Nation Deserves Better Than "Clumsy & Flimsy" Reporting, Opines Prof. Jeff McCall '76

September 25, 2019

"It is always bad for a news organization when it becomes a subject of the news instead of reporting the news," writes Jeffrey M. McCall, professor of communication at DePauw University, in The Hill. That was the case when the New York Times ended up in everybody else’s headlines for its clumsy reporting of supposed new allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh."

According to McCall, "No news organization is perfect, including the New York Times. But -- because of its stature -- professional missteps by the NYT do more damage to the journalism industry than a run-of-the-mill reporting blunder by an Ohio weekly or a Florida local television newscast. The Times is the nation’s primary news agenda-setter. What the Times publishes is almost certain to end up as news in other outlets, including major daily newspapers, wire services, broadcast networks and cable news channels. The Times serves a powerful function in having a major say in what 'news' gets disseminated into the national dialogue and what doesn’t. With great power comes great responsibility. The Times’s news judgments truly affect the news priorities of fellow journalists and the public at large."

The professor continues, "The recent flimsy Kavanaugh 'news' prompted days of follow-up coverage across multiple journalism outlets, filling the news cycle with hand-wringing and emotion. It prompted a half-dozen opportunistic Democratic presidential candidates to go on the campaign stump and call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. Even if the latest allegations against Kavanaugh were proven accurate, abusive behavior in college 30 years ago hardly makes for an impeachable offense. Thus, the Times’s blunder created a nonsensical narrative that polluted a presidential campaign in which the rhetoric already is filled with hype and bombast."

The author of Viewer Discretion Advised: Taking Control of Mass Media Influences, McCall points out that "the Times has had several missteps in recent weeks. It changed the headline on a story about President Donald Trump’s remarks on the mass shooting in El Paso, caving to pressure from a cyber mob. The Times also had to deal with two of its editors who thought it was OK to tweet out offensive comments."

He offers, "Whenever the nation’s news agenda gets cluttered with rubbish, a major concern becomes what news is under-covered or left out of the national discussion altogether ... The free press was created by constitutional framers to hold the political establishment accountable as an informal 'Fourth Estate' of government. The question now becomes who holds the media accountable. The press increasingly is becoming part of the political establishment itself, with its raw flexing of content control in the name of influencing culture and impacting policy."

The column concludes, "First Amendment framer James Madison knew a free press would make mistakes. 'Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing, and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press,' he wrote. That acknowledgement shouldn’t give the press a sense that shoddy standards just get lost in the wash. The public notices, and society suffers, when the journalism industry performs poorly. The NYT must be better -- for its own sake, the sake of its journalism colleagues and, mostly, for the sake of news-consuming Americans."

You'll find the complete text at the newspaper's website.

Jeff McCall is a 1976 graduate of DePauw, where he was a Rector Scholar and speech (communication) major. He went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He joined the DePauw faculty in 1985.

A former journalist himself, McCall is regularly quoted in stories on media matters. He recently joined in a community conversation on social media, covered here. A column for The Hill from last week is summarized here.

Source: The Hill

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