Have You Hugged Your Watchdog Today?

The journalist has long occupied a paradoxical position in American society.  None of us wants one "snooping around" our own home or office, but we eagerly lap up what they uncover when they get into other people's business.

Ah, reporters! You can't live with 'em, and you can't live without 'em!

The love-hate relationship we have with the media says something about us and our double standards, but, more important, it says something about the ideal role for journalism in our world. We need it — a certain brand of it anyway — more than many of us might realize.

A Peak Inside the Newsroom

In full disclosure, I studied journalism in college and worked in the field for three years before heading off to graduate school to study English (my other major in college).  Because of this experience, I feel more of a kinship with journalism than I do with any other field besides higher education, where I wound up spending most of my career.

Even after I became a literature professor, journalism continued finding its way into my work. I wrote a book about the intersections of literature and journalism in antebellum America.  (You'll never guess the title.  It's called Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America.  I wanted to call it The Story and the Truth, but the publisher pushed for a title that would come up in Amazon searches.)

After I published that book (my first), I continued in that vein, conceiving and editing a collection of essays called Literature and Journalism: Inspirations, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert and writing articles on the intersections of the two fields in the works of Theodore Dreiser and Rebecca Harding Davis.  Even after I became a university vice chancellor and then a chancellor, I wrote and published a weekly campus newsletter called Take Five.  You can take the boy out of the newsroom, but you can't take the newsroom out of the boy.

Because of all this personal and professional experience, I can't be totally objective about journalism (although I think I can be objective when I'm working in journalism, as I was trained to be in J school).

What I can do is reflect on what I learned and what I saw during my days in the field — not merely to wax nostalgically, but also to illuminate a world that is probably largely a closed box to most of you. My aim is not to idealize journalism or journalists, but to make a case for the value of news reporting when it's done responsibly.

The Paradox of Those Prying Eyes

Let's return to that paradox.  The reason our opinion of reporters changes when they are coming at us instead of merely running out in front of us to "get the scoop" (as my high school journalism teacher Julie Kukolla used to say) is simple.  Traditionally, journalists are supposed to be "watchdogs" — that is, they are supposed to keep a close eye on the world around them, especially the goings-on in institutions such as government and big business, so that they can alert the rest of us when something is amiss.

This makes perfect sense to most of us, I think.  We want to know if a politician is taking bribes instead of purely representing our interests or if a corporation is selling us something dangerous. As citizens in a democracy, we can vote against crooked politicians.  As consumers, we can vote with our wallets.  Journalism, in short, empowers us.

Why, then, do we get nervous when reporters come "snooping around"?  If we want them scooping, we should let them go snooping, right?  After all, if we are honest, responsible individuals and businesses, we have nothing to hide.

Here's my first peek into the closed box.  Finding something "wrong" has become a powerful, even a singular motivation for many reporters.  When I was a freshman in the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University Bloomington back in 1985, my buddy Phil Otto and I took a class in the history of journalism.  Our professor was a lively fellow who, as I recall, took special relish in quoting Wilbur Storey, who said, "It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell."

Now, I happen to think that there is a line between exposing wrongdoing for the benefit of the broader world and raising hell just for kicks, but knowing exactly where that line lies is sometimes more difficult than it might seem.  (This is probably at least part of the reason that we also took a class that taught us journalistic ethics.)  A classic case is the matter of a politician's private indiscretions.  Should a journalist report on, say, a politician's adultery?  The reporter who does might argue that the private affair reflects a weakness with broader implications and thus merits exposure to voters, but it's easy to see that breaking this kind of story also comes with some personal satisfaction.  The newshound who has sniffed it out not only has raised some hell, but also has scored some points with his or her employer and readers.  The snoop got a scoop!

All of this is to say that we have good reason to be a little worried when reporters seem to be on our scent.  Even if we are doing nothing nefarious — I'm not, and I hope you aren't either — a green, irresponsible, or overly eager reporter might misconstrue something and turn it into a story.

The Kind of Journalists We Want

Even if some of them get carried away, we need journalists to be our watchdogs. Most of us, busy with our own jobs and personal lives, don't have the time, expertise, or access to investigate questionable activities, so we need journalists to do the snooping and scooping for us. Imagine a world where people in power could operate without watchdogs watching them. Actually, you don't have to imagine such a world; just consider these words from Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved in the remote area of Maryland's Eastern Shore:

Public opinion is, indeed, an unfailing restraint upon the cruelty and barbarity of masters, overseers. and slave-drivers, whenever and wherever it can reach them; but there are certain secluded and out-of-the way places, even in the state of Maryland, seldom visited by a single ray of healthy public sentiment — where slavery, wrapt in its own congenial, midnight darkness, can, and does, develop all its malign and shocking characteristics; where it can be indecent without shame, cruel without shuddering, and murderous without apprehension or fear of exposure.

Douglass wrote these words for his book My Bondage and My Freedom, and they clearly refer to slavery, but the message can be applied to the value of exposing any wrongdoing in any era.

We want journalists who are driven to expose cruelty, barbarity, crime, and all other kinds of illegal, unethical, and destructive behavior because they are the best watchdogs. Here again I think I can provide some insight into the newsroom.

In my experience, dated though it is, I never thought of my journalistic colleagues as typically partisan, at least not in their coverage of the news. They may have belonged to a political party, but I don't remember ever knowing which one.

My sense of mainstream journalism back then — and of much sound journalism even today — is that the point (and the drive) is not to promote one party or one ideology, but to question everything, not for the sake of being difficult, but for the purpose of exposing problems so that they can be corrected. That can be really annoying if you happen to be the person being questioned (or someone somehow affiliated with this person or the person's organization), but it's necessary for the kind of world that I think most of us want.

All of us, in fact, are better when others question us. (Parents, think of the times that your children called you on something you said or did around the house, and you realized they were right.) Actually, we all could do a lot to improve ourselves if we were better at questioning ourselves, but our brains are subject to some often counterproductive cognitive biases. I will take up some of these biases, beginning with mere exposure effect, in future columns.

For now, make a point to hug a journalist — but make sure you're squeaky clean first.

A final note: The publisher's idea of playing to Amazon searches does not seem to have worked so well.  Because I couldn't remember the subtitle of my second book, I ran an Amazon search for "literature and journalism," and my first book does not show up in the first 100 results.  I guess the algorithm was confused by such similar-sounding titles as The Art and Craft of Feature Writing and A NewsHound's Guide to Student Journalism.  To be fair, I wrote that book more than 15 years ago, and I suppose Amazon has changed a bit since then.  Some of the titles that beat out my books were "Sponsored" results, including this one: Turn Words Into Wealth: 7 Ways to Make 7 Figures as a Thought Leader.  It came in just above my second book (No. 41 on the results list).  Maybe that's a sign that this retirement gig I have planned is a sound one.  As my core readers, you can help me go viral and turn my own "Words into Wealth" by telling everyone you know about Mark Canada, "Thought Leader."