A Sign of Improvement in Journalism?

A recent surge in fact-checking in the MSM turns out to be pretty popular. Who knew? The trend started with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen's "simple fix," and was picked up first by ABC's Jake Tapper on This Week, then by the always inept CNN and Howard Kurtz that managed to take a good idea and apply journalistic "balance" to it. Here's Jay Rosen's timeline of the whole thing, including the ridiculous refusal by David Gregory, host of MSNBC's Meet The Press to adopt it, saying that viewers can fact-check "on their own terms," whatever that means. This prompted the creation of Meet The Facts, a website attempting to crowdsource the fact-checking that Gregory refuses to do, for whatever reason. (I apologize for for the link barrage on a new topic - I had a draft post about this a month ago and just realized I never posted it. This topic is important, however, and the links are well worth reading, particularly the timeline.)

Right around the time David Gregory said no, Colbert even jumped in on the action. (I linked it because embedding the video isn't working for some reason.)

Anyway, so the fact checking is catching on, and the AP is noticing its popularity. Amazingly, they've even noticed that Kurtz's version of "both sides lie equally," "balanced" fact-checking is not what people want.

"What we tend to forget in journalism is that we got in the business to check facts," [AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron] Fournier says. "Not just to tell people what Obama said and what Gingrich said. It is groundless to say that Kagan is anti-military. So why not call it groundless? This is badly needed when people are being flooded with information."

This is 100% exactly right, and I applaud the AP for realizing it's the right way to do it.

Often when I talk about reforming journalism, people try to argue that right now, cable ratings are high because they're giving the public what it wants. In a short-sighted sense, this can be considered literally true, but I always argue that that statement misses the media's power to shape what the public wants at that instant. Folks, advertising works - it's why it's such a ridiculously huge industry. So I have two different responses to this point: 1) The news must be about giving the public what it needs, not what it wants, and 2) the public is really starving for hard news, and if it were a more readily available option, we would devour it. The former is a normative statement, the truth of which lies in balancing the relative importance of journalism to society and our desire to avoid paternalism if possible. The latter, on the other hand, is an empirical claim, and this is the start of proving it - I hope more people notice these trends. We both want and need real news.