It is now 22 years since I worked as a journalist, and about four years since I last taught a class that was cross-listed with the university’s Department of Mass Communications.<\/p>\n
I had six years in daily newspapers \u2014 not a career, but enough to learn the ropes \u2014 plus some magazine work.<\/p>\n
The Gallup Organization is out with polling data, appropriate for an election year, about growing distrust of the news media. <\/a><\/p>\n The lede:<\/p>\n For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A key graf with implications for the business side:<\/p>\n Lower-income Americans and those with less education are generally more likely to trust the media than are those with higher incomes and more education. A subgroup analysis of these data suggests that three demographic groups key to advertisers — adults aged 18 to 29, Americans making at least $75,000 per year, and college graduates — lost more trust in the media in the past year than other groups, but the sample sizes in this survey are too small to say so definitively.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Quite simply, editors no longer totally decide what is “news.” In the old days, they did. The managing editor of one paper where\u00a0 I worked had written a master’s thesis on that very topic: agenda-setting. He also once pronounced to the staff, in response to some citizen’s complaint that we had not covered Event X, that “a newspaper is not a public utility.”<\/p>\n In other words, we had no obligation to cover an event, a political candidate, or anyone’s activities if we were short on staff or just did not think it newsworthy.<\/p>\n Now, however, you see even the big papers and networks reacting \u2014 slowly and creakily \u2014 to news stories that germinate in blogs or other types of “citizen media.”<\/p>\n In addition, the exposure of things like the Journolist scandal<\/a> or other examples of blatant bias<\/a> get rapidly circulated online.<\/p>\n What New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane said about\u00a0 the newsroom’s “culture of like minds<\/a>” is true at many papers. I saw it when I was in my twenties, in both print and broadcast media,\u00a0 but outside of journalism graduate programs \u2014 and maybe not even there \u2014 where would I have discussed it?\u00a0 Who would have cared? Now some people specialize in pointing out media bias.<\/a><\/p>\n Where I am going with this? I liked newspaper work on many levels, but I can think of some smug editors and reporters who deserved to have their cages rattled<\/a>. I like that there are multiple channels of information now, even if some of them are unreliable. (Not to mention criminal<\/a>.) It’s still better than the alternative.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is now 22 years since I worked as a journalist, and about four years since I last taught a class that was cross-listed with the university’s Department of Mass Communications. I had six years in daily newspapers \u2014 not a career, but enough to learn the ropes \u2014 plus some magazine work. The Gallup […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[95],"class_list":["post-4617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-journalism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1ct","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":860,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=860","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":0},"title":"VA Approves the Wiccan Pentagram","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 23, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The first message (from a Pagan staffer at the American Academy of Religion) hit my inbox at 12:28 today, and then the Colorado Pagan email lists lit up: The Veterans Adminstration approved the pentagram for veterans' grave markers. (Pentagram, pentacle, same thing as far as the news media are concerned.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8977,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8977","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":1},"title":"“Tower Time” Is Not as Simple as You Think","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 7, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group's sessions at the American Academy of Religion was titled \"Magic in the Time of the Tower\" (see program screenshot below), and attendance was good. There was discussion of magical workings coordinated by social media, and of magical workings blabbed about on social media.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"culture\"","block_context":{"text":"culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=culture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/tower-card.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10019,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10019","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":2},"title":"Season of the Witch(crap), Part 2","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Season of the Witch(crap), Part 1\" here. Continuing . . . \u2022 One more \"high\" priestess joke, and you're out of here. From the Colorado Springs Independent, the weekly that gets all the cannabis advertising because the chain-owned daily paper won't touch it: \"Meet Colorado's High Priestess of Cannabis.\" Yes,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media1.fdncms.com\/csindy\/imager\/u\/blog\/14467973\/cannaculture.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media1.fdncms.com\/csindy\/imager\/u\/blog\/14467973\/cannaculture.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media1.fdncms.com\/csindy\/imager\/u\/blog\/14467973\/cannaculture.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7282,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7282","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":3},"title":"Review: “The Sisterhood of Night”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 15, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Pagan film critic Peg Aloi has interesting things to say about a new movie, The Sisterhood of Night. Not only does it have the traditional element of teenage girls, secrets, and occultism (see, not coincidentally, Salem, Mass., 1692) but there is a social-media element too: The film cleverly allows us\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"movies\"","block_context":{"text":"movies","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=movies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5325,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5325","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":4},"title":"Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Religious studies professor Sarah Pike, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America discusses her work at the Religion and American History blog. In a chapter I wrote recently on \u201cWicca in the News\u201d about changing representations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":670,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=670","url_meta":{"origin":4617,"position":5},"title":"The parallel universe of train\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The parallel universe of train travelMaking train reservations for M. and me to travel to AAR-SBL in November, I discovered that there were already no basic sleeper rooms left to reserve for one part of the trip--outbound from La Junta, Colorado, to Chicago.Who says Americans don't like train travel? Every\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4619,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4617\/revisions\/4619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}