USA Today, Sept. 23, 2004, Page 21A


Journalism must evolve - and quickly
Science provides a model, with objectivity at its heart

By Philip Meyer

While it is tempting to cast the CBS reporting disaster as another 
moral lapse of the media, it's really more a matter of capacity. 
The tools of journalism have not kept up with the information age.

Dan Rather was not out to get George W. Bush. He was out to get a 
good story. And the desire for a good story, in the face of 
competition from all of the varieties of new and old media, is a 
powerful - and sometimes blinding - incentive.

Journalism used to be a craft of hunting and gathering. We looked 
for news, found it and delivered it. When information was scarce, 
the end users were so glad to get it that they didn't make much 
fuss about its quality.

Now they care. And the "blogosphere" has enabled them to act on that 
care with some coordinated reality testing.

Information has evolved in the same manner as food before the 
invention of modern agriculture. The abundance from today's 
production methods has given us the luxury of caring about taste, 
texture, packaging and nutrition, none of which were as important 
in more primitive times. (It was not until the 1980s that gross 
domestic product in the USA showed a higher dollar figure for food 
processing than for food production.)

The other consequence of information abundance was predicted by 
Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel laureate in economics, back in 1970. 
Information, he said, consumes the attention of those who receive 
it. Therefore, when information is plentiful, attention will be 
scarce.

This news is bad for advertisers, public-relations advisers, 
politicians and others who want to sell you something.

They have to get your attention first, and it's not easy.

All of the cheap ways of getting attention are about used up. Sex 
and violence in entertainment, the quirky reality shows on TV, the 
screaming heads on news programs have gone about as far as they 
can.

Journalism, in order to survive in all of this noise, has to offer 
something better. It needs a more credible, highly 
product. Editing should be gaining importance relative to reporting.

When Al Neuharth started USA TODAY in 1982, I cheered because this 
was information in a highly processed form: many stories, most of 
them brief and easy to read, carefully fitted into a graphic format 
that made them convenient to find and to scan. It was much harder 
to edit than a conventional newspaper but far easier to use. It has 
drifted some from that model, but it's still true to Neuharth's 
vision.

Ease of use is one way to add value to information. Another way is 
to make it credible. And to do this, journalists need to borrow 
some of the tools of science.

Scientific method is designed to let us ask questions of nature 
without being fooled by the answer. Its objectivity is in its 
method, not in giving equal weight to all of the possible answers 
as journalists are wont to do.

Two key aspects of scientific method that journalists need to adopt 
are transparency and replication. A scientist tells how he or she 
arrived at a conclusion in enough detail so that another investigator 
can follow the same trail, examine the same data and get the same 
answer.

Investigative journalism that relies on paper trails and documented 
interviews can do that. CBS did the right thing when it posted its 
documentary evidence on the Internet. That let users who had more 
technical knowledge spot the anachronism in the papers' typefaces. 
A sole reliance on anonymous sources no longer works, although 
those sources still can be useful if they point an investigator to 
information that can be documented.

Scientific method also drives you to play devil's advocate with your 
data and carefully look for explanations that aren't the ones you 
want to hear. In a presidential-election campaign as dirty as this 
one, the explanation that some malicious force is trying to take 
advantage of you always needs to be considered.

At my journalism school, we give graduate students training in 
scientific method, but we don't bother undergraduates with it. That's 
a mistake, but we have a pretty good excuse. There is not much of a 
market for highly trained journalists skilled in data analysis and 
critical thinking.

We are still stuck on the historic mission of journalism schools to 
provide cheap labor to the industry. We need to encourage journalists 
to professionalize themselves, and we should goad their employers 
into paying for a higher level of skill.

A profession looks after both the moral values of its members and their 
technical competence in a formal, specific way.

One person recently suggested to me that CBS was lazy in not doing 
further checks on the bogus National Guard documents before taking the 
story to the air. I'm guessing that it wasn't laziness so much as a 
lack of enough skilled reporters and editors to pin the story down 
under deadline pressure. Traditional media such as TV and newspapers 
are responding to the financial pressures from new-media competition 
by trying to do journalism on the cheap. It won't work.

With all of the noisy buzz of the information age clamoring for our 
attention, we want calm voices that can convince us that they spend the 
resources to investigate and present the truth. Trust has become another 
scarce good. If the natural-selection process of the marketplace still 
works, truth-tellers will prevail in the long run. The news-consuming 
public will insist on it.

I wish it would hurry.

Philip Meyer is a Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of 
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is a member of USA TODAY's board 
of contributors. His latest book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving 
Journalism in the Information Age, will be published in November.