Much of normal news, the routine patter that fills our screens and spills from the airwaves, is a chummy co-production of authorized sources and compliant scribes. The rituals of normal news ensure that the public agenda is dominated by the concerns and perspectives of the powerful, whose priorities typically lead the newscasts.
Fortunately, that’s not all our news media do. We also have parallel traditions, among them a journalism of defiance. That’s when reporters ferret out and make public newsworthy realities that people in power would rather be ignored and sometimes even make it illegal to expose.
We’re in an era of spectacularly audacious disclosures of official secrets—commensurate with the most audacious expansion of official secrecy in the history of this or any country. Since Wikileaks, the online anti-secrecy network, posted in 2010 the classified gunsite footage of Iraqi civilians being slaughtered by a U.S. helicopter, news media worldwide have showcased stunning disclosures of U.S. secrets and the shadowy infrastructure through which the unprecedented post-9/11 regime of surveillance and data collection has been sustained.
The counterattack has been ferocious: The soldier who was Wikileaks’ source, Chelsea Manning, is doing 35 years in federal prison, and the mastermind who brokered the release to the news media, Julian Assange, is under de facto house arrest in London.
Meantime, top media continue to feast on secrets served up by Wikileaks’ successor, ex-U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden. They include astonishing revelations about government data sweeps, penetration of the tech industry and the overreach of National Security Agency electronic snooping.
Amazing stuff. Political leaders continue to denounce Snowden as a spy, but the public isn’t convinced. One of the few surveys of broad opinion on the matter, a Quinnipiac University poll last year, found that by a huge 55-34 percent margin voters regard Snowden as a whistleblower, not a traitor, and that by 45-40 percent people believe official anti-terrorism efforts go too far in restricting civil liberties.
So you might think that U.S. journalists would feel emboldened: After all, here’s news of vast import, purloined in the name of civic purpose with evidence of public support. Seems like a sturdy basis on which to challenge the tired rituals of normal news, to re-energize that parallel tradition of defiance and independent truth-seeking.
A surprising new survey suggests this isn’t how today’s journalists see things. It’s the latest in a series of polls conducted every 10 years since 1971 by Indiana University researchers. What it found was a demoralized profession, one that has lost its nerve. Respondents are convinced the news industry is generally heading in the wrong direction and that its biggest problem is “declining profits.”
Most remarkable are signs of a dramatically growing rejection of the very reporting techniques that have nourished the journalism of defiance in recent years.
Consider this question: Might, “on occasion,” a reporter be justified in using “confidential business or government documents without authorization?” That means newsworthy information you’re not supposed to have.
Fewer than 58 percent of the 1,080 respondents in the 2013 poll approved, a major decline from nearly 82 percent in 1992. Continue reading “Has U.S. journalism lost its nerve?”
