BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  NOV 22

“As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to corporate media…The less significant it is to ordinary people, the more attention the media pays.”
Vermont Senator and socialist Bernie Sanders, quoted in the Washington Post in his new book, Our Revolution.

The media never translated the story. This was the first time media went without attribution.  Panel members on news shows are no longer analysts but propagandists. Will the media change? No. Look at the numbers. Profits are up.
Paraphrasing the assessments of a former broadcast journalist now a university faculty member, whose comments were not for attribution.

“The media always covered [Mrs. Clinton] as the person who would be president and therefore tried to eviscerate her before the election…but gave Trump a pass.”
John Podesta, Clinton campaign director, to the Washington Times, November 11, 2016

“I’m running against the crooked media.”
Donald Trump

“The mainstream media is a loser in this and not just in trying to analyze what was happening but trying to influence and affect what was happening.”
CNBC’s Squawk Box Host Joe Kernen

“Of all the losers in this season of discontent, the mainstream media top the list.  I don’t say that lightly and I sincerely fear that loss of faith in journalism ultimately will cause more harm to the nation than any outside enemy could hope to.”
Columnist Kathleen Parker, November 29, 2016

And then from a practicing columnist who is touted as media critic there is this exercise in denial:

“We have to keep doing our jobs of truth-telling, challenging power and holding those in power accountable—as the best journalists did during the campaign itself.”
Margaret Sullivan, media writer for the Washington Post, published among three other commentaries excoriating Donald Trump and propagating racism and cultural division.

In politics a common self-defense is to declare that if everyone is critical of you, you’ve done something right. That is the posture of the American press today, too, and has been for a long time.

Coverage of the presidential campaign, however, should have awakened the media to the prospect that when everyone is critical of you, they could have a strong case.

There has been wide and almost universal criticism of the media’s involvement in the campaign. The criticism has been harsh, unvarnished, direct, and unforgiving, from Sanders to Trump, from former and current journalists to the general population. The American people have no more confidence in the media than they do in Congress, less than 20 percent.

A good many in the media, however, remain in denial. The New York Times hinted that something may have been wrong with their coverage in a carefully massaged message to their subscribers, who had flooded the newspaper with complaints. The letter was embarrassing.

There is an air of elitism in the media’s defense of themselves in their “post-election” naval gazing. Some, such as Ms. Sullivan are just delusional in their sanctimonious conviction that they have an exclusive on truth. Although in another column Ms. Sullivan did acknowledge “journalistic failures” including “smugness and willful blindness…”

Among the many lessons we learned and relearned from the campaign coverage, four stand out: (1) Nearly all news media are first and foremost profit-motivated corporate entities; (2) The media are biased and more willing than ever to exercise their bias freely and openly; (3) The media seem to take lightly what standards of professional conduct actually exist; and (4) As a result of 1, 2, and 3, the public is ill-served and uninformed.

For purposes of discussion, the conditions that help compose these four lessons oftentimes bleed into one another and it is helpful to define modern-day media.

The news media of past decades are not recognizable in today’s content market. The industry is a conglomeration of (a) mainstream media–the traditional news outlets, such as newspapers and over-the-air newscasts,  with which an older generation grew up; (b) the cable infotainment industry–which operates 24-hour cycles of broadcasting that require a much higher degree of entertainment value and marketing creativity to keep an audience; (c) digital communications-the panoply of websites, blogs, and continuous stream of Twitter feeds that now in good measure drive the other media; and, (d) the established entertainment industry that exploits current events to win audience appeal—the late night shows, morning shows, movies and docudramas, and the ripped-from-the-headlines tv series.

The ‘news’ media, by and large, are profit-driven, private corporations or entrepreneurial individuals and organizations whose primary motivation, in a new highly competitive and experimental marketplace, is to make money. Public interest is secondary. While some in the media and academia may argue that one objective serves the other, that simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

Post-election analyses indicate that many media raked in substantial profits from their campaign coverage. One study found that CNN alone made $100 million that was attributable to its concentration on Trump’s campaign theater. Paul Farhi, the respected media writer for the Washington Post, wrote this in October: “Thanks to an audience driven by nearly round-the-clock campaign coverage, the leading news networks will reap unprecedented profits this year.” Fox, he said could enjoy gross profits of $1.67 billion, up 11 percent.

And this about the candidacy of Donald Trump from Les Moonves, Chairman of CBS: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS…”

Among the reasons the profits kept coming were the concentration on the absurd, the focus on the negative, the horse race, and what seemed to be a conscious intent to incite division and anger for the sake of a good headline. Both sides of the political equation accuse the media of promoting Donald Trump throughout the primary season because of his appeal to their bottom line. Would he have gotten the GOP nomination without an estimated $2 billion in free publicity?

There has never been any question about the political slant or bias of American journalists.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent have identified themselves as Democrats or liberals. A recent study found that 90 percent of campaign contributions made by journalists went to Hillary Clinton in this cycle. TV infotainer extraordinaire Chris Matthews asked New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor whether she knew anyone in the newsroom who was pro-life. “That’s not a question I’m going to answer,” she replied. “I have no idea.” I do.

The publication of emails by WikiLeaks revealed a number of cozy relationships between media celebrities and the Clinton campaign, from John Harwood at CNBC to Gloria Borger and Donna Brazille at CNN, to Glenn Thrush at Politico. At the extreme end of the spectrum, a London Telegraph columnist Monisha Rajesh said Trump should be assassinated. Financial Times writer Mark C O’Flaherty tweeted “…always wondered when a Nazi-scale atrocity would next arise…” This from the Daily Caller, itself a biased conservative news organization.

The determinant in assessing bias has always been whether a professional journalist is professional enough to set bias aside and report as an objective observer. That question is mute in the new age of media. Journalists are pretty much free to inject their bias in their reporting. The separation between news and commentary is as thin as a spider’s thread.

The media, sometime in the recent past, crossed the ancient Rubicon from the informer to the unabashed influencer, from observer to activist, from monitor to manipulator. They’ve crossed before throughout history, but this time it appears they sunk the boat and aren’t coming back.

Another aspect of media transformation is what seems to be an abrogation of the standards of professional behavior that help define what good journalism is. The reasons for the overwhelming public distrust of the media are varied and long-standing, but those transgressions dealing with ethical behavior could fill a hard drive: gross conflicts of interest, systemic bias noted above, doctored video tapes and quotations, misrepresentations, misuse of anonymous sources, gross distortions, promotion of divisiveness and anger, and the unapologetic fusion of news and commentary.

Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post standards of ethics reprinted in the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an organization to which I once belonged:

Washington Post reporters and editors are pledged to approach every assignment with the fairness of open minds and without prior judgment. The search for opposing views must be routine. Comment from persons accused or challenged in stories must be included. The motives of those who press their views upon us must routinely be examined, and it must be recognized that those motives can be noble or ignoble, obvious or ulterior.

We fully recognize that the power we have inherited as the dominant morning newspaper in the capital of the free world carries with it special responsibilities:

to listen to the voiceless
to avoid any and all acts of arrogance
to face the public politely and candidly

They are very meaningful and artfully crafted words, but hardly recognizable to a good many Post readers.

I found ironic a Post story November 21, about the “yellow journalism” now infiltrating the web. It quoted a founder of one of the new websites (they are essentially a digital version of the National Enquirer). He said: “Violence and chaos and aggressive wording is what people are attracted to.” That makes sense of headlines such as these: “The ugliest most appalling spectacle in American Politics,” and “Trump’s church visit is a dud,” and this beauty, “The unbearable stench of Trump’s BS.” Only they didn’t run on the yellow journalism website. They ran in the Washington Post.

The tragedy of American media today is that the public is entertained, but not informed.  People are incited to anger, but not enlightened. People don’t receive the knowledge they need to make educated decisions throughout the process of governance, not just at the polls, but from the campaigns to the bill signing ceremonies at the White House, from their inability to deal with regulatory and enforcement practices of government to their willingness to even cast a ballot on election day.

A Harvard University study found that campaign coverage of actual issues was only 8 percent of total coverage—8 percent! Studies by the Winston Group of campaign debates in the primaries found that less than 10 percent of the questions asked dealt with real issues. When editors and producers assign stories based on the expectation of more clicks, eyeballs, hits, tweets, and memes there is something wrong. If it goes viral, pure gold.

The swiftly evolving transformation of the American media complex over the past two decades has been more dramatic than in any time since the invention of the printing press. While the media are struggling to enter the 21st Century technologically, they are, journalistically, rushing back to the 18th Century when newspapers were the willing tools of partisans and ideologues.

We have been losing the best of the American press for years and this campaign season only accelerated the pace.

Criticism of the press is never received well by the industry, understandably so. It is the only institution in the country, public and/or private, that enjoys no real independent oversight or regulation and has no external mechanisms for identifying and disciplining bad behavior. The American media, for the most part, are subject to criticism, but not obligated to do anything about it.

Unfortunately, too, the brush of criticism is always broad, unfairly discoloring the craftsmanship of good professionals doing good work and adhering to standards and values that benefit their readers, listeners and viewers.

I’ve been privileged to work with some very honorable, dedicated and intelligent journalism professionals over many years. They left a great and enduring legacy that is honored today in the attitudes and productivity of many in the profession. One of the greats, the late Gwen Ifill, recently left us with another extension of that legacy.

Those with whom I have worked make criticism of media hard and distressful, because they devoted so much to it: ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the best the profession has ever produced; Bob Timberg of the Baltimore Sun; Dave Espo and Cliff Haas of AP, and Don Phillips of UPI and the Post; David Broder, Post; Marty Tolchin, New York Times; John Palmer, NBC; David Rogers, Wall Street Journal and Politico; Nancy Ambrose and Ann Compton, ABC; Phil Jones, CBS. While we always had differences, and while I suspected their personal views were diametrically divergent from those I was representing, I never lost my respect for them or their objectivity. I married a career broadcast journalist for whom I have the utmost admiration. What else can I say?

But their brand of journalism and the standards of ethics that drove them are disappearing.

If the media ever evolve from their state of defiance and denial–the signs are not good as evidenced by their continuing coverage of American politics and government–they should do something to clean up their image, restore their brand and make people trust them again. They could start by encouraging  the creation of some kind of independent national commission or other formal structure with a mission to assess the role of the media, not only in politics, but all of society. That would help move thinking and action in the right direction.

The commission could begin by considering some of these options:

1. Revitalize the journalistic profession itself. Distinguish professional journalists from the amateurism in the infotainment media, social media, citizen journalism, and all other cheap substitutes that dilute the profession and demean its purpose.
2. Rebuild and diversify the American newsroom. If you’re going to claim to be in the news business then be in the news business with sufficient professional staffing to get the job done and make sure the professional staff is diverse, not only ethnically, racially and gender, but also ideologically and politically.
3. Reform and set stricter standards on the use of anonymous sources, the prevention of conflicts of interest, the dual incomes of reporters, and other conditions that the media condemn in other industries.
4. Restore clear distinctions between news and commentary. Keep them separate and prohibit working reporters and correspondents from injecting opinion into their work products. Limit commentary all together, ensure that it is diverse, confine it to one section of paper and ensure, as well, that what is published has redeemable quality.
5. Create much greater transparency. Websites should contain the backgrounds of reporters and commentators, the financial interests of the news organizations, including ownership and the interests of the owners. Here again, media should live up to standards they impose on others.
6. Create industry-wide standards of official and ethical conduct that all journalists, editors, producers, and news executives are expected to observe. A number of news organizations have published standards, but there is no national code and no independent means of enforcement in those that exist. Meantime, tougher self-policing would be a first good step.
7. Get media centers the hell out of New York and Washington. Media in America exists in a vacuum-sealed confinement from the rest of the world and that contributes substantially to its ingrained bias.
8. Educate the public about the First Amendment and its provision for freedom of the press, but not just relative to what it affords the press, but what benefits the public is supposed to derive from it.
9. Assess the tangled relationship between polling and reporting. The current intermingling of the two is fraught with conflict and impreciseness. The public is not well served by any news media outlet that both creates the news and reports it, focusing primarily on the most dramatic data.
10. Launch an exhaustive study of news content, its balance, its benefit and its adherence to the real needs of consumers, particularly in the treatment of national issues. Dig deeper into where Americans get their news and why.

A commission’s findings would likely garner a lot of news coverage, don’t you think? I would be anxious to read that.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.