In the news business, when a lot of citizens are asked the same question, it’s called a “man on the street.” Late night TV hosts like to stun us with bits where seemingly common knowledge is not that common after all. Jay Leno once asked people on San Antonio’s Riverwalk to name someone who fought in the Alamo. The jaw-dropping ignorance made us laugh and cringe (and some teachers cry). Most recently, a late-night crew asked individuals how they were voting AFTER the election. In other words, the folks were not aware that election day had passed.
What we have here is a failure to educate the next generation in the value and practice of news literacy. Why would they need to worry about boring news? Especially local news. Could there be anything less interesting than what grandpa is doing with government money?
Really it’s all of us though. We’re hand-fed the news we care about by our “feeds” or broadcast channels. With so much information available, our filters and choices keep us sane, but also separated from a common ground.
In my last column I mentioned the devastation of newspapers by the internet. Since 2000, the U.S. has lost twenty five percent of its newspapers. Now we face news deserts where those who want to keep up with local news have no source. And quite often the papers that are still in business struggle to cover those boring (but important) topics with fewer employees. Best keep to the happy stories that won’t disturb anyone. Soon, no one at the paper even knows how to cover those boring government stories.
Maybe AI will help this dire situation. I hope so. But if we don’t value local news, don’t read it or even demand it, it’s all wasted. And it’s bad for democracy.
February 3-7 has been proclaimed News Literacy Week here in Cuero and other locales across the nation. As I see it, there are two parts to news literacy: 1) awareness of current events, and
b) awareness of news source agendas and biases.
The 20th Century saw the education and news literacy of the general public expand (and perhaps peak). It was also the heyday of newspapers. When broadcast media entered the picture, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the “equal time” policy. News broadcasters were required to give equal time to candidates of both major parties.
Imagine if online algorithms showed us both sides of an issue (without spin or hype) rather than only the ones we lean toward? Perhaps we would be a less divided nation.
The equal time policy went away in the 1980s de-regulation era, paving the way for broadcast news with an agenda. That no-boundary mindset continued with the internet when Congress exempted websites from libel prosecution. How could newspapers, still held to a higher standard, compete with the more attractive, attention grabbing online offerings?
Unlike any other profession, journalists must self regulate because the government can make no law abridging free speech. That libel and slander laws exist at all are testament to how much damage newspapers had to do before Congress drew a line.
In the early 1900s, due to the misbehavior of major newspapers, such as those owned by Hearst and Pulitzer, reporters banded together and created a code of ethics. They were hard-earned lessons that guided newsrooms in the 20th Century.
With the advent of citizen journalists posting online, these lessons of old are bypassed. Anyone who can press record or type a sentence is a journalist. Sometimes, they’re just bullies and they need a boundary. But I digress.
My point is that true journalists still value objectivity. It seems that with the loss of the equal time policy, a lip-service objectivity took over broadcast news. The line between news reporting and opinion blurred to unrecognizable. And with the decline of newspapers, people only consider broadcast news as “the news.”
I know I’m preaching to the choir, dear reader, because here you are all the way to the end of a newspaper article. Bless you! Now, please do this strange behavior in front of your children and grandchildren. Better yet, share items from the paper at family meals. A mental feast as well as physical. Instill in them the fear of missing out (FOMO) on local news and help them delight in learning interesting aspects of the world they see everyday.
And one last request: let’s all add a fact check site to our news reading. Some cynicism about stories and what we believe to be true is a good practice.
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