The Complexities of Journalism
A few months back, Pew Research invited me to take a survey of journalist attitudes. I remain uneasy calling myself a reporter, though I do now practice journalism on a fairly regular basis. Nevertheless, I guessed they hadn’t contacted too many drinks writers, so I decided to fill it out to give them some breadth in their responses. Yesterday Pew released the findings of the survey.
The results are highly problematic.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a researcher is holding assumptions, and even worse is when those assumptions remain hidden to you. In this case, my own experience as a lowly beer writer is useful in highlighting the massive blind spot that distorts their findings and report. As news consumers and readers of this site, I thought you might be interested in the subject.
Not everything about the survey is skewed. Pew asked a bunch of questions about what it’s like to be a working journalist, and those findings are useful. But that wasn’t the point of the research, and those findings are buried deep in the report. Instead, here’s the lede—see if you can spot the problem:
“From the economic upheaval of the digital age to the rise of political polarization and the COVID-19 pandemic, journalism in America has been in a state of turmoil for decades. ”
Pew’s clear goal is to unearth the attitudes of political journalists. Most reporters don’t cover politics. Boot up your Google news feed and you’ll see categories like sports and technology and business and entertainment. Indeed, back when news came from the hand of a paper boy, these were actual sections in the newspaper. In combining responses from journalists on different beats, the framing matters.
Take for example this question: “Does every side deserve equal coverage in a story?” It seems innocuous enough if you’re thinking of politics. For the past generation, the public and press have argued about how to present different sides of a political story. But what if you write about beer? The question is nonsensical. In much of journalism, there aren’t sides per se—certainly not actors from political camps trying to shape the news for their advantage.
If you answer this question as a political reporter, you’re answers will mean one thing. If you’re a beer writer, they may well mean another. I do my level best to make sure every point of view is represented in my writing. If I were reporting political news, I’d have a totally different approach—I would use my discernment as a reporter to assess whether a source was offering bad-faith lies to skew a story and if so, I wouldn’t report that. I can count the number of times a source lied to me for a beer story on the fingers of one hand.
Read the following questions and imagine a beer writer answering them versus a political reporter:
“How concerned are you about potential restrictions on press freedoms in the US?”
“Do you think your news organization's readers, watchers, or listeners lean a certain way politically?”
“How much of a problem for society do you think it is when people with the same political views get their news from the same news organizations?”
“Do you think it is possible to report news that nearly everyone finds accurate these days?”
Beer writers do not think a great deal about press freedoms or the politics of their readers. They don’t worry that their informants are so committed to misleading them that they can’t report an accurate story. The problem with those hidden assumptions is that they lead to murky results. To that second question, the answers were “lean left,” “lean right,” “equal mix,” or “not sure.” I answered “not sure” because we don’t really discuss politics. So how do the results of sports writers, beer writers, and entertainment writers inform that question? (Not at all.)
Let’s take a more pointed example. Pew asked, “When you are working on a story, how confident are you in your own ability to recognize information that is false or made-up?” Are we talking about political propaganda and political lies, or spin from a company’s PR department? The way you interpret these questions depends heavily on the context.
I’m proud of the work journalists covering beer are doing. This wasn’t always the case. When I started writing about beer, the coverage was woeful (and I was a part of the problem). In the past five to ten years, a slew of new reporters have entered the field who are doing incredible work. We don’t always get everything right, but that’s because humans err. Pew was trying to elicit views about reporters who live in the scrum of fake news, death threats, politicians lying and all the rest. I endorse that! But recognize that journalism is a bigger field, and in many ways reporters live in entirely different worlds depending on what they cover. In the field of beer writing, things are so much better now than they’ve ever been. If you read Pew’s report, there’s no way to find that story in the report.