PUTNEY — I teach college courses in journalism, and one of the points I try to get across early on is that mainstream journalism is constrained by principles that are essential to the validity and reliability of the press, but that also mean that wrong ideas and misinformation are sometimes allowed to promulgate far beyond reasonable boundaries.
The principle of objectivity and fairness requires that the press report both sides of a given story, and that it treat the statements of important public figures with a seriousness that is sometimes unearned and inappropriate.
The principle that the press reports the news - it doesn't make the news - means that it is constrained to cover events. Stories have to have some kind of news peg; otherwise, it is analysis or opinion, a decision made to talk about some topic in the absence of a precipitating event.
One example I use: the fact that some important Republican presidential candidates have dismissed evolution as a theory.
When their belief is reported, it is not possible for the reporter to add an editorial statement, perhaps to the effect that all science is based on the concept of theory rather than “truth,” and that the theory of evolution has been so profoundly validated that it underlies all of the most important developments in the biological sciences over the past century.
You can't run a headline that says “Perry Dismisses Theory of Evolution, Demonstrates Failure to Understand the Basic Principle of Scientific Investigation.”
You can't note that in dismissing evolution as a theory, a candidate joins in a long line of skeptics, starting with those who believed that the earth is flat.
You can't say that any thinking person should consider whether this disqualifies a candidate for office in the 21st century.
A second example I use is that there is rarely a good news peg to write about the most important news.
For example, human activity has created profound changes in the global climate in a way that will only increase, unless radical changes are made, and those changes will have devastating effects on everything from food production to relationships among nations.
Even though the burden of evidence is extensive and well-validated, it is not possible to run a headline like “Overwhelming Evidence for Human Effect on Climate Change; Devastating Consequences for Life on Earth Predicted if Radical Steps Are Not Taken.”
Anyone paying attention to the literature knows that this headline is true, but it's not a story you will read in tomorrow's daily newspaper.
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This example is what so fascinated me about a story that originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor: “Climate Study Confirms What Skeptics Scoffed at: Global Warming Is Real.”
There it was - in so many words, the same headline that I had told my students was unlikely to appear because of how journalism works.
That this headline and story did appear, of course, has to do precisely with how the press works: There was a news peg.
It turns out that an extensive study of climate data, funded partly by the Gates Foundation and partly by the Koch Foundation (one of the most important forces behind right-wing politics today), confirmed the evidence of prior studies, demonstrating even more strongly that what we all know to be happening is, indeed, happening.
The news peg was made particularly compelling by the fact that the Koch Foundation funded the study because of its skepticism about global warming and its sense that the researchers in charge of it had no axe to grind - that, in fact, they were skeptics themselves.
But they were also scientists, and they reported what they found in the data.
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I am not an optimist by nature, but I do remember the sense of optimism I had when I was in college during the 1970s, casting my first vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and even through the Clinton era, when it seemed for a time that some sort of rational approach to the problems that faced this country might be possible.
It saddens me that the students I work with are so pessimistic, but I am not sure I have anything to tell them to convince them otherwise.
It is difficult to imagine that knowing the truth about climate change will make a difference in our environmental practices, globally speaking, given the economic forces at work in nations like China, India, and Brazil, and given our own addiction to fossil fuel.
But it is nice to see an important truth appear in the news, for a change.
I wish I had an answer to the problem with mainstream journalism. We're still not going to see a story about Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann that points out how benighted their positions are on a subject like evolution or climate change, because that is not the function of the news.
Fairness, objectivity, reporting the news as it happens rather than making the news - these are cornerstones of the practice of the Fourth Estate.
Everything else is opinion and analysis, and the proliferation of these forms - cable news, radio talk shows, blogs, and the like - has only cheapened and diminished the power of an enterprise that I still know to be an absolutely essential cornerstone of liberal democracy, which, as Churchill said, is clearly the worst form of governance except for all the others.