Pressing Issues

When people get together and talk about their trade, there's a term for it: shoptalk.

But in the news business, the talk long ago went out of the shop. With the advent of the Internet, it sometimes seems as though everyone is a media critic, and the mainstream media have become everyone's target.

I don't object. We need to listen to our readers and viewers, if only to discover that their complaints are often the same as the ones we used to discuss in the saloon down the street after our shifts had ended. Only today, the complaints come rolling across our computer screens in a never-ending cacophony of protest that challenges (pick your issue) our motivations, our judgment, our biases, our education, our religion or lack thereof, our parentage, and even our relationship with certain animals -- dogs and reptiles being the most preferred.

And this isn't coming just from e-mailers with time on their hands and a gripe they want aired; it's a staple of many of the popular blogs.

Again, I don't object. I'm at a loss, however, to explain why in the current amplified climate, griping about the media has turned into a crisis for the media. To me, it makes no sense. Yet the evidence is all around: Declining circulation and advertising revenues among print media, and declining ratings and advertising losses among broadcast media all point to the turbulence shaking mainstream media today.

As I write, the Internet buzz concerns a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that seems to confirm the critics' contention that the storm has already gathered, and that mainstream media are doomed.

What's probably most striking, though, is the fact that Pew researchers found that much of the harsh criticism is Internet driven.

"The Internet news audience -- roughly a quarter of all Americans -- tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole," Pew reports. "People who rely on the Internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance."

And get a load of this: "The Internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to 'stand up for America,' and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68 percent) of those who get most of their news from the Internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53 percent believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53 percent), and being too critical of America (43 percent)."

This I find astonishing. While it is true that the Pew survey noted a continuing overall downward trend in respect for news media, you could make a pretty good argument that the distrust is either highly exaggerated, or largely irrelevant. After all, Internet users most likely are tapping into news media Web sites to get their news. Even if they are going to the Drudge Report or Yahoo, what they are getting is coming from sources such as newspapers, broadcast outlets or The Associated Press.

But there does seem to be a certain amount of delight among the more active of the bloggers in pointing out errors, as if to confirm a thesis that the media are biased and thus not worthy of trust with anything so important as being a check on American democracy and governance. (Note to my fellow bloggers: politicians have been saying much the same thing for hundreds of years.)

In digesting this survey, what I think editors and publishers need to do is question their own strategies for dealing with the Internet. No, I'm not advocating ignoring it, or Internet users, for that matter.

Yet what the survey also tends to tell me is that readers and viewers value substance over fluff, accuracy over sloppy news-gathering, objectivity over agendas. Writing in Editor & Publisher, the magazine that bills itself the bible of the newspaper business, Iowa State University professor Michael Bugeja makes another point that editors too often have overlooked: Get your reporters out of the office and out into the community.

"Why would anybody trust a newspaper whose reporters they seldom see?" Bugeja asks. "It's as simple as that. We need more interaction and less interactivity."

I'll call that, and raise you a commitment to excellence that, sadly, seems to be slipping away as editors look for ways to meet the challenges of the Internet. Closing news bureaus, slashing content and laying off reporters, photographers and editors is probably not the correct way to win back the trust.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.