Article archive / October 2018
Originally published: . Volume 9, No. 10. Source pages: 2.
Next week is National Newspaper Week, an event sponsored by the national association of newspaper managers to help promote and celebrate the contributions of journalists. They send us some art, banner logos, and some editorials.
This year’s editorials included some bitter complaining about the “fake news” label being used by the President, and how this damages the journalism brand.
Puzzling. The newspaper industry has been well aware for two decades of the serious slide in the public’s trust.
Before Trump was elected, Pew Research reported that only 27% of liberals and only 15% of conservatives felt that information from national news organizations was “very trustworthy.”
In two years, little has changed. Currently, only 35% of liberals agree that news organizations are very trustworthy. For conservatives, only 12%.
Nor does the public think that the national news media does a very good job at keeping them well informed. For liberals only 28% in 2016 and only 27% in 2018 agreed that national journalism was doing their job well.
The picture is worse for conservatives. In 2016 only 24% felt the national outlets kept them well informed and in 2018 this fell to 11%.
It seems that the only remaining thing that the two parties can agree on is how abysmally bad the national news media is.
Complaining about Trump’s “fake news” label seems to be a post hoc error––Trump came after low trust in journalists. Maybe it is reversed, maybe the journalists caused Trump.
Gone are the days of Walter Cronkite journalism–“The most trusted man in America.” I grew up in the newspaper family with two real, true journalists and I now think that those days, the 1950s and 1960s, might have been a golden age for journalism. My work with the Times has been a lovely echo of that past, a faded melody of the intersection of high ideals, information and the human condition. Perhaps an illusion, but a nice one.
It was in the 1970s, while in graduate school at LSU, that my major professor, Don Glad, exposed me to systems theory. Like most systems theorists Don loved the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
The Law says that in a closed system, information and structure degrade (entropy) and, eventually the system dies. Steven Pinker describes it this way: “…the second law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides write “The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the 1st Law of Psychology.”
Don Glad was a newspaperman before he became a clinical- community psychologist and university professor. After Don died, Ralph Dreger called him an “irascible genius,” who applied that genius to “the most pressing problem of the times…” Ralph was referring to race relations in the south in the 60s. “There was no single individual more influential in bringing about communication in days when there was transition from segregation to desegregation and integration…”, Ralph said about Don.
Today also, we are in very strange times. The system is perturbed. Fast think reigns. We are in a slow boil. The usual majority rule is now unworkable–we are split down the middle. Subgroups are over-boundaried. No valid information flow. Not much likelihood of a true consensus.
There is plenty of entropy these days. And psychology has some of the best ideas around for helping our communities and nation.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.