Mind over media
Mind over media
Modern journalists take on a unique challenge, shaping the narrative of what we see in the world – and what we don’t.
A historic question
What are the goals and responsibilities of the modern media, and how do news companies strive to achieve them?
As the Greater Dallas Press delivery van pulls up just outside Nearburg, several members of The ReMarker staff gather round. It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Friday, and 1,400 copies of the October edition of The ReMarker have just arrived. Bundle after bundle of hot-off-the-press newspapers are unloaded and hauled off to the Hersh Journalism Suite. From there, the papers are distributed all over campus — to Winn, Hoffman, Decherd, the Lower School, and even the student store. When students emerge from their classes and head to lunch, they pick up a copy of the newspaper on their way, thumbing through it while waiting in line for food, perusing it between classes, stashing it in their backpacks to take home and read later. Then the conversations start — the casual comments, heated discussions, intense debates.
And that’s what The ReMarker, what any newspaper, should do — that is, fuel dialogue about important topics and issues. Over the years, newspapers and other forms of media — television, radio and now social media — have changed, especially with the dawn of the digital age. Even today, publications and news outlets across the country go about accomplishing this goal of sparking discussions in totally different ways.
According to Robert W. Decherd ’69, chairman, president and CEO of the A.H. Belo Corporation, the parent company of the Dallas Morning News, newspapers in the late 19th century “took very specific and often strident positions on political and other issues.” Then, during the mid-20th century, they took a more balanced approach, where opinion remained secondary to the delivery of standard, straightforward news.
“But more recently, the cycle has gone back toward opinion being incorporated in the news report, and that makes the challenge of maintaining balance even greater,” Decherd said.
But why is maintaining balance so important? What’s wrong with opinion occasionally slipping into news reports? Well, Robert Zorn ’75, independent journalist and author of Cemetery John, believes objective truth is paramount in factual reporting.
“I have to be really careful that I'm not seeing things just because I want to see them in a certain way or in a certain line,” Zorn said. “This actually gets back to what I learned from a lot of teachers at St. Mark's: to be intellectually honest. You can't all of a sudden ignore stuff just because it doesn't fit your theory or way of thinking.”
Similarly, Patrick Barta ’90, Asia Enterprise Editor for The Wall Street Journal, believes that while many may decry the modern news industry as ‘fake news,’ his publication continues to approach its coverage “without opinions, without spin, without any shortcuts that deprive readers of factual information.”
“We pursue facts; we don't publish rumors,” Barta said. “We don't publish things that are untrue, and if we miss someone's name, if we get the date wrong, if something is blue and we say it's red, we correct that. The people who say that we are ‘fake news,’ they just don't understand what we do. A lot of times that's just people who don't want to believe that we're trying to do our jobs scrupulously and fairly, and that's not something to worry about. We just have to keep doing our jobs.”
On the other hand, Decherd believes that The New York Times serves as an example of journalism that properly incorporates the writer’s personal experiences and knowledge within its stories.
“It’s the greatest newspaper on Earth,” Decherd said. “It has the most resources of any newspaper on Earth but has long since embraced the idea that its reporters are well-informed, insightful men and women who can essentially report the news in narrative form, which by definition means they reveal some of their own philosophy and views.”
That separation of opinion from news reporting is important because it allows readers to know what exactly they are getting at any given time. D Magazine President Gillea Allison believes opinion pieces should be clearly labelled and distinctively designed in order to draw readers’ attention. And regardless of whether the story is fact- or opinion-based, D Magazine also employs a group of interns, paid staffers and editors to engage in the rigorous process of fact-checking every line of every story.
“While a blog post can be deleted from the internet, print is there forever,” Allison said. “So that’s why we invest a lot of time and resources into ensuring accuracy.”
So what’s the benefit of opinion if it’s so easily misinterpreted? Dallas Morning News President and Publisher Grant Moise thinks opinion ultimately has the potential to better society.
“We praise the people who deserve it and constructively praise the people, the companies or the organizations that deserve praise,” Moise said. “We will constructively criticize the people, the companies or the organizations who deserve the criticism. If we do those in a healthy balance, then you're ultimately going to create a better Dallas and in turn a better North Texas.”
Barta, who's spent the past 18 years living and working abroad, has primarily focused his efforts in investigative reporting on Asian countries, many of which do not have similar journalistic freedom. In the end, it’s important to remember that the U.S. is one of the few major countries to have an unrestricted press and to even be debating what responsibility a free press has in balancing fact and opinion.
“American media certainly isn't perfect, and it does make mistakes, but it's part of a healthy democracy filled with debate based on facts,” Barta said. “As much as people complain about the media — that's their right, and they should if they see problems — they should also be thankful.”
The digital era
With the rise of the internet and social media, how have news companies adapted to shifting standards and expectations of modern readers?
With age comes change, and journalism is no exception to the rule. From ink-and-quill pamphlets in town squares to unlimited information in the palm of your hand, the news industry has morphed and adapted to various developments of the modern world. And no innovation has shaped the state of journalism more than the ubiquity and convenience of the internet — for better or worse. According to Barta, the pace of news has rapidly accelerated over the course of his 23 years with the paper.
“When I started at The Wall Street Journal, we used to print newspapers only, and we had a roughly 6 p.m. deadline,” Barta said, “so if something happened at 11 in the morning, that gave us until 6 p.m. to figure out what happened. Now if something happened at 11 in the morning, you can get the story up online within minutes sometimes. There's a great deal more pressure.”
While the unparalleled efficiency of online news has increased accessibility to information at a faster rate and over a broader range of topics, many news companies feel strained to keep up with this higher demand, shifting towards more sensationalized coverage to make up for falling profits.
“I showed some students the first three minutes of CNN the first day it started,” Barta said. “It's very strange: no opinion, just facts. To a current audience, I think they would be kind of boring. But it was objective, and there was no debate about whether they are inciting your passions and sensationalizing the news. Then I switched to a clip of a recent news program that I won’t name, and it was people screaming at each other and fighting and like, 'You're terrible! You're so stupid!' It wasn't really insightful journalism. It was sensationalism, frankly, and I think that's what people look at. They say that news media is not healthy, and they don't like that, even though that is often what gets traffic online.”
Many publications, however, continue to strive for high-quality journalism, finding new ways to optimize their coverage to provide as much information as possible without stretching themselves too thin. To D Magazine President Gillea Allison, the ultimate winners are smaller and more local publications.
“If I was going to start a magazine today, I would not start a national magazine or a publication,” Allison said. “Because with us, we're quite relevant. We really have very specific content relevancy and trust as our number one attributes. I'm not going to sit here and say that print is going to come roaring back, and we know that. We've built a very diversified business around our digital presence, events, programs and branding. But local magazines, or city and regional magazines, are outperforming other peers.”
The even more drastic half of the digital shift is social media. According to Decherd, social media is likely “the most disruptive force in the history of journalism and continues to be.” With their ability to rapidly spread unverifiable or abbreviated information to millions of people worldwide, popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others can monumentally shift both public opinion and the very methodologies of traditional journalism.
“The biggest question, which will not be answered soon,” Decherd said, “is the extent [to] which the core principles of journalism in the United States and other countries where free speech exists translate to the digital world — if they do at all. We're in the early stages of that. We're basically seeing the long tail of pre-internet journalism being almost continuously reshaped in a digital environment. But there is no way to separate the changes in journalism and the effect of social media from the polarization that exists in the United States today. And that is something we collectively need to address in a very intelligent and thorough manner.”
On top of allowing less reliable information to spread, social media promotes an environment where the first story is the best story, something Dallas Morning News President and Publisher Grant Moise worries crowds out the trustworthy journalism people are searching for.
“[For Dallas Morning News journalists,] the rules and the standards of all of the gates of approval and fact-checking that they have to pass through are no different on social media,” Moise said, “but it's hard because then these young journalists especially are watching all of these other local news sources or national news sources beat them to break that story. But that's where we always just have to tell them, ‘We're not in the business of being first necessarily — we're in the business of being right.’”
But no matter what changes and challenges the news faces, technological or social, internal or external, global or right at home, the media will continue to put out reliable and accurate news.
“At the end of the day, for all the sensational stuff you see on TV and all the shouting, you still see incredible reporting,” Barta said. “We've had budget cuts, yes, and it's hard to compete and newsgathering is really expensive, but we are still a viable company. Even though people complain about the media and don't like it, and there have been changes that are clearly noticeable in the way information is presented, at the end of the day, I think you will find that good journalists at the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dallas Morning News are still doing their jobs just as well, if not better, than they've ever done.”
A one-man publication
With major news companies sporting large staffs and even larger wallets, how can someone like Robert Zorn ’75 deliver quality investigative reporting all on his own?
As concerns over misinformation and biased reporting rise, the role of the reader grows critical in maintaining truthful and intellectually rigorous discussion. So how does one tell right from wrong? For Robert Zorn ‘75, the answer was doing it himself.
Zorn’s book Cemetery John analyzes the Lindbergh Kidnapping of 1932 and proposes that there were two additional conspirators, John and Walter Knoll, who had worked with Bruno Hauptmann to kidnap Charles Lindbergh’s son and ransom him for $50,000 — roughly $950,000 today. What makes Zorn’s scenario so unique is that his father, Eugene Zorn, was the only one who witnessed the two brothers planning the kidnapping.
“On my father's deathbed,” Zorn said, “my father was haunted that that two guys that he knew that were neighbors of his had gotten away with the crime and the murder of a child while their accomplice had gone closed-mouth to the electric chair, taking the penalty for all three of them. My father felt that telling the story could bring a measure of justice to the case, so I made him a promise that I would take up his investigation and tell his story to the world. To my amazement, I found out that he was exactly right.”
Yet despite seeing a clear solution to this hotly-debated case, Zorn opted to start long before the crime, carefully analyzing the Lindbergh family from the perspective of the criminals involved.
“When people have written about this case, what they do is they go to The New York Times the day after the crime, March 2, 1932, and start there,” Zorn said. “I went farther back in time to learn more about Lindbergh and his wife, who was the daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico, and then also when the baby was born. A lot of clues were overlooked. They were dismissed as irrelevant or undecipherable, but if you get all the noise out of the room [and] adopt this ‘close-to-the-ground’ approach, you'll see that these clues will actually talk to you.”
Many may feel like they simply lack the qualifications or prerequisite knowledge to tackle the tricky issues that fill the media, just like how Zorn knew absolutely nothing about forensic science or criminal profiling when he began. But he put in the work to truly understand his subject and was ultimately able to help bring justice to the world.
“I think about how green I was when I started out with just a promise to my dad to try to get to the heart of this thing,” Zorn said, “to figure out if this story was right, to tell a story to the world, but now I've spent countless hours with the greatest criminal profilers in American history who taught me so much, and I've learned a tremendous amount. But I had to acquire that knowledge.”