Burying hard truths in a flurry of facts

“Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works?”

— Asymmetry, a novel by Lisa Halliday

”People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.”

— The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis

…

We called them “story arc” sessions — yes, a term that I totally stole from network television. Rather than reviewing the latest stories in the works, reporters would consider the longer term: Where is this beat headed, broadly? A year from now, what coverage will we look back on that best explained the world to our readers?

Those story arcs were our pole stars. They guided our story decisions, and helped readers put individual stories into perspective. They’re why climate change provided the context for so many of our environment, energy, and natural resource stories long before the issue rose to headline status.

I don’t have the sense that any of the major news organizations use a similar process to guide their political coverage. We read daily stories, some alarming, most normalizing, but rarely directly addressing the question: What’s going on here?

Here’s a major story arc: The United States, gradually and then, last year, suddenly, abandoned large parts of its constitutional governance in favor of one-man rule — one marked by a man devoted to self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. The lower federal courts continue to honor the Constitution as well as they can, but the Supreme Court has been an enabler, and the Congress compliant, in the new governance. Our long-time allies, the world’s democracies, are aghast, left trying to navigate a world turned upside down.

Not every story has to pound the story arc into readers’ heads every day, but dutifully reporting on the one hand and on the other, burying hard truths behind a flurry of facts, is journalistic malpractice.

Margaret Sullivan has been sounding the alarm for some time, and she did so again this week:

I sometimes feel like I’m living in a nightmare as I watch the twin disasters unfolding in American democracy and American media. I know I’m not alone in that.

You know the democracy part — the Trump regime’s vicious deployment of ICE, its weaponization of the Justice Department, its threats to our traditional allies, its barrage of lies, and much more.

Sullivan recites a painful litany of journalism misdemeanors and felonies: the silence of owner Jeff Bezos after the FBI raids the home of one of his Washington Post reporters, the stream of normalizing stories at the New York Times alongside some of its unquestionably excellent journalism, and of course the wreckage of CBS News.

Sullivan concludes: “It’s as if a five-alarm fire is consuming a city and the mainstream outlets are saying they might smell something burning — but perhaps it’s just a bonfire on the beach. Some people in a bar think so.”

She points to principles proposed by journalist Mark Jacob:

I liked Mark Jacob’s suggestions in his newsletter, headlined “How to build a radically truthful news outlet.” This former Chicago Tribune editor advises:

• Never allowing a lie to go out on their platforms without challenging it, even if that means taking Trump on a tape delay.
• Ending interviews with newsmakers if they won’t stop lying, and banning them from future appearances.
• Calling out rival news outlets that engage in disinformation.

In a note to me, Jacob explained:

“It’s not enough for good journalists to do quality work. If the goal is an informed public — and it should be — then part of their mission must be to defeat the liars so the facts prevail. This requires more aggressive tactics.”

All good. But even the most determined journalists still face structural challenges to advancing fact-based public dialogue in support of democracy. Their websites, newspapers, blogs, and newsletters are often on shaky financial ground. And their business models are built on pulling the attention of a bedazzled public away from the entertainment of the moment. Their driving metric remains traffic.

Worse, for millions of Americans, political delusions come at no cost. If I believe the moon is made of green cheese, my daily life proceeds, unaffected. Of course, if I believe the bus schedule is fake news, I may spend a lot of time standing on the side of the road.

Renowned journalist Walter Lippmann identified this problem more than a century ago:

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve.

We need to connect those pictures Lippmann mentions to the lived experience of readers, of citizens. Until we start to rebuild journalism as a democracy-support service — a community-support system that citizens can connect to their daily lives — winning back hearts and minds to the truth will be an uphill battle.