What's Left (or Right) To Trust?

More than four years ago, in February of 2000, my local CBS affiliate in Chicago tried something different. With the mantra “no water-skiing squirrels” and the expertise of veteran Chi-town anchor Carol Marin, “The 10 p.m. News with Carol Marin” attempted to take local news back in time. Gone were the menacing, sensational teasers as the station went to commercial—“What your family should know about strangulation this Christmas season”—replaced by Marin standing and reciting the day’s news as impassively as a mannequin.

It was a throwback to the 1950s. And fifty years behind its time, the newscast failed. By August, there were rumblings that the CBS affiliate would can the format. By November, Carol Marin and her hardcore local news posse were toast. Their attempt at de-sensationalizing local news had only revealed the extent to which Americans (or at least Chicagoans) had become accustomed to the current sorry, sensationalized state of news in America.

Flash forward to 2004. Three 24-hour cable news channels compete for viewers. CNN captures the liberals, Fox News the conservatives and MSNBC the viewers who are transfixed by long acronyms. Fox News is winning the cable battle, and during the Republican National Convention it even beat the networks. At the same time, media intellectuals, pundits and ordinary Americans alike agree that Fox exhibits a fairly extreme bias towards the right. Eighty-nine percent of Americans trust museums for unbiased information. Thirty-six percent trust television news. These numbers don’t really add up. Americans in the twenty-first century seem to have developed a contradictory stance towards the media. On one hand, they demand their news to be exciting. On the other, they clearly wouldn’t mind if their news were more trustworthy. Problem is, trustworthiness and sensationalism don’t mix too well.

The lack of trust Americans have in their media is reflected by the number of media watchdog groups, each with its own left- or right-leaning agenda, that have sprung up in the last few years. There’s the Media Research Center, whose mission is to “prove that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values.” And then there’s Media Matters for America, whose opposing raison d’etre is “to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

There’s no denying that individual media outlets cover events differently. Just look at the headlines. When interim Prime Minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi addressed a joint session of Congress recently, reporters from both Fox News and CNN attended the same speech—but they didn’t write the same stories. The headline on CNN.com read, “Bush: US Won’t Abandon Iraqi People.” Fox News chose the simpler: “Allawi: Thank You America.” Judging only from the headlines, Fox’s pro-Iraq war, conservative stance comes through loud and clear. The articles also highlight different aspects of the speech, with Fox focusing on Allawi’s gratefulness to America where CNN notes that the speech was made against a backdrop of growing violence and hostage-taking. There is little overlap throughout the stories. Each outlet mentions different facts, emphasizes different points and even presents the story differently (Fox News put the story at the top of its website with a picture; CNN opted for a simple hyperlinked headline). These are two different accounts of the same event. So who’s telling the truth?

To answer this, we need to understand why media outlets form their own, unique biases. Research has shown that people tend to watch news from media outlets which share their own opinions. That means it’s in the interest of media companies to stray from absolute neutrality. Slant the news a little, and you’ve instantly differentiated your newspaper or TV station from the competition. Add headlines more sensationalized and jingoistic than your competitors, and you’ve instantly beaten them. Wooden information-deliverers like Carol Marin don’t stand a chance against the boisterous Bill O’Reilly and the seductive Paula Zahn. The media are a business, and their business is presenting biased information in a way that catches the eye of their target viewers.

It’s important to keep bias and sensationalism separate. Media bias is as old as the printing press, and it’s not going away. Sensationalism, however, has only as much staying power as we media consumers give it. Recently, we’ve been a bit too generous. When media outlets differentiate themselves by bending the truth and overstating the facts, it’s tough to know what’s left to trust. It’s also tough to blame them for their excesses. The consumer confidence problem plaguing American media—the problem that has convinced 64 percent of America that the media are untrustworthy (up from 46 percent in mid-1989)—is not the media’s fault. It’s ours.

We’re demanding unreasonable things from the men and women who write our news. We want the CBS ten o’clock news to be as exciting as the 9 o’clock drama. And we also want each bit of news analyzed accurately and neutrally. We want to think that the biased, sensationalized headlines flashing in front of us actually reflect the truth, even as our own demands on media make the truth harder and harder to present in a way that interests us. Until Americans stop insisting that the media cater to contradictory goals, water-skiing squirrels will carve circles around intelligent news.

Alex Slack ’06 is a history concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.