Acquisition of Credibility and Social Authority by Media: Then and Now

Acquisition of Credibility and Social Authority by Media: Then and Now

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.”

The quotation above from Joseph Pulitzer, a publisher not known to shy away from a dramatic headline when he saw one, speaks to the importance of the social authority and credibility of the press in modern society. Without an effective press that has credibility and social authority to critique the government, he stated, popular government would fail the people. How this has happened over time and the opportunities to achieve it in the future is the concern of this paper.

This essay argues that media has acquired social authority and maintained credibility in many different ways throughout history: through anonymity, through its general independence, in its role of social critic, through memorable eccentric reporters, in a just the facts approach, through objectivity, as an investigative adversary, or when it just rises to the occasion. It further goes on to analyze the current environment that the mass media faces and suggests that media outlets in the new-media infused world of today may have to pursue different strategies from those they have pursued before. How the press has maintained credibility has not only changed over recent times but it will likely differ markedly in the future.

Anonymity, a practice frowned upon in much modern mainstream media today, at particular moments in history was central to the ability of some publishers to survive. Arguably the earliest press, the writers in the Republic of Letters, required it to carry on. Their enlightenment ideals and thus implicit opposition to the French King made anonymity or pseudonyms necessary. Moreover, any reader in those days might perhaps have distrusted any signed document, since the author would likely only have maintained his ability to publish in his name with the consent of sovereign, a sure indicator of compromised credibility.

In the early United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution placed the freedom of the press in a privileged position. The press had evolved from being subservient to the crown as it was in Europe to now becoming independent. Early American news sheets in the 1820’s tended to emerge first under the patronage of benefactors who were often a small circle of politicians or merchants. As a consequence they appear to have held little general credibility. Only later could they be said to have some distance in reporting, indicated perhaps most clearly in the papers’ names, which often included the term “critic” “herald” or “sun,” all of which begin to suggest a desire to challenge or illuminate the world, perhaps reflecting the stirrings of the public-spirited press that Pulitzer called for above. Moreover, these stirrings were accompanied in many cases with moves to lower prices, daily rather than subscription purchases, and larger circulations, and thus likely a desire to be relevant to as many people as possible. Perhaps the most successful was James Bennett’s New York Herald, which distinguished itself as independent of powerful interests. The indication of this independence was perhaps made most clear by the attacks on Bennett by the “6 penny” papers, the papers of the elite, who in 1840 sought to put him out of business in order to protect their owners’ interests. Mere independence in the early 1800’s was enough to sustain credibility and authority.

Reporting in the American Civil War serves to illustrate how some reporters in that time worked to make their reputations. Not only did reporters get bylines during the period but they also consciously set themselves apart as a new breed. They did this partially by calling themselves the Bohemian Brigade after a famous watering hole in New York and as Tucher writes “assuming the mantle of Pfaffs’ apostles” (Pfaff being the owner of said watering hole). Moreover, they acquired this reputation for fearlessness and unconventionality at a time when few writers sustained themselves on a writing income alone. Their reputation, though it faded fast in the Gilded-Age journalism that followed, did mean they emerged from the war with a “narrative of themselves as an authoritative interpretative community.” The mode of reporters’ acquiring social authority in their own name through independence of mind was born.

The 1890’s saw an appeal to science and realism, in common with thinking in society at the time, as a way to gain authority. This challenge was made all the harder as reporters were working within the period when the yellow press, a sensationalist and scandal-mongering set of papers, existed tempting all to over reach. The challenge for the reporter was to stick to the “facts” whilst having enough, likely interesting but possibly fabricated, “color” in any story. It was in this period that the New York Times began to acquire its reputation upon a model of “journalism as information.” Moreover, muckraking journalism, a style of journalism in line with the ethos of the time, emerged supportive of social progress. The tools of muckraking and science alongside “facts” served journalists well in this period in their quest to sustain credibility and authority.

It was only after this period that the modern ideal of objectivity emerged. This was in part as a response to the perspective-shattering nature of World War I in which U.S. propaganda had been so successful in enlisting the support of the nation, the rise of public relations specialists, and the economic crash that followed the war only 11 years later. Objectivity emerged as the primary vehicle for journalists to legitimize their craft. The shock of the war and the other changes had splintered a broader consensus and led a movement to “replace a simple faith in facts with an allegiance to rules and procedures” to ensure the legitimacy of the words they wrote. This ideal, though still revered by many in the modern press corps, is easy to understand, as it recognized that though every report might strive for objectivity there is always some subjectivity in any report. Additionally this change was accompanied by the re-emergence of the byline as a marker of quality, something that emerged in parallel with specialization and the acceptance of interpretive reporting.

It was the 1960’s when trust in the media based on “objectivity” began to fray. The combination of a number of events where the government successfully persuaded the press not to publish stories related to among other things the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union and the preparations for the Bay of Pigs generated a criticism of the press in common with the times. The outcome of the bargain unraveling was for the press to move into the role of adversary, particularly with respect to its dealings with the government. The step from adversary to large-scale investigative reporting, a modern incarnation of muckraking journalism, was small. These efforts reached their zenith with the Pentagon Papers and Watergate - both events that continue to provide the press legitimacy even today.

Independent of the overarching rationales for social authority laid out above, the effectiveness of the press in covering the unplanned event has alternately built or squandered the previously acquired authority. Most notably, the assassination of President Kennedy provided made for TV images in the form of the funeral. That and the fortuitous capturing of the death of Lee Harvey Oswald on live television ushered in a period when television became preeminent in news reporting. Moreover, as Barbie Zelizer writes, the event legitimized the journalist as the principle reteller of the story despite their absence from the actual scene of the shooting. Vietnam made the names of journalists that are only now retiring or being replaced. CNN came of age in the first Gulf War. The happenstance of the “memorable journalist” and the “historical event” cannot be discounted as a factor in maintaining the credibility of journalism writ large.

All of the above has been reviewed in order to make the point that the source of social authority in journalism and news reporting in general has come from many different sources. Moreover, credibility has been captured by different media over times and sometimes credited as much to the individual (what would Watergate have been without Woodward & Bernstein?) as the outlet or medium.

That said, the next section of this paper will discuss the modern context for credibility and social authority, a context that is substantively different both because of the communications explosion, since these same publications now exist in a sea of other publications both on-line and offline that attempt to satisfy ever small audiences, and for a number of other reasons. The question I seek to answer is how media might sustain their social authority in this new context. Essentially, in a world that supports an infinite number of voices and publications, the source of journalistic authority will morph again.

It is impossible to consider journalism today without first acknowledging the recent failures in reporting. The Jayson Blair scandal in which Blair was found to have fabricated stories didn’t place the New York Times in a good light. The Judith Miller debacle, where the New York Times was shown to have been hoodwinked by the administration over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has left even those most likely to defend the grey lady, Miller’s fellow journalists, acknowledging its failures. Moreover, the failure by the New York Times to publish the existence of a domestic wiretapping program for several years brings into question the reputation of the press as fearless defenders of the individual against the state acquired in earlier periods.

As journalists in general and the New York Times in particular have reeled from the criticisms stemming from the above events, their sanctuary of choice – the abstract idea of journalistic objectivity – has proven an increasingly uncomfortable place to retreat. Objectivity, was dropped from the ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists in 1996. Not even the journalists association regard it as adequate to defend their social authority. A good example of this is a recent event with a leading columnist at Time Magazine, Joe Klein. In his column of November 28th titled “Tone Deaf Democrats,” Joe Klein made a claim about the controversial FISA bill that is under consideration in the House. He interpreted the bill’s provisions as preventing warrantless wiretapping of even known foreign terrorist suspects. Progressive-leaning readers felt this interpretation was incorrect since the draft bill contained a sentence that read “a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” This disputed assertion by a senior writer at Time resulted in much reader-led investigation and reader communication not only with the columnist but also with his editor. Though I have used here an example where progressive readers wish to correct an interpretation they see as unfavorable to their cause, such behavior is not confined to the progressive left. A similar fracas can be recounted from the conservative perspective about the Dan Rather / Bush National Guard story prior to the 2004 elections. Mainstream media, who have until now relied on their expertise, a certain deference from their readership, and their ability to limit their visible critics to a few letters or a small 30-word correction in a subsequent issue, are now faced by self-propelled reader-reporters who, when they choose to, treat the fourth estate as an adversary not unlike the way traditional media has considered government.

Additionally, with an ever-larger number of critics coming online, the bar for knowledge will climb ever higher for the general assignment reporter who will be faced as he always was with readers who might know more than he does on a particular subject but who are now able to critique his reporting publicly and instantaneously. Moreover the ability to be perceived as “objective” when readership or viewership is so heterogeneous will require the inclusion of views across such a wide range of perspectives that it begs credulity that a reporter can achieve this.

Whatever one thinks about the particular incidents recounted above it is clear that relying on the idea of objectivity that was created in the 1930’s begs the question: Are there alternatives? Objectivity alone isn’t much fun if the media is relying on reputation acquired in a period where deference reigned and talking back wasn’t possible.

Anonymity, a vehicle of credibility in the Republic of Letters, is an option open only to a few. The Economist, a weekly of considerable repute with a broad cross-section of educated society, goes as far as to work without bylines and to use the brand, presumably in totality a more resilient object, as a way of preventing criticisms of the kind which Joe Klein at Time sustained. The option of complete anonymity isn’t one open to commercial ventures, who need to sell their copy, but is available to certain websites. Wikileaks, an unconventional publisher of allegedly secret documents takes full advantage of this possibility.

Another possible response is specialization of the outlet in terms of audience. This seems instinctively appealing since the “objectivity” bar is lower for any given audience who come to read, listen, or watch the news coverage with a limited range of frames, thus making credibility easier to gain. Will this result in a move to a more UK style of journalism whereby papers have not only editorials of a certain tendency but also a selection of news presented for a partisan subset of the population? It isn’t yet clear but it does seem as doing so would permit papers to adopt a definition of “objectivity” that they could more easily sustain.

A more radical version of partisan coverage to meet a specific audience would be to move the opinion page to the front page, effectively what blogs do for those who read them as news sources. The opinion-laden interpretation of a story is then presented with hyperlinks to the relevant subset of facts. Though this is possible, it seems unlikely, given institutional inertia though one could say that the transition of the website of The Washington Monthly Magazine to be solely a blog operated by Kevin Drum is possibly an example of this in the magazine world. That said, it is possible that journalism will include a much larger number of voices as exemplified by two political blogs in Orange County, North Carolina (Orange Politics and its competitor Squeeze the Pulp) where opinion pieces lead discussion on topical issues and the reader reads the news filtered by a trusted opinionated conversational voices and news material is reached through hyperlinks that also serve to extend the conversation to other websites.

Another alternative is hyper-specialization in terms of the remit of reporters. The Washington Post’s Loudon Extra is an example of this on a geographic basis, and their small business portal, Metro Business, is an example on a subject basis. The Loudon Extra neatly illustrates some strategies that appeal not to the general abstract idea of objectivity to gain a reputation for stories written solely to be read by an audience admiring of a reputation long gained. The Loudon Extra seeks to provide vibrant local reporting by synthesizing those stories its mother paper has, producing its own and calling on local citizens to comment, and sharing its content whilst making it available using multi-skilled reporters and making every story available as a podcast. From the perspective of the reporter, a move to increasing subject specialization with multi-media functionality will raise the likelihood that the reporter will not only provide richer coverage but will have greater subject-matter expertise than the reader.

An alternate is an emerging model from the blogosphere best exemplified by Josh Micah-Marshall’s hybrid blogging and reporting outlet that includes his editorializing front page (Talking Points Memo), a publication that has traditional experts ready to weigh in on specific topics of the moment (TPM Café ), and a more traditional beat-reporting entity (TPM Muckraker) that innovatively uses its readership as researchers on occasion.

An opportunity provided by the web to sustain a dialogue and make room for an infinite number of comments also permits a change in the relationship with a subset of an outlet’s readership. The rationale for embracing a more conversational style in reporting is twofold. First it builds loyalty and perhaps dissuades regular readers from attacking the outlet destructively. Second, it enables the readership to provide input around story choices, expertise, or sources. The case for these sorts of efforts has been made independently of outlet with the example of the comprehensive synthesis of conflicting stories on the “Virginia Tech Massacre” on Wikipedia. The BBC also has a model that taps readers as resources and seeks coverage of numerous events under the brand of Your News. Minnesota Public Radio with its Public Insight Journalism Initiative has also had some success in sourcing stories, generating stories, and providing commentary and in some cases specific expertise.

A final element of readers’ feedback that can be accommodated is around layout and story preference. There is little preventing a modern paper from producing an online edition that is laid out algorithmically based on the preferences of individual readers. Such a new portal would again be a means of seeking to build trust with the readers and acquire social authority for delivering the subset of news each reader wants to see.

With the media’s citadel under assault, it appears to me that even the modern conception of journalistic objectivity may not be enough to sustain journalism as we know it now. Undoubtedly certain prestigious outlets will rely on it for continued salvation. The Associated Press, for example, will likely continue to rely on objectivity as the basis for its existence and as its reputation for timely terse reports from across the globe will continue to fill a niche. Certain elite newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal will also be able to maintain a position as papers of record as their large and elite readership will justify high paying advertisers.

I wonder, though, if the rest of the news-reporting media might seek salvation elsewhere. The world may be very different from the 1800’s, but it is clear that publishers can more than likely recruit a few of the modern equivalent of “men who live by literary labor” to write for free, edit for free, and pick stories for free. Moreover the press can make a shift from maintaining reputation on the basis of a generalized aloof authority (often combined with objectivity in all but the modern sensationalist press) to one of mutual trust. The breadth of explanations regarding how social authority has been be achieved provides an appreciation that a reputation in a particular time is neither durable nor is its mode of acquisition necessarily repeatable. The modern new-media environment challenges the traditional mode of gaining credibility through acquisition of a generalized reputation and provides significant opportunity to set up relationships that rely on a particularized mutual trust between an outlet and its readers.

Whether the contemporary media will be a cynical, mercenary demagogic press or a press that operates with “trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it” that can preserve that public virtue prized by Joseph Pulitzer I am not sure but we can only hope. Whichever it is, the mode of achieving and maintaining credibility will likely be different, very different. As Michael Schudson writes in his book The Power of News, “neither is there a journalism worth more than a radio headline service that is not also an act of play and imagination.” Let us hope that media and journalists in particular can imagine an era of two-way trust.