Our Government Our Election

Objective
Students will learn about legacy media’s role in scrutinising government.

Teacher's Background Information: A Brief History of Legacy Media Journalism
We expect journalism to be neutral, objective, and non-partisan. For the most part, much of the legacy media we consume today—newspapers like the Globe and Mail or the Regina Leader-Post and radio and television networks like the CBC or Global—do their best to live up to these standards. Their journalists are trained professionals who follow codes of conduct, and their work is overseen by editors who do their best to see that their journalism lives up to the highest standards.

However, the ideal neutral, objective, and nonpartisan journalism is not consistent with the field’s history. Journalism has a long history of partisanship. In fact, being highly partisan was the original purpose of most journalism.

At the dawn of the 20th century, most cities in North America had several newspapers. Each newspaper would put forth the owner’s political views. Smaller centres were not much different, except that there were not as many newspapers.

Early into the 1900s, the nature of newspapers began to transform. Owners began to focus on profits. That is, the owners’ politics took a back seat to making money off the newspaper.

To facilitate this profits-first change, newspaper owners looked for ways to reach the widest audience possible. Papers began to merge so there would be less competition. Meanwhile, publishers toned down the partisan rhetoric. By reaching more people and having lessheated, less-slanted news, papers became more appealing to advertisers. At the sametime, because there were fewer newspapers being published but each remaining paper sold more copies, the owners could charge more for advertising.

For owners, the model worked. Profits soared. For readers there was some benefit too: less-heated, wider political debate in the papers helped people see things from a more moderate perspective. When radio and television entered the scene, they too followed this model of news coverage.

Middle-of-the-road news for profit was not perfect. The ideological diversity found in late-19th century news was gone. Upton Sinclair critiqued the system in his 1919 book The Brass Check. Sinclair exposed how the few newspapers that were left simply promoted profit-centred values and desires.

Owners recognised that their newspapers needed to appear neutral if they wanted the public to trust what they were reading. Thus, a push began to create schools of journalism. The idea was that trained editors and journalists would be held to professional standards. Professional journalists would work independently of the owners, hence they could be trusted to create news that was neutral, objective, and non-partisan.

However, media historian Robert McChesney believes that complete objectivity in the news is merely an ideal, something most journalists aspire to but something that can never be fully achieved. As he wrote in The Political Economy of Media,"over time it has become clear that there was one problem with the theory of professional journalism, an insurmountable one at that. The claim that it was possible to provide neutral and objective news was suspect, if not entirely bogus. Decision making is an inescapable part of the journalism process, and some values have to be promoted when deciding why one story rates front-page treatment while another is ignored. This does not mean that some journalism cannot be more nonpartisan or more accurate than others; it certainly does not mean that nonpartisan and accurate journalism should not have a prominent role to play in a democratic society. It only means that journalism cannot actually be neutral or objective, and unless one acknowledges that, it is impossible to detect the values at play that determine what becomes news, and what does not" (p. 30).

Legacy media today performs a valuable journalistic function, with news created by trained professionals who are held to high standards. However, there are values at play in all news, which may have some influence over even the most objective journalism.

Procedure
1. Play the Whisper Game to consider the shortcomings of second-hand information. Have a student write down a statement, then whisper it to their neighbour. The next student will whisper it to their neighbour, and so on. Compare what the final student heard to what was originally said. Use this to illustrate that news coverage is second-hand information.

2. Read Legacy Media and Political Coverage.
KEY QUESTIONS

• What kinds of Saskatchewan-specific legacy news sources are available to your community?
• What are the qualities and weaknesses of legacy media?

3. Read Editorials and Opinions.
KEY QUESTIONS

• Editorial stances and the opinions of media owners—in theory—are not supposed to impact the work of journalists. Do you think this is the case in practice?
• Should media outlets that offer opinions be obliged to provide a balanced diversity of opinions?

Note that the summary activities in Legacy Media and Political Coverage and Editorials and Opinions will be returned to in Lesson 2.5, with students to be asked to consider the role of online conversation in relation to the articles they explore.

4. Summarise topics of this lesson with a wider class discussion of the question:
Do you trust the news offered by legacy media?

FURTHER EXPLORATION
5. For an in-depth case study of the media’s role in shaping common sense see “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Damage and the Reporting” in The PLEA: 70 Years of the Bomb.