The media won't get less politicized. News consumers must get smarter. | Keith Whittington

The media won't get less politicized. News consumers must get smarter.

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The internet is parasitic on traditional media sources, says Keith Whittington. Traditional news outlets do the hard reporting to generate the facts and notable opinions that other outlets respond to.

The greatest challenge to truth in journalism is that social media presents news stories out of context; we no longer see news among other news articles, and we may only ever see the headline without the detail and nuance required.

Media institutions are working to tackle these challenges, but until then it is our responsibility as citizens and consumers to get smarter about how we navigate news feeds and the hyper-partisan press.

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KEITH WHITTINGTON:

Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of "Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech", as well as "Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present".

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TRANSCRIPT:

KEITH WHITTINGTON: Traditional media outlets remain extraordinarily important to how we communicate and develop ideas. They've not been completely displaced by Facebook and Twitter and the like. In lots of ways, the internet is parasitic on traditional media sources because it's those traditional news outlets that are doing the hard reporting, for example, that generates the facts that other people are responding to. They still generate a lot of the sustained and sophisticated development of opinion and development of viewpoints that others wind up responding to elsewhere. So we have not yet reached a point where I think the traditional media is irrelevant to our public conversation, but they're certainly challenged in new ways.

And in part they're challenged because there is new competition, that there are other people and other mechanisms for communicating to a mass audience than what we've traditionally relied on with newspapers and with broadcast media or cable news and the like. But they're also challenged by the way information is conveyed in a modern environment. People consume the news differently than they once did. So for example, even if they're consuming news that was generated by a newspaper, they may not be reading it in a newspaper; it's coming packaged very differently. They may be coming across it through a Facebook feed, for example, where the thing they're most immediately encountering is not the news article in the context of lots of other news articles as they turn the page, they're scanning down the entire page. Instead, what they're encountering is a headline. And the headline either makes them turn away or draws them into the article. In many cases, the headline is all they know about the article because they never actually click through and read the more detailed discussion in the news article itself, for example. But instead, all they know is the headline. And as a consequence, I think, traditional media has been struggling to figure out how to convey the crucial parts of the information they need to convey in the headline itself. They want the headline to be enticing so it will draw people into the larger story, but they also have to very careful that the headline is not misleading, so the headline really does convey the core point of the underlying information so that the people who, in fact, walk away with nothing more than the headline are not getting a misimpression about what's being conveyed underneath.

That has attracted a lot of attention lately in terms of thinking about misleading headlines and misleading statements. For example, if a public figure or a government official says something that's not true, it's traditionally the case the media will often include that information directly in a headline itself, knowing that the reader will then dive into the article and the article will lay out the context for it. It might explain what's mistaken...

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