“Why didn’t we know?” is the question most often heard since last week’s stunning election results. Dozens of daily polls were all wrong: why didn’t we know? Trillions of words filled billions of web pages – so why didn’t we know?
We’ve heard various answers – polling is only a snapshot, there were sampling errors, no one can know who will actually come out to vote.
But polling and its shortcomings notwithstanding, the question remains. Why didn’t we know? Where were the journalists, those famously curious, out-to-get-the-story-behind-the-story, relentless men and women of the Fourth Estate?
With some notable exceptions, journalists failed us.
For 18 months journalists covered the campaigns, crisscrossing the country, jumping like puppies for a tossed ball to fetch every shiny news item and serve it to an eagerly receptive public. For 18 months journalists thought fact-checking was enough ballast for the campaign story. But it was far too little. They missed the real stories of people whose Hail Mary pass was to vote for the other guy and hope he’d be able to deliver what they need.
Transfixed by their intense focus on the campaign itself, journalists missed the stories of the America that lay behind it.
We’re just starting to get those stories now. I watched Ted Koppel talk with a group of residents in a stricken coal-mining town in West Virginia. Theirs were articulate and sympathetic voices who might have broadened the discourse of the campaign … had we heard from them.
Journalism is an increasingly ambiguous occupation. Even before there was the Internet, the IPhone and “citizen journalists,” journalism was different from other professions. Unlike law, medicine or psychology, journalists have no licenses, meet no national or state criteria, and are held to no legal standards. Good journalists will voluntarily follow principles of journalistic integrity, ethics and practice, but they don’t have to. They don’t have to carry malpractice insurance. There is no journalistic malpractice, short of libel.
Like so many other industries, news is an industry in transition. Instant communication has further confounded the search for truth, a search that requires thought and reflection. Information is entertainment, and when journalism has to choose between them, entertainment has a distinct edge.
We need to figure our way out of this. The media industry will only give us more and better journalism if we demand it. And demand it we must.
There can be no democracy without a well-informed citizenry.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.