to merge and were forced to appeal to more diverse readerships.
Before that, there was a tradition of pointed subjectivity. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, attempted to destroy John Adams and his ideas by writing under a pen name in the Aurora.
Journalism has had many successes, but bad journalism has probably accompanied every destructive event in our history as a nation.
Editors and publishers in the former Confederate South helped create a new, romantic narrative for the Civil War (it was about states’ rights, never about slavery) and bury the advances of Reconstruction. They insisted there was no such thing as the KKK or that it existed as a non-violent fraternity. They inaccurately painted the black leadership that emerged after the war as chaotic and the white teachers, preachers and others who came from the North as rapacious carpetbaggers. The actual, remarkable strides that former slaves made toward self-rule — becoming senators, city councilors, police officers and business owners in the first 20 years after the war — were reversed and memory of them lost.
In the 1800s, Native Americans in Florida were wiped out after newspapers inaccurately depicted raids on white settlements. During the Dust Bowl, an influential editor on the Texas panhandle urged homesteaders to continue plowing up the southern prairie, which they did, and ridiculed the Roosevelt administration official who correctly identified that plowing as the problem. On the eve of the stock market crash, the Wall Street Journal urged investors to keep buying stocks.
Some see the decades-long reign of Walter Cronkite and the three networks as a golden era of news. And in some ways it was. The anchors helped promote a single, national narrative and social cohesion. But news organizations had awesome power as gatekeepers. They decided what was important and what was not, what we got to hear and read, and what we did not.
The pretension of objectivity only added to their power because information was believed to be carefully filtered of bias and thus somehow more “true.” But the human is a subjective animal and even the most careful trained and disciplined journalist cannot erase bias
Journalist Bill Moyers’ talks about the Southern newspapers of his youth and early career abetting the cruelties of Jim Crow by never acknowledging them. Many viewers and readers felt left out of the picture painted by major news organizations, and in the 1980s some conservative listeners welcomed the brash and angry radio voice of Rush Limbaugh.
I believe there is a direct line from Limbaugh and the political shock jocks he helped spawn to Fox News, which was formed specifically to correct what it saw as a liberal bias in the news. Together, they did their best to discredit mainstream news coverage, passing on misinformation and creating controversy where there should have been none — i.e. the “war on Christmas” and Megan Kelly assuring her listeners that Santa Claus is white.
The straight line from there is where we are today, where a majority (52%) of people in one recent poll saying they believe Donald Trump rather than the news media — even when what he says is easily disprovable.
How does this connect with Bowen theory? I am not sure, but I have a lot of questions. A few: How do journalism and social media drive emotional process in society and how does emotional process in society drive journalism? What is responsible journalistic and public communication? (I mention both because, with social media, we all now can be journalists.)
Research indicates that in a polarization, people hold onto their view of an issue even in the face of disproving facts — in fact those facts only harden their position. How does that work? Is this just people moving away in the face of intensity? And if so, what kind of communications would engage people’s thinking, as opposed to emotional reactions?
And in a world awash in biased communications and fake news and other intentional efforts to deceive, how does one get a credible picture of reality? Given all this, what is responsibly exercised citizenship from a Bowen perspective?
In a free society, we value free and open communication. But that very value, abetted by social media and digital technology, seems able to undo the civil order that upholds it. Bowen says that in a regression, people talk more about rights than responsibilities. Maybe the way we take to Facebook, Twitter and certain news sites is a manifestation of that.