Click-Bait Journalism is Damaging the Industry’s Credibility
Initially, the internet was supposed to save journalism. The internet provided journalists, and the newsrooms that employed them, what seemed like an effective counter-punch to the on-the-minute breaking stories found on cable news and talk radio, which had so wounded the relevance of print media through the 1980s and 90s. Yet, with the advent of social media in the mid-2000s, and the unexpected and ongoing struggle for news organizations to sufficiently monetize their online offerings, the traditional news media finds itself hitting low after low – both fiscally and reputationally. According to a 2018 study conducted by the highly-respected Pew Research Center, only 21% of US adults had “a lot of trust” in the news media, versus 29% who said they had “not too much/none at all.”
The reasons for this lack of trust in the news media are numerous. However, the notable failure of online print journalism to sufficiently monetize its work – and the scramble to sufficiently do so in the past few years – has resulted in what has been called a “click-bait” culture by many in the news business. This “click-bait” culture demands inflammatory headlines, divisive substantive content, and the throwing of neutrality and objectivity to the wind in favour of hyper-partisanship and journalistic activism. This type of tabloidization of the news media has indeed provided a small bump to the bottom-line for many news rooms around the world, but at what cost? In just the past few years, we’ve seen retraction after retraction, correction after correction, and journalist after journalist publicly embarrass themselves with inflammatory, divisive, and often misleading or untrue information published in their stories or on their social media accounts. One need look no further than the recent saga involving the New York Times and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to illustrate the extent of the problem.
The New York Times – widely known as the “paper of record” due to its long history of editorial and institutional excellence – published a story in the September 15, 2019 edition of the Sunday Times which levelled a fresh allegation of sexual misconduct against Justice Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh had been accused by a former classmate of pulling his pants down and revealing his genitals at a party in the 1980s while a student at Yale. According to the allegation, while Kavanaugh had his genitals exposed, he was pushed into a female classmate by a friend, causing his genitals to be shoved into the face of the female classmate (and alleged victim). The allegation quickly spread like wildfire, causing a number of Democrat candidates for the 2020 race for the White House to call for Justice Kavanaugh’s immediate impeachment. The only problem was that editors at the New York Times had knowingly omitted a key piece of information from the story, which effectively debunked the entire allegation: specifically, that the alleged victim of this assault both declined to be interviewed for the story, and further, that she had indicated through intermediaries that she had no recollection of such an event ever happening. In short, the entire allegation was bogus. So much so, that when the FBI was made aware of the allegations (a year before the recent Times story), they chose not to investigate after an initial screening of the allegation revealed there was no substance.
How did this story ever find itself on the second page of the Sunday Times? Who among the staff at the New York Times thought it was journalistically and morally defensible to omit this key piece of information, which completely and totally changes both the substance and implications of the story? To say this was journalistic malpractice is to offend those like disgraced former CBS anchor Dan Rather who have been accused of journalistic malpractice in the past. This was nothing short of malicious journalistic malfeasance, which should effectively end the careers of everyone involved.
Yet, it probably won’t. See, the New York Times seemingly decided long ago to make the business decision to subtly shift its focus from being a straight news daily, to a partisan political smear machine. As much was admitted in a recently leaked recording (credit to Slate) of Times executive editor Dean Baquet claiming in an all-staff meeting at the Times that their newsroom had been built to “cover one story (allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign, and the Russian government)” and one story only”. The problem with this, of course, is that following the release of the long-awaited Mueller Report, and the former long-time FBI Director’s subsequent testimony to the U.S. Congress, the entire allegation has been revealed to have been largely a dud – at least in its core allegation, that then-candidate Donald Trump conspired with Russian authorities to get himself elected. In effect, the New York Times has built its newsroom to cover a single story – a story which eventually turned out to be verifiably and objectively ‘fake news’.
As such, it is no surprise that a newsroom which was built around reporting on a fake news story, would continue to publish fake news after that story met its long-awaited journalistic death knell. It’s what they’ve been built to do, according to Mr. Baquet. However, the reality is also that the New York Times is reporting record-high subscription levels, and rising revenues after decades of financial peril. There was a business decision made by the New York Times, and that business decision has ultimately paid off where it matters – even if it has cost the Times its reputation and integrity.
We see some of the same issues emerging in the Canadian media. One remembers the Canadian media’s bizarre hesitancy to report on allegations of sexual misconduct against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the summer of 2018, in which he was accused of groping a young journalist at a music festival in British Columbia a number of years ago. This was doubly odd as the media – the Canadian media included – was in the midst of reporting on the developments of the #MeToo movement at the time, and had been publishing and reporting on stories of sexual impropriety, assault, and rape, sometimes with far less concrete evidence than was present in the accusations levelled at the Prime Minister. Questions from the public arose: was the Canadian media protecting the Prime Minister due to their own financial interests, as the federal Liberal government had been in discussions for a $600-million-dollar media bailout package (a proposal that has since become a reality)? Was the Canadian media sitting on a story to protect their own bank accounts?
One may never know the answers to those questions, but they certainly came to my mind as I recently attended the launch of the Green Party of Canada’s 2019 federal election campaign for Obiter, and sat through and observed a press conference held afterward by Green Party leader Elizabeth May. I counted seven separate times where the journalists asked Ms. May questions that were obviously intended to bait her into attacking the other party leaders. On three occasions, the journalists assembled asked questions of Ms. May which were transparently leading her to criticize NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, and three times they asked questions of Ms. May which were obviously intended to get her to attack Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer. Only one single question was about the current Prime Minister of our country, Justin Trudeau.
Is it not unusual that entering an election campaign, assembled Canadian journalists had six times as many questions regarding out-of-power opposition parties as they did about the government of the day? Exactly who does this serve, and why? The answer seems obvious to me, but I’ll leave it to you, as the reader, to come to your own conclusions. I’m Corey LeBlanc, and that’s just my opinion.