Long answer: I think that what is underappreciated about journalism is the time pressure. If you’re writing for a daily paper, or some equivalent, you often have to become passably expert in some topic in a few hours. It is a miracle that, say, the Times puts together enough material for a medium-sized novel every 24 hours. Some of it is longer lead times, the mags and features sometimes you have a week or so, and the real glossy mags like the Atlantic and the Economist and so on you might have weeks or more to research. But it is absolutely incredible to witness a paper go from “literally nothing exists” at 11am to “here is a full paper, with relatively few typos and hopefully no libels and tens of thousands of words of news, analysis, criticism, a topical cartoon, sports reports, the weather” by 9pm. There just isn’t time to do a full fact-check. The sheer just-in-time nature of it is incredible. Same with TV and radio; everything is spinning like a gyroscope, seconds away from going wrong.
(The Atlantic and the Economist and the New Yorker, etc, it’s totally different, everyone sits around in oak-panelled rooms thinking deep thoughts and writing one piece a month which is then picked to the bone by fact-checkers like vultures on a dead buffalo. I exaggerate somewhat.)
And then you get the incentive issues that while journalists definitely think of themselves as performing a public service, and we are, we’re also contributing to a business and that business needs to sell papers or get clicks or whatever so “1,000 people died of malaria today” can’t be the splash headline every day. It just can’t. Journalism is in the public interest, but it ALSO needs to provide what the public is interested in, and if it doesn’t do the latter then it can’t be the former. And there’s a coordination problem that if I say “I will do only high-minded journalism that is in the public interest”, the next guy can say “great, I’ll do scurrilous celebrity hackery and sell 40 times what you do and put you out of business”.
AND THEN you have to remember it’s staffed by humans with biases and political opinions and families to feed and social status to uphold.
So with those limitations in mind, I think journalism does a pretty good job of giving readers/viewers/listeners a rough picture of reality. But they’re really big limitations and it’s unrealistic to expect anything approaching a clear, unbiased window on the world.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: I think that what is underappreciated about journalism is the time pressure. If you’re writing for a daily paper, or some equivalent, you often have to become passably expert in some topic in a few hours. It is a miracle that, say, the Times puts together enough material for a medium-sized novel every 24 hours. Some of it is longer lead times, the mags and features sometimes you have a week or so, and the real glossy mags like the Atlantic and the Economist and so on you might have weeks or more to research. But it is absolutely incredible to witness a paper go from “literally nothing exists” at 11am to “here is a full paper, with relatively few typos and hopefully no libels and tens of thousands of words of news, analysis, criticism, a topical cartoon, sports reports, the weather” by 9pm. There just isn’t time to do a full fact-check. The sheer just-in-time nature of it is incredible. Same with TV and radio; everything is spinning like a gyroscope, seconds away from going wrong.
(The Atlantic and the Economist and the New Yorker, etc, it’s totally different, everyone sits around in oak-panelled rooms thinking deep thoughts and writing one piece a month which is then picked to the bone by fact-checkers like vultures on a dead buffalo. I exaggerate somewhat.)
And then you get the incentive issues that while journalists definitely think of themselves as performing a public service, and we are, we’re also contributing to a business and that business needs to sell papers or get clicks or whatever so “1,000 people died of malaria today” can’t be the splash headline every day. It just can’t. Journalism is in the public interest, but it ALSO needs to provide what the public is interested in, and if it doesn’t do the latter then it can’t be the former. And there’s a coordination problem that if I say “I will do only high-minded journalism that is in the public interest”, the next guy can say “great, I’ll do scurrilous celebrity hackery and sell 40 times what you do and put you out of business”.
AND THEN you have to remember it’s staffed by humans with biases and political opinions and families to feed and social status to uphold.
So with those limitations in mind, I think journalism does a pretty good job of giving readers/viewers/listeners a rough picture of reality. But they’re really big limitations and it’s unrealistic to expect anything approaching a clear, unbiased window on the world.