Resolved: don't trust the mainstream media...a review of the Munk Debate

 Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media…the title of a recent Munk Debate, aired on CPAC last night, featuring Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi on the Affirmative side, and Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg for the Negative.

While the ‘polling results’ indicate a sizeable shift in audience opinion in favour of the Affirmative side, compared with the snap-shot of audience opinion at the beginning, the debate itself warrants some serious reflection.

First, although it will come off as parochial, provincial and somewhat neurotic, as a Canadian interested in the role and influence of the media in our contemporary world culture, why did Munk planners select debaters from the United States and Great Britain, with Malcolm Gladwell, a transplanted Canadian whose career has been rooted in the U.S? Are there no media scholars, observers and practitioners who could have tackled this subject with vigour, scholarship and insight? OR, and this is going to ring as a sarcastic cheap shot, “Was the issue of ratings, audience numbers, star power and the dominance of the American media in North American culture too compelling to ignore?”

Indeed, while ratings among the mainstream media is a core issue, and helps to shape much of the lens through which story assignments, reporting, and editing takes places in the major media outlets, specifically the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two most frequently referenced in this debate, ratings was not considered a significant factor in the debate itself. Whether rich media barrons like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, or large corporations dominate the ownership and boardroom decisions, the look into the specifics to support each side tended to be very specific, as if a single episode served the purposes of the debaters more than the gestalt of the landscape.

It is the landscape in which the mainstream media operate that warrants more attention than it received last night. Implicitly a direct and expansive comparison of the mainstream media in an information culture dotted with independent outlets, blogs, podcasts, and outlets like Politico, Buzzfeed, and their clones, seems to be a relevant reference point for this debate. That lens was rarely, if ever, opened throughout. The literacy levels of the readerships/viewerships, along with the attention span of media consumers, too, were ignored, avoided, or perhaps deliberately passed over in order not to insult the audience. Whose direct or indirect ‘editing’ prompted this oversight? Was it the debaters, or the Munk strategists?

And while specific significant mistakes were detailed, on both sides, given the failure, for example of reporters to follow up on the Klimnik influence on the Trump-Ukraine web that prompted the Mueller probe of the former disgraced president, the media’s persistence in quoting every word of the thousands of Trump tweets, whether they made any sense, or whether they were merely character assassin’s word bombs, was not considered worthy of discussion in this debate. The media landscape, however, has been shifted (certainly not transformed) by the media’s enmeshment in the campaign of deceptions, lies, and projections that issued from the Oval Office for four long years. What kind of role did such an obsession of the mainstream media play in the erosion both of the validity and trustworthiness of the general flow of information? And why was such a question not even raised in this debate?

Fact checking, as a specific issue, was an important topic, approached differently by each side. For the Negative side, Gladwell told a personal story that illustrated his failure to fact check a story he wrote for the Washington Post, for which omission he was nearly fired. On the Affirmative side, Mr. Taylor attacked Gladwell for his compendium of factual errors in a chapter on the Northern Ireland troubles in his book entitled David and Goliath, an oversight Gladwell easily and readily acknowledged along with his determination to hire and deploy fact-checkers thereafter.

However, the trust of the public in mainstream media is not so much due to the errors in specific facts, in specific stories, or even in their failure to follow up on stories that warranted additional coverage, even if the public appetite for such follow-up (risking a turn “into the weeds” a phrase evoked by Ms Goldberg) and a downturn in public consumption of that part of the story. If newsrooms and editorial rooms are so fixated on the ‘fact-checking’ aspect of their business, then, perhaps the mainstream media has fallen for the myopia of the public appetite and consciousness for the kind of court-room silver bullet of ‘gotcha’ which, admittedly generates sales, ratings and advertising revenue, but which also truncates and thereby reduces the complexity of political campaigns, into ad hominum attacks.

Such an ad hominum attack, through the blatant and cheap deployment of sarcasm and belittling of Gladwell by Murray, while generating an audience applause, and potentially contributing significantly to the audience change in opinion on the debate question, lowered the tone and the professional potential of the debate itself, while also demonstrating a fatal flaw of the mainstream media and the culture. The obsession with personal attack/assassination/sarcasm/ radioactivity that we all know lies at the heart of the process of magnetizing eyeballs, ears and perhaps even the occasional mind.

Was the fast-food addiction to the radioactivity of any story, specifically focused on the failures/peccadilloes/outright abuses/sexuality/extortion of/by a human being, the acknowledged menu of the tabloids, into which trap the mainstream media has succumbed, on so many occasions and fronts not worthy even of a mention in such a debate? Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Fox News and the mainstream media’s obsessive competitive impulse to compete with and to attract eyeballs from the already converted consumers of those voices, a dynamic both sides of the debate would likely concur has and is and will continue to erode the trust in the mainstream media. Why was that dynamic not worthy of the specific and detailed contest and acknowledgement in this debate? The fact that a large percentage of Fox News viewers vote Republican and an even larger percentage of viewers of MSNBC vote Democratic, while not in dispute by either side, (Gallup was the source quoted by Mr. Taibbi) nevertheless begs the question what role has the media played in such a deep divide in public opinion? And how has that role-adoption contributed to the demise of public trust in the mainstream media? Just another question left unaddressed and begging for address!

Everyone agrees with the cliché that mainstream media is the first draft of history, and thereby warrants a focus on the granularity, the specificity and the detailed answers to the five core questions of any journalist’s job description: who? what? where? when? and why? And the tasks involved in fulfilling the basic requirements of those questions/answers, including the demand to contact all available and willing sources, and record and report the findings of “all sides” of an issue, a matter highlighted by Gladwell as an important reason for trust in the mainstream media, also invites the perspective of how those details are to be implemented and included in the discussions over editorial board decisions.

And it is in this light, the editorial stance of any responsible and respectable mainstream media outlet, warrants and demands scrutiny. “Duration of a story’s currency” is, different and must be considered differently from the currency and relevancy of a stock’s rise and fall in the market. However, if the journalism business insists on operating on the corporate/investment/profit model, exclusively, and the exclusivity of that model damages the amount of resources deployed in any direction on any story, then we all know that relevant, and cogent and perhaps unsettling information will fail to capture the assignment editor’s eyes and reflection, even if it comes to his screen. Of course, the occasional courageous editor, with the support of his/her publisher, (as evidenced in the Watergate stories by Woodward and Bernstein), will green light a story that bears considerable risk.

Have editors and publishers lost some of the kind of courage and grit on display by Martha Graham during Watergate? Why was such a question not even mentioned in this debate? Were the debaters wrapped in a deferential (and somewhat bland) ethos of protecting the rank-and-file reporting camp? Or was the issue simply too complicated and thereby too ‘weedy’ to be included in the research done by either side?

Financial sustainability, as a significant factor in the temperament in any mainstream media, embracing each and every organization on a daily, hourly, monthly and yearly basis. Competition with the digital media, not yet considered a full player on the mainstream media platform, has eroded advertisers, viewers, readers and ultimately trust and confidence in the mainstream media. And part of that erosion can be attributed to the “all politics is local” epithet which negates coverage and deployment of correspondents into foreign lands. Decline in those numbers is only exaggerated when a conflict like the war in Ukraine demands coverage, and finds the consumer culture somewhat devoid of background in which to integrate the new information.

This void of international news and foreign bureaus, ironically has accompanied and paralleled the mountainous growth of international trade, the interdependence of national economies on the world trends, and the rising of global issues which demand a collaborative and co-operative approach and muscular commitment from all nations. These existential threats, food shortages, global warming and climate change, geopolitical conferences and negotiations, the state of nuclear weapons development in various states, including rogue states, the migration of millions of people from very different ethnicities, religions, languages and traditions demand a very imagination, courageous, creative and substantial funding investment from the mainstream media. And so far as this single scribe, unattached to any news service, living in a small border town in Canada can decipher, only G-Zero media has taken up the challenge to being to consider the world after the G-7-8-20 groupings. Their perspective, however, while not abandoning national boundaries and interests, attempts to bring current, relevant and cogent information from many quarters on  a daily basis to readers who have selected and signed on to their platform.

The laggardness of the mainstream media, to revise their priorities from the micro, parochial, business, national market, to the international scene with new bureaus and new reporters and new investors and advertisers is a demerit and blind spot that hangs over not only last night’s debate, but the future of the industry and the world generally.

Trust in mainstream media, while worthy of serious reflection and debate, both inside and outside the editorial and board rooms of the main players, neverthelessp demands the best from the organizers and the debaters themselves.

Critics, from a safe and secure place in a study before a laptop, while not engaged in the hurly-burly of the daily news, nor in the elite atmosphere of the Munk Debates at one of the most prestigious auditoria in the world, The Thompson Hall in Toronto, the home of the world renown Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under the auspices of the Munk Centre, an arm of the Munk School of Global Affairs, itself an arm of the also world renown University of Toronto, are positioned to offer significant, substantive and perhaps even historic insights, visions, not only of our problems but of their potential solutions.

Trust, a sine-qua-non of any organization, including the mainstream media, is a matter under consideration of all leadership groups in all sectors. And in order to address the issues surrounding the building and sustaining of trust, the worker bees as well as the queen bees have to integrate both a mirror and a lamp as their lenses through which to consider the issues.

Last night, we were fed a menu full of mirror reflections, with hardly a tip of the hat or the verbiage to the lamp… Leaders depend on the mainstream media not only for the micro-fact-checked, verified facts, but for their intelligent, imaginative and courageous assessment of those facts and the best minds’ curation of those facts. Mired in the minutiae will provide a glimpse of the menu of the fact in the mirror, and will fail to address the responsibility of the lamp lit by those facts, no matter how complex, or how unsettling.