Bay Area news leaders report on how the media performed in its role of educating the voters. Excerpt from “A Consumer’s Guide to Media: Finding Truth in an Election Year,” October 30, 2012.

LOWELL BERGMAN, Logan Distinguished Professor in Investigative Reporting, UC Berkeley; Producer/Correspondent, PBS documentary series “Frontline”; Former Producer, “60 Minutes”

PHIL MATIER, Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle; Commentator, KCBS Radio and CBS 5 Television

SCOTT LETTIERI, Reporter, KGO Radio

CARLY SCHWARTZ, Founding Editor, Huffington Post San Francisco

SALLY LEHRMAN, Knight Ridder/San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair for Journalism in the Public Interest and Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Scholar, Santa Clara University – Moderator

 

SALLY LEHRMAN: Do people expect a political bias from news media these days? If they don’t, should they?

CARLY SCHWARTZ: It’s true that journalism is a supply and demand economy. People aren’t going to come to stories that are just a list of the facts. They can read an encyclopedia for that. Our role as journalists is to make things exciting and to make people want to know what’s going on, while making sure that every fact is accurate. It’s unrealistic to assume human beings don’t have inherent bias. While it’s very important to explore every perspective, I think that the nature of news today is one that we want to bring people to and get them excited about. I think presenting facts in a certain way kind of speaks to that.

LEHRMAN: Scott, you’re from kind of a more traditional outlet. Should people expect a political bias nowadays?

SCOTT LETTIERI: The line between propaganda and news has really gotten smaller. A lot of it has to do with the consolidation of the media. There are six or seven media groups that own the message. The company that I worked for, Cumulus, owns 527 radio stations. When they came in, they fired half the staff. It’s all bottom-line driven. A lot of folks in the last 30 or 40 years since things have changed don’t know the difference between news and propaganda. I’m a purist. I like to stay objective for the most part. I know that I’m going to bring in a lot of my own experience and a lot of my own life. I try to get both sides. I try to be truly fair. It’s a matter of educating people, letting them know the difference between point of view and what is real journalism.

LEHRMAN: Instead of bias, should we be expecting objectivity?

LOWELL BERGMAN: The notion of objectivity in modern American journalism, which is unusual – it doesn’t exist in Europe – comes from technology. When the telegraph was started and there was one telegraph line, the idea was that every newspaper along the way could get information and they wanted people to buy it. The Associated Press, when it was formed, started a new style in journalism, which was a style that anyone could publish. That’s the objectivity standard that started us thinking that we could actually get down the middle and present a story so that anyone could accept it. What we call the legacy media – The New York Times and other organizations like that – have developed a standard [for how stories are covered;] you may say they have a liberal bias, for instance, but they [also] report against their story. They will report information that’s not supportive of, say, their editorial point of view.

What has happened today is what’s happened in broadcast media over the last 20 years. It no longer has the controls that were once built into it. It’s more or less become free market, particularly on cable. The result is that anything goes. There is no way to fact check that kind of journalism.

LEHRMAN: Phil, you now work in print and broadcast, and you are expected to be a commentator. How do you divine this line between bias and truth or objectivity?

PHIL MATIER: Objectivity in journalism is this elusive thing that, as Lowell aptly pointed out, came with the AP and flourished in America for a few years in the ’60s and into the ’70s and then sort of evaporated with the advent of cable news. Let’s be honest about it. Truth, or objectivity, is common agreed-to facts. The idea of a paper years ago was that you put the facts out and everybody could read it and somehow agree: This shooting occurred that night with this amount of people.

Originally newspapers of the United States made their money on shipping news. They announced what came into port and what left. From the minute somebody started making money back in Boston, it moved political. It was biased for years. It was showmanship for years. I work in the Hearst Corporation, the Hearst newspapers; before the media moguls of today, that was the newspaper mogul. People talk about the bias now. When William Randolph Hearst sent Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw the war and Frederic said, “There will be no war,” Hearst said, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” It’s not like there was this sudden turn. If anything there was an era in there where the journalists tried to get into what we call common agreed-to-truths and this objectivity. It fell apart in Vietnam and everything else.

LEHRMAN: With your own experience as a journalist, how do you discern truth and can you think of a moment where you were unsure of what truth was for the purposes of reporting? How did you navigate that? 

LETTIERI: I never let truth get in the way of a good story. [Laughter.] It’s slippery. It’s hard to tell the truth. You try to bombard yourself with so much information that hopefully you will have an epiphany. Knowing the truth is instinctual on a lot of levels, I think. But you also have to do your homework. You have to get in there in the trenches, dig and talk to a lot of people and do a lot of research. That’s also a responsibility of the citizenry to not just to watch TV and try and get your truth from that, or one radio broadcast. You have to read magazines, listen to NPR, watch PBS and maybe tune in to Fox News, just to get the other side, and the truth lies somewhere in there and it comes out eventually.

BERGMAN: There’s a competing ethic in the news business, which is not to get it first but to get it right. That’s the part of the news business that gets beaten down because usually it means either lower ratings or [is] less sensational, etc. It also generally means the development of information that isn’t immediately apparent to you. If we’re going to talk about truth – the word truth – truth is not what’s immediately apparent to you; it’s what’s behind it. The degree to which we can [look for] that in the news media, I think that’s how we justify our public role and a lot of the Supreme Court and other decisions that give us special privileges. The commercial side of the news business is just interested, as many people believe, in selling newspapers and getting viewers. How do you do that? You do that with sex, death and violence. It’s an old formula.

LEHRMAN: How do we know when to report something and when do we hold it back, either because we’re not sure it’s true or for some other reason? Let me ask you, Lowell Bergman, was there a moment in your career [when] it was very difficult to report what you had discovered to be true?

BERGMAN: The most important example was back in 1977. A group of us who used to work at Rolling Stone magazine here in San Francisco – when it moved to New York we were all fired. So [we had to ask,] “What are we going to do? Where are we going to work?” We set up something called the Center for Investigative Reporting, which still exists and is actually bigger than ever. Initially our funding was primarily from what I would call liberal-left people, nonprofit funding.

One of the stories that we came across initially was a murder case involving the head of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton. We had to make a decision about whether or not to both possibly alienate our donors and also [publish a story at odds with] our own backgrounds and political sympathies. Were we going to do the story? The story as it developed and as we looked into it showed that Black Panther Party had become basically a criminal gang and [that Newton] had been involved in this murder. He wasn’t convicted of it in the end, but he was involved in the murder. We had a sort of, if you will, “come to Jesus” moment [when we decided to publish the story]. It was a great lesson for me, because the story got national play and it was very successful. We got a lot of complaints from certain people in various political groups. [But] in fact, it established our credibility. This is more about what I think a lot of us would like journalism to be and why I’m proud of that story; the idea is that we do have to report against ourselves. We may be wrong. We may believe the wrong things. That’s the difficult time to do stories.

The other experiences I’ve had have really been around what a news organization will or will not do. That’s another story. That’s not about what I may want to publish, but what can I actually report on. Then, after a while learning that there are some areas where you can’t report on certain things. Self-censorship is another issue in terms of how all of us experience the world of journalism.

LEHRMAN: [In] an age of sensationalism,  how are we to make decisions about things like elections?

BERGMAN: Let’s see. Two-thirds of the people who are eligible to vote are registered. A smaller percentage of them vote. What are elections in this country, and how do you expect people to make decisions?

Personally, I see the decline in the public education system in the United States since Proposition 13 means that you don’t have an informed electorate. You talk to the judiciary here in San Francisco and you ask them about the kinds of questions they get asked by reporters, they often say the reporters don’t understand what’s going on. It’s a choice that the voters have made in California to defund the public education system, and this is what you get as a result. There was, in the wake of World War II, aside from the GI Bill, a popular feeling that the people in the United States should become more well-educated. We built the greatest college and university systems in the world and we had great school systems. We don’t have that anymore, particularly in the public realm, and so what do you expect the electorate to decide? If they don’t have the ability or the tools to discern what is true and what is not on a basic level, then I think we’re just complaining about something that is a fact.

LEHRMAN: At the same time it doesn’t sound like we’re helping a whole lot by just going to the lowest common denominator. Out here it sounds like the media has deteriorated to entertainment.

MATIER: We’ve always been entertainment. Back when I was a much younger reporter I was on the night desk one day. We screwed up the horoscope. We got more calls than you would ever imagine. It taught me a big lesson about the readership: You screwed up the horoscope, they were after you.

We’ve always had the sensational trials. We’ve always had the mudslinging. Look at the past presidential elections. Everyone says it always gets boiled down to a slogan. Well, what was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too”? It’s a part of America. It’s not necessarily pretty. Given a choice between watching a presidential debate and a chipmunk waterski, chances are more people are going to [watch] the chipmunk waterski. It’s shorter, it’s more entertaining, and you don’t feel like you got your mental pocket picked. We go for that. We always have. What’s difficult now is that, in conjunction with this, we’re being asked to decide on bigger questions than we used to. [On the November ballot] there’s, what, 10 propositions [on subjects ranging] from the death penalty to school taxes to labeling of food. All these things are being thrust at you and you’re supposed to be informed on it. It’s tough. You’re just being hit with these ads, and these ads are “true.” If you take these ads apart, each little fact might be true. They just leave out all the others.

SCHWARTZ: It’s also a matter of, how do you inform the public if the public doesn’t want to hear it? We have a joke at the Huffington Post: you come for the cute puppy slideshows, and you’ll stay for the tax policy. We call those the “eat your veggies” pieces.

I used to get in big trouble when I was a front-page editor. I would delete five out of the six Donald Trump hair stories on the front page. Our clicks would go down, sure, but I like to believe, and maybe I’m an idealist, but just maybe one or two of those readers that came for that one Donald Trump piece that was up stayed to read about the debt ceiling.