Media Burdens Run Two Ways

I was chatting with a group of students the other day when one of them looked me in the eye and commented, “You’re very tough on journalists.” I had to plead guilty.

 Of course, I’m tough on journalists. Maybe even as tough on them as they are on politicians.

 Our representative democracy depends on journalists doing their jobs. Why? Because it’s essential that citizens get the solid, accurate, and fair information they need to make good judgments about politicians and policy decisions.

 Which is why, if you value representative democracy, you have to be deeply concerned about the once-over-lightly journalism that fills our media. Too often, reporters, commentators and online contributors focus on trivia, partisan posturing, and political gamesmanship, and not on the substance of issues.

 Yet the world we live in is so complicated and so difficult to understand that the need is greater than ever for journalists to pick out what really matters in their communities or in the nation and convey solid information to the citizen.

 The prevalence of fake news and misinformation makes this search for objective truth ever more difficult and challenging. If we don’t have the right information as citizens, then we don’t have the facts to shape our opinions — and we’re going to be in trouble as a nation.

 Disentangling truth and untruth from the citizen’s standpoint is really hard. Especially because some of the institutions we once relied upon for independent, objective information — I’m thinking specifically of Congress here — have increasingly stopped serving as models for the search for truth.

 Sorting through all the information at our fingertips, distilling meaning from it, zeroing in on what’s really important — that’s work that both journalists and ordinary citizens have to undertake. And it’s essential to making our government work. Journalists have to ask themselves whether they are getting to the bottom of stories and giving enough information to citizens, so they can make good judgments — or are they too focused on trivia, entertainment, and posturing? And citizens — whose media tastes drive so much of what the media provide — need to be focused on what matters.

 It’s a complicated dance, but in the end, it comes down to one thing: journalists need to provide, and citizens need to ask for, the reporting that’s necessary to make the country work.       

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.