A bit late but if I may continue my first post (and apologies for the length):
First, about The Globe
paying for pictures of Toronto Mayor Ford holding a crack pipe:
The editor of The Globe said: "We paid $10,000 for a series of photographs. Toronto is the financial capital of this G8 country and the sixth-biggest government in Canada. Paralysis in Toronto is bad for the country. The mayor is supposed to be the guardian of his city. The photographs we published are a price worth paying."
That's right folks, The Globe paid for the photos to save Canada. Feel free to start singing the national anthem.
The real reason it paid for the pictures is that the news media today have little credibility. The Globe needed the photography to prop up the text article about Ford.
In the old days, whatever TV news anchors Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Harvey Kirck or Knowlton Nash said was taken as gospel. Today,
not so much. The news media have squandered away their credibility over the past 20 years.
The Toronto Star trashed Rob Ford every. single. day. for three years before the crack scandal became public. The newspaper cried "wolf" every day for three years. When the wolf finally did appear, 51% of the public did not believe the Star.
A newspaper is only as good as its credibility and half the public wasn't buying what the Star and other news media were selling. With a failure like that, heads should've rolled - publishers and senior editors should've been fired. But nothing happened. That alone is very telling.
Sports teams readily fire coaches and general managers when things go bad. Corporations fire presidents and CEOs when stock prices or sales fall. But newspapers do nothing as their credibility bottoms out.
[Edit - June 5: The Toronto Star now tells potential customers that they can be confident that the Star is more credible than the Internet. - Now that's reassuring.]
There are at least four reasons why credibility has been lost:
1) The Internet. Everything published by a news outlet can be fact-checked and verified online. It's very easy to see which newspapers are playing fast and loose with the facts.
2) Cutbacks. Newspapers seemingly have no quality control whatsoever and they don't seem to care. What other industry allows this?
It's not just the parade of typos and grammar mistakes. It's headlines that don't match the story, wrong facts in the story, totally unverified science/technology/health stories, pictures that don't match the story, missing photo captions, captions that don't match the photo, captions that have wrong or missing IDs. All of this happens every single day in all daily newspapers here in Toronto.
Credibility comes from people, not computers, not brand names. People trust people they know. Yet every newspaper has been - and still is - laying off their only source of credibility, their experienced employees.
Note that The Globe, and other newspapers, need photography to boost their credibility. People trust editorial photography more than anything else. Sure, pictures can be faked and this is why papers have to be extremely careful about the pictures and sources they use. But photography is the most valuable asset to a news outlet. And yet all newspapers are cutting back on photographers and photography. Again, this is very telling.
3) Meaningless and superficial coverage that news outlets try to pawn off as "journalism." Perhaps this is related to cutbacks.
For example, last week all the Toronto news media jumped on "a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse" of Mayor Ford as recorded by city hall security videos. What did these videos show?
Ford having trouble opening a locked door and asking a security guard to open it for him; Ford posing for pictures with passersby in front of city hall; Ford trusting some people he just met by jumping into a cab with them (as one Toronto paper pointed out: you should not be a trusting person when in a big city like Toronto); and Ford refusing to wear a hat with a beer logo on it. These security videos were front-page news and led TV newscasts.
Readers know what's relevant (to them). Unfortunately, newspapers don't.
4) The news media go to great lengths to try to trick the public.
In the old days, editorial and advertising were like oil and water. The two were always separate. Any time an advertisement looked too editorial, the paper added an "Advertisement" disclaimer. But that stopped years ago.
Several newspapers today either use no disclaimer or they use something like "Special Feature" hoping the reader will be fooled into thinking that the advertisement is editorial content from the paper. Some papers have their editorial staff produce
advertorial or "branded" content and that content uses the employees' newspaper byline.
Some newspapers put ads *inside* an editorial article. For example, a photo and caption *inside* a story have nothing to do with that story because the photo and caption are just an unrelated advertisement.
Remember when newspapers were about serving the public not the advertisers?
A newspaper's job is, or at least was, to provide some sort of public service by producing useful and timely information. By doing this, a paper could build an audience. This audience could then be "rented" to advertisers. Today, newspapers simply sell out their audience.
And speaking of public service, it's been over a month since Mayor Rob Ford decided to seek rehabilitation. During this time period, the Toronto media have failed yet again with their shallow, meaningless coverage.
Based on reading three daily newspapers and watching two TV news channels, none have bothered to serve the public by producing any stories explaining what "rehab" is, what it can and can't do, what happens in "rehab", what it costs, how it can fail, etc.
Imagine how many people could have been helped by such information. Imagine how journalism could've once again been about public service.
But it won't happen.
The news stories are already written. The news media need Ford to be a villain not a victim. Any sympathetic stories about rehabilitation programs and interviews with folks who have gone through such programs risk creating sympathy for the devil. But unbeknownst to the news media, Ford is not the devil or at least he's not a self-made devil.
It's common for newspapers to create an enemy, a crisis, or a devil to help a story "move along." The target is often a political party or politician, a religious group, a special interest group, a rival sports team, or a cause such as building new subways, hosting an Olympics-type event, etc.
The process of creating an enemy ("Them") and putting your readers into a group ("Us") can be explained by Tajfel and Turner's
Social Identity Theory.A "Them vs. Us" battle can be beneficial, (e.g. to help a newspaper build its reader base), if properly implemented. In fact, this is what the Toronto Sun unknowingly did through the 1980s. But newspapers don't have a clue about this.
Newspapers unintentionally and unknowingly take advantage of Social Identity Theory when they try to push their own agendas. But since their use of that theory is done accidentally, the papers' efforts are inefficient and often wasted.
For example, three years ago, the Toronto Star campaigned against Rob Ford. But its efforts actually pushed voters to Ford the same way it inadvertently pushed voters to (former mayor) Mel Lastman about a decade earlier when the paper was supporting another candidate. The Star didn't create a "Them vs Us" but rather an "Us vs Us" which always fails.
It's been said that you get the government you deserve and that's what happened here in Toronto. It didn't just happen 3-1/2 years ago with Ford's election as mayor but rather it's been happening for almost 20 years. Ford's election as mayor was just the "highlight" of this process.
One could argue that the media is part of this failure as the news media has failed to educate the public and get them involved in the political process. This is (was) one of a newspaper's main purposes of existence. A decline in the quality of journalism directly affects the local public.
If you think blaming the local news media for a "bad" election is far-fetched, look what happened after the
Cincinnati Post closed (link to PDF) in 2007. That city suffered lower voter turnout to municipal elections and fewer new municipal candidates. That's exactly what's been happening in Toronto where voter turnout has been falling since the mid-90s and the same candidates got re-elected over and over again and nothing changed, nothing got done.
(Interestingly enough, the 2010 election of Ford had the highest voter turnout in over two(?) decades.)
When a paper fails in its duty to the public, it shouldn't blame politicians like Rob Ford for getting elected or blame the public for casting the votes. But that's exactly what some newspapers in Toronto have been doing. Instead, these papers should look in a mirror.
Topic: Not all it's cracked up to be (Read 1747 times)