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Sifting through files, I found a hand-written response to “Sum up your newsroom’s mission in a sentence.”
To give people the information they need to be free and govern themselves.
That’s what we learned in journalism school at the University of Wisconsin: To offer fact-based reporting that helps folks manage their lives and keeps the citizens in charge of our republic. Spreading the virtue of independent, verified, truth-seeking reporting was the reason Wisconsin, Marquette, Missouri, Northwestern and Columbia University launched journalism programs in the early 1900s. Democracy appeared to be at risk then; falsehoods and anger were often overwhelming truth and reason.
Today, we are living through similar times.
More:Here's how the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin had an impact on its communities in 2022
The journalism schools were part of a broad societal response to what historian Jon Grinspan calls “The Last Time We Broke America,” between the Civil War and 20th Century. Reforms pursued by Wisconsin’s Bob La Follette and President Theodore Roosevelt were also part of this movement to restore reason and civic service to our politics.
“Living in a time of incredible disruption, instability and inequality pushed unsteady citizens into partisan combat,” writes Grinspan, curator of political history for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “Nervous people make nasty politics, and the churn of Gilded Age life left millions feeling cut loose and unprotected. During this era, Americans saw weaker family ties, had fewer communal institutions and spent more time alone ... Americans ‘had to cling to something,’ observed the writer Walter Weyl, and in the absence of their old folk customs or local institutions, ‘the temptation to cling to party became ruthless.’”
Like the industrial revolution of the 19th Century, disruptions caused by technological revolution have weakened trust in our democratic institutions in recent decades.
Trust in news media, other institutions has fallen
In 1977, 72% of Americans trusted news media “quite a lot” or “a great deal,” according to a Gallup poll that has been done every year since. That was almost as good as our 74% trust in the medical system and higher than our 64% trust in church and religion, 57% trust in the Supreme Court, 45% trust in the military and 40% trust in Congress.
By this year, we were down to 38% trust in the medical system, 31% trust in church and religion, 25% trust in the Supreme Court and 7% trust in Congress, a record low. Trust in the news media has dropped to 34%.
Only one institution measured by Gallup is doing better than 45 years ago: Trust in the military has grown to 64%.
The Gallup numbers show that while the trends have been greatly exacerbated in the 21st Century, trust in our democratic institutions started their fall 20 years earlier. More than half the drop in news media trust occurred prior to 1997, before the consumer Internet took off. What changed as the ‘70s became the ‘80s?
At the same time that a vast transfer of labor in our manufacturing economy, much of it to other nations, brought the loss of hundreds of thousands of family-supporting jobs, we saw the rise of cable television. News appeared to become available 24-7. Except it’s very expensive to fill 24 hours of news a day with researched and edited reporting, where multiple sources are interviewed and facts are checked before a story is aired.
Research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that the vast majority of time on network news programs like the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite was made up of verified and edited news stories. By contrast, the vast majority of time on cable news programs was live, unedited and unverified.
It didn’t take long for people seeking power, for their financial supporters and for campaign operatives to see the opportunities of speaking live to an audience without being fact-checked.
Live, unverified, unchecked interviews are only one change that came with cable TV. A series of transformations followed.
The 24-7 “news” programming filled time slots with panels of opinion writers, including political operatives and retired politicians, riffing their opinions off the news rather than reporting it.
The plethora of cable channel choices led to calls for deregulation of those with federal licenses to broadcast on the public airwaves. First fell the Fairness Doctrine, which required holders of public broadcast licenses to give equal time to opposing political viewpoints. Then the Equal Time Rule, where broadcasters had to offer equivalent opportunity for opposing candidates for office and the parties they represented. Finally, new rules made it virtually impossible to challenge a broadcast license when it came up for renewal.
Freed by deregulation to serve niche audience markets, as the cable companies had learned to do, radio broadcast license holders dispensed with trained news staffs at stations across the nation, including WTMJ-AM and WISN-AM here in Milwaukee. They replaced them with less expensive syndicated talk shows where a celebrity host would express opinions about news of the day – opinions that mirrored the views of their target market. And they supplemented these nationally syndicated programs with local commentators copying their template.
“Us against them” became a major marketing theme – “our” radio or cable network and its audience stand for what is good and true in America, the others are to blame for all our troubles. The opinion hosts – who rarely did a stitch of reporting — handed over their shows to the candidates they supported. Why would politicians running for office want to be grilled by independent reporters who would challenge false assumptions and factual inaccuracies, when they could go on the air and give a free infomercial to their voters?
Then, after 20 years of this shift toward niche opinion marketplaces by cable and radio networks, the commercial Internet arrived.
Today we know that most people under 40 get their news through mobile devices and social networks. This news doesn’t come delivered as a package of verified, fact-checked information from Walter Cronkite or the Journal Sentinel or the Wall Street Journal, but comes as alert headlines, videos and social posts with links. Research by the American Press Institute found that the source of the story, its reputation and its ethical standards had little to do with which links people valued and trusted. The most important thing? What we think about the person on our network who shared it.
Facebook and Google dominate this marketplace like nothing we’ve seen before in American media. These two companies now control more than 80% of all mobile advertising revenue, according to media researchers Tom Rosenstiel and Katherine K. Ellis.
Those two companies have taken control through algorithms that respond to each user’s behavior. Like the cable stations, they want to keep your attention long enough to share content with others – because they don’t produce any content on their own — and long enough to click on an ad for a product they know you’ve shown a recent interest in buying. The algorithms have learned that people tend to share items that move them the most emotionally – particularly those that make them angry and fearful.
That doesn’t tend to be coverage of your local village board or city council or zoning commission. It also likely isn't Natural Resources Board meetings or Legislative hearings on the state budget. That's why we’re almost always the only people representing the public at those meetings and reporting what those elected representatives are up to. This beat reporting remains our foundation stone.
Loss of local journalism has impact on democracy
As Facebook, Google and Amazon have grown, the business model that long supported local newspapers has been walloped as hard as the one that supported local retailers like Boston Store and American TV – once the Journal Sentinel’s largest advertisers.
“Every couple of weeks you can read about another newspaper shutting its doors, or moving from daily to weekly, or hollowing out its newsroom until it’s little more than a skeleton staff,” writes Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. “Study the maps made by Penny Abernathy, visiting professor at Northwestern University and an expert on dwindling sources of news, and you can seethe dead zones — the 200 or so counties with no local paper. About 1,600 other counties have only one.”
Local newspapers historically have provided almost every bit of the reporting about democracy in action — the hearings, board meetings, policy debates, trials, records and elections — according to “Losing the News,” a research report by PEN America.
Where there is not a strong local newsroom doing these jobs, the report found:
Citizens are less likely to vote.
Fewer people run for office; more candidates run unopposed.
Government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency and effectiveness.
Salaries, taxation, deficit spending and corruption rise.
Business malfeasance goes unchecked and unregulated.
“The loss of local journalism has been accompanied by the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens,” according to the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism’s Local News Initiative. “Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025.”
The same folks financing those vicious political campaign commercials have moved in with web sites that try to look like those of independent, fact-based news outlets but are, in fact, partisan propaganda operations. At least a half-dozen of these operate in Wisconsin. When critics ask why the Journal Sentinel “censors” the news by not publishing stories that make the front page of The Epoch Times, I explain that unlike that newspaper, we’re not published by the Falun Gong, a religious cult based in China. Some had no idea; others don’t care so long as the stories reflect their opinions.
Local reporting key to spotlight, solve problems
When French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville set out almost 200 years ago to describe the American experiment in democracy to his European peers, he wrote: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
You don’t have to spend much time working for the free press established by our nation’s founders to witness first-hand just how America repairs her faults.
Independent reporters shine a light on a problem for all to see. Wherever possible, they also report about successful ways that others are addressing similar challenges. Once a large number of citizens become aware of the problem, and see a better pathway, they demand improvements from their government officials, their political representatives, their community institutions.
Without calls for improvement from an informed citizenry, things generally stay the same — and problems often get progressively worse.
Here are just a few examples of how this kind of reporting serves our community.
After reporting about a number of fatal electrical fires in Milwaukee, where no one was held to account, we hired a master electrician to inspect a scientifically selected sample of homes. In “Wires & Fires,” reporters Raquel Rutledge, John Diedrich and Daphne Chen exposed the invisible danger of flawed wiring behind the walls in four out of five rental homes in Milwaukee’s oldest and poorest neighborhoods. Since it published, the Common Council has been looking for ways to resurrect rental home safety inspections — inspections that landlords in the Legislature dismantled with a state law taking away local control. A neighborhood program has been launched to educate folks on how to spot problems and get them fixed. The Legislature is looking at requiring insurance for rental properties, which would lead to investigations into the cause of electrical fires and expose owners to legal liability if they fail to maintain safe residences. And some property owners acted quickly to repair faulty wiring in buildings our reporters examined.
That investigation also led to one of our biggest partnership projects this year – “The Landlord and the Tenant,” which appeared as a 10-page special section in the Nov. 20 Sunday paper. Raquel Rutledge from the Journal Sentinel and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica produced an insightful story revealing a profound injustice in the wake of a fatal housefire. A mother who made a terrible mistake, due to her own upbringing, is in prison and will remain in prison for years to come. Meanwhile, no one has been held accountable for the fire itself, sparked by substandard wiring behind the walls of this rental home.
In all my years in journalism, I’ve never seen a more profound response from our readers as to this story.
In this social media age of short attention spans, I just spent the last hour devouring every word of your investigation. I can't remember the last time I read a news story from top to bottom . . . This piece is a shining example of why investigative journalism is so important.
And:
Thank you and your colleagues for a powerful piece of research and your crystalline narrative of a winding, intricate subject. I cannot recall a more affecting piece of journalism in my long life of daily news reading. You laid so bare the distribution of wealth and power that I briefly hoped your exposé might bring about change in local government agencies. But then of course I realized that Mr. Brunner and the legions of local government employees who pretended to do their jobs have complete immunity from responsibility. But not immunity from shame, for what that’s worth.
Another example: One afternoon, health reporter Mark Johnson got a call from a doctor at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. The doctor had just saved a 5-day-old infant who had arrived by Flight to Life from a small hospital in Central Wisconsin. He was furious. The child had a rare genetic condition that should not be life threatening if diagnosed within 4 days. Every newborn in America has their heel pricked for a blood screening test shortly after birth to detect these genetic conditions. The tests are supposed to be sent within 48 hours to a lab for diagnosis. If that had happened in this case, the baby could have been treated with sugar water – sugar water! — and released from the hospital in good health.
“They’re batching! They’re doing it all over the place! You’ve got to stop it!” the doctor shouted.
Johnson had never heard of batching before. Neither had John Fauber, another health reporter with decades of experience. They began investigating. All over the country, they found state newborn screening lab sites warning medical professionals “DO NOT BATCH!”
It turned out that hospitals across the nation were holding onto newborn screening samples, sometimes for days, before shipping a “batch” of them together to the state lab — to save a little bit of money in overnight shipping or courier transportation costs. Worse, some state labs were closed on weekends and for three days in a row on holiday weekends. So, as our reporters found, a baby born with one of these conditions on a Tuesday in Colorado was a healthy, 19-month-old toddler. Another baby born with the same condition on a Friday before a holiday died. Investigative reporter Ellen Gabler and developer Allan Vestal joined the team and were able to get newborn screening information from more than 30 states.
They found that one state – Iowa — was doing newborn screening right. Iowa’s director of newborn screening made sure that every test from every hospital was delivered to the state lab in time to meet all medical standards, so that each genetic condition would be spotted within the crucial four-day window. Iowa also found that health insurance companies readily paid the $50 or so it cost to get the tests in on time. Iowa is a big state, with hospitals far away from the state lab. So when other states and hospital systems made excuses about budgets and logistics and how it was far more difficult than we realized, our reporters could respond: Well, Iowa does it. Their excuses evaporated. We built interactive data bases so people could look up newborn screening results from individual hospitals in all the states where we could get data.
The landscape changed overnight. Babies’ lives were saved immediately. When little Juniper Horrock’s life was saved the same week Utah put in a new screening delivery system in place, state health officials thanked the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
THIS is how America repairs her faults.
The day we published the story about Juniper, I heard with new ears the metaphors in a reading from the prophet Isaiah. For the first time, it occurred to me that this prophecy from 2,700 years ago is still in the process of being fulfilled.
The baby shall play by the viper’s den,
And the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.
They shall not harm or destroy on all my holy mountain;
For the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord
As water covers the sea.
Every time an antibiotic, a polio vaccine, a newborn screening test is developed to protect a child from deadly dangers, we take a step forward. Every time a more perfect union is formed to replace arrogant strongmen with public servants of good will, allowing lambs to live as equals under the law with wolves, we take another step up.
At our best, this is what we as reporters aim to do: Spread knowledge of better ways that help us respond, as a community, to lessen harm and improve lives.
I want to thank all the brilliant, hard-working journalists I've had the good fortune to work with through the years who shared this commitment to public service and continue to do so.
I want to thank our colleagues in printing, circulation and sales, as well as all the businesses and groups that have supported our efforts.
Finally, I want to thank our subscribers for embracing independent, evidence-based reporting. This work is kept alive by you. It has been a great privilege to serve you.
How to support journalism
There are many ways to support and participate in truth-seeking reporting that brings problems and potential solutions to light. To subscribe to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: jsonline.com/deal To give digital subscriptions to others: jsonline.com/gift To make a tax-deductible contribution to reporting that informs our democracy: jsonline.com/RFA To give us tips about problems worth investigating anywhere in Wisconsin: jsonline.com/tips To be part of civil, constructive, solutions-orientated commentary, analysis and gatherings: [email protected] contact our newsroom staff: jsonline.com/newsroom
George Stanley retired as editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and regional editor for the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin at the end of 2022.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: George Stanley's farewell column
