What can “folk theories of journalism” tell us about why
some people don’t trust us?
What can “folk theories of journalism” tell us about why
some people don’t trust us?
I love a good folk theory.
A
folk theory is “a belief based on received wisdom, rather
than concrete evidence, knowledge, or facts.” It’s a sibling to
“conventional wisdom,” a cousin to “old wives’ tale,” and
a next-door neighbor to “common sense.” A folk theory is, in
essence, the average person’s perception of how a complicated
system operates — what makes intuitive sense to them as a
somewhat-removed observer.
There are folk theories of consciousness, of
mind,
of
society, of emotions,
of
cyber-social systems, of
social change, of racism,
of behavior,
of physics, of
business cycles,
nondual enlightenment — there’s even a folk theory of
meetings. A folk theory is often contrasted with a (wonderfully
named) theory
theory.
My personal favorite is the folk theory of democracy, advanced
by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in their 2016 book
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive
Government (which I highly recommend). That one could be summed
up as “the version of democracy you were taught in civics class
in high school”:
In the conventional view, democracy begins with the voters.
Ordinary people have preferences about what their government should
do. They choose leaders who will do those things, or they enact
their preferences directly in referendums. In either case, what the
majority wants become government policy…
This way of thinking about democracy has passed into everyday
wisdom, not just in the United States but in a great many other
countries around the globe. It constitutes a kind of “folk
theory” of democracy, a set of accessible, appealing ideas
assuring people that they live under an ethically defensible form
of government that has their interests at heart.
Unfortunately, while the folk theory of democracy has flourished
as an ideal, its credibility has been severely undercut by a
growing body of scientific evidence presenting a different and
considerably darker view of democratic politics. That evidence
demonstrates that the great majority of citizens pay little
attention to politics. At election time, they are swayed by how
they feel about “the nature of the times,” especially the
current state of the economy, and by political loyalties typically
acquired in childhood.
These loyalties, not the facts of political life and government
policy, are the primary drivers of political behavior. Election
outcomes turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of
contemporary democratic theory. That is, elections are well
determined by powerful forces, but those forces are not the ones
that current theories of democracy believe should determine how
elections come out.
I find Achen and Bartels persuasive (which for me raises big
questions about how reporters and news organizations can be
maximally useful to a democracy), though there’s a
lively debate
about their views. But it’s pretty much undeniable that
there’s a major gap between the folk theory of democracy and its
reality.
So, after that windup…what’s the folk theory of
journalism?
That’s the subject of
this new paper just published in the journal Journalism
Studies. It’s by friends-of-Nieman-Lab Ruth Palmer, Benjamin Toff, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and it
tries to get at how folk theories of journalism align (or, more
often, don’t) with how journalists and media scholars view our
work.
And it’s a mirror image of Achen and Bartels’ dueling
visions of democracy. There, the folk theory is the idealistic one
and it’s the practitioners in the field who are the cynics. Here,
it’s the journalists who cling to idealism and the general public
that’s more likely to see something nefarious at work.
The paper’s abstract:
The idealized view of the press as an institution that operates
independently from private and political interests and tries to
hold power to account is central to many journalists’
self-conception and extensive academic scholarship on news. Yet
surveys find significant numbers of citizens reject such views
about the role of news in society.
This article draws on in-depth interviews with a strategic
sample of 83 news avoiders in Spain and the UK to investigate
“folk theories” about the relationship between news and
politics. Instead of believing in the watchdog ideal, many saw the
news media as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, actively
complicit with a distant and self-serving political and economic
establishment. Many saw the news not as bringing important subjects
to light, but as actively covering them up.
The difference between professional and scholarly theories that
stress the watchdog role on the one hand, and folk theories where
this notion is completely absent on the other, highlights the
specific cultural challenge journalism faces today. Cynicism about
the role of news in society poses a problem that transcends the
specific economic, political, and technological challenges that
currently preoccupy many journalism professionals and
institutions.
So it’s worth noting that this is look
I love a good folk theory.
A
folk theory is “a belief based on received wisdom, rather
than concrete evidence, knowledge, or facts.” It’s a sibling to
“conventional wisdom,” a cousin to “old wives’ tale,” and
a next-door neighbor to “common sense.” A folk theory is, in
essence, the average person’s perception of how a complicated
system operates — what makes intuitive sense to them as a
somewhat-removed observer.
There are folk theories of consciousness, of
mind,
of
society, of emotions,
of
cyber-social systems, of
social change, of racism,
of behavior,
of physics, of
business cycles,
nondual enlightenment — there’s even a folk theory of
meetings. A folk theory is often contrasted with a (wonderfully
named) theory
theory.
My personal favorite is the folk theory of democracy, advanced
by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in their 2016 book
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive
Government (which I highly recommend). That one could be summed
up as “the version of democracy you were taught in civics class
in high school”:
In the conventional view, democracy begins with the voters.
Ordinary people have preferences about what their government should
do. They choose leaders who will do those things, or they enact
their preferences directly in referendums. In either case, what the
majority wants become government policy…
This way of thinking about democracy has passed into everyday
wisdom, not just in the United States but in a great many other
countries around the globe. It constitutes a kind of “folk
theory” of democracy, a set of accessible, appealing ideas
assuring people that they live under an ethically defensible form
of government that has their interests at heart.
Unfortunately, while the folk theory of democracy has flourished
as an ideal, its credibility has been severely undercut by a
growing body of scientific evidence presenting a different and
considerably darker view of democratic politics. That evidence
demonstrates that the great majority of citizens pay little
attention to politics. At election time, they are swayed by how
they feel about “the nature of the times,” especially the
current state of the economy, and by political loyalties typically
acquired in childhood.
These loyalties, not the facts of political life and government
policy, are the primary drivers of political behavior. Election
outcomes turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of
contemporary democratic theory. That is, elections are well
determined by powerful forces, but those forces are not the ones
that current theories of democracy believe should determine how
elections come out.
I find Achen and Bartels persuasive (which for me raises big
questions about how reporters and news organizations can be
maximally useful to a democracy), though there’s a
lively debate
about their views. But it’s pretty much undeniable that
there’s a major gap between the folk theory of democracy and its
reality.
So, after that windup…what’s the folk theory of
journalism?
That’s the subject of
this new paper just published in the journal Journalism
Studies. It’s by friends-of-Nieman-Lab Ruth Palmer, Benjamin Toff, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and it
tries to get at how folk theories of journalism align (or, more
often, don’t) with how journalists and media scholars view our
work.
And it’s a mirror image of Achen and Bartels’ dueling
visions of democracy. There, the folk theory is the idealistic one
and it’s the practitioners in the field who are the cynics. Here,
it’s the journalists who cling to idealism and the general public
that’s more likely to see something nefarious at work.
The paper’s abstract:
The idealized view of the press as an institution that operates
independently from private and political interests and tries to
hold power to account is central to many journalists’
self-conception and extensive academic scholarship on news. Yet
surveys find significant numbers of citizens reject such views
about the role of news in society.
This article draws on in-depth interviews with a strategic
sample of 83 news avoiders in Spain and the UK to investigate
“folk theories” about the relationship between news and
politics. Instead of believing in the watchdog ideal, many saw the
news media as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, actively
complicit with a distant and self-serving political and economic
establishment. Many saw the news not as bringing important subjects
to light, but as actively covering them up.
The difference between professional and scholarly theories that
stress the watchdog role on the one hand, and folk theories where
this notion is completely absent on the other, highlights the
specific cultural challenge journalism faces today. Cynicism about
the role of news in society poses a problem that transcends the
specific economic, political, and technological challenges that
currently preoccupy many journalism professionals and
institutions.
So it’s worth noting that this is looking at news avoiders, a
group
Palmer and Toff have been interested in for some time. Here,
“news avoiders” are defined as people who say that they access
news less than once a month. (You, Nieman Lab reader, are not a
news avoider, even if you took Twitter off your phone.) We’re
talking about the bottom 3 percent in Spain and the bottom 8
percent of the U.K. in terms of news consumption.
People avoid news for all sorts of reasons — some say it makes
them feel sad, some have no interest in politics, and some just
don’t see it as a productive or enjoyable use of their time.
…news avoiders offer stark evidence of something that is
always true of folk theories of journalism, but that is easy to
forget: peoples’ ideas and attitudes about the news media are
shaped not only by exposure to news products, but also by other
influences, including second-hand information, elite rhetoric, and
immersion in a particular climate of opinion about the press.
Those interviewed in this study often articulated well-defined
attitudes about news despite rarely or never having consumed it
regularly. While it may be tempting to dismiss their ideas about
journalism as unfounded, it is still essential to understand them,
because folk theories shape how people engage with news
irrespective of whether or not journalists and scholars consider
those theories well-founded.
Let’s run through some of those theories.
Politics is awful and politicians are awful, so why in the world
should I read news about it?
If we apply a broad definition of politics to include the
politics of everyday life, much of what we discussed in the
interviews could be considered political — for example, many
interviewees expressed strong views on issues such as crime,
terrorism, immigration, or unemployment, and some were quite active
in their communities. But even civically engaged interviewees
themselves usually did not think of their opinions or actions as
political…
…most interviewees reserved the terms “politics” and
“political” to describe what professional politicians do,
usually at the national level, and seemingly far from daily
life…Many associated politics with bickering among political
professionals, or, especially in Spain, what they described as
political ineptitude and corruption.
Given that interviewees thought of politics in that way, it is
perhaps unsurprising that nearly all of them said they were
uninterested in politics, expressing an aversion that ranged from
indifference to emphatic cynicism. The vast majority did not
identify with any political party. Some had simply never paid much
attention to politics, while others self-described as apolitical,
or said they were fed up with the whole system, offering comments
like Spaniard Manuel’s concise, “All the parties are the same
shit with different names.”
In theory, people with an aversion to politics could value
journalism for holding power to account even more than political
enthusiasts, but we found no evidence of that. The lack of interest
and even disdain many felt for politics seemed to bleed into their
feelings about news and vice versa. In fact, far from valuing news
because of its political coverage, interviewees often said that
they avoided news in part because it covered politics, offering
observations like Ryan’s (UK) blunt, “I hate politics. It’s
probably one of the reasons I don’t read the news, to be
honest.”
For these people who have negative feelings about their
nation’s politics, they associate news about politics with anger,
sadness, or feeling emotionally drained. News and politics merges
in their mind into one giant ouroboros of negativity. (One
interviewee: “I don’t really know a journalist. In my head,
I’m going journalist, politician, I don’t know.”)
I can’t do anything to make politics better, so why bother
reading about it?
This is the concept political scientists call political
efficacy — the belief that your government is responsive and
that your political actions can have an impact.
…even the few participants who said they knew politics could
ultimately affect them felt they could not affect politics, so what
was the point in following political news? Many made observations
similar to Emily’s (UK) that, when it came to politics, “Nobody
can actually change it. Because at the end of the day, us little
people, it doesn’t count what us little people think. It’s
whatever the government decides to do. That’s the important
thing”…
While some interviewees seemed resigned to feeling they could do
little to influence politics, others found it frustrating —
almost as though political news coverage were rubbing their noses
in issues over which they had no control. Many saw avoiding
political news as part of a larger strategy for managing their
emotions. Rather than engage with news that would leave them
feeling sad about the state of the world and frustrated about their
own impotence to change it, they chose to conserve their emotional
energy to focus on their own problems.
Trashy journalists just want to sell papers/boost ratings/generate
clicks/make a buck, and they’ll write whatever they think will do
it.
Especially in the U.K. interviews, some news avoiders didn’t
jump to politics when describing the news they were skipping. They
instead thought of British tabloids, “which they associated with
grisly crime news, sports, and celebrity gossip”:
With this as their default idea of what news was like, it is
perhaps unsurprising that English news avoiders consistently
complained that news was too sensationalistic and negative, which
they saw as a symptom of a profit-hungry press. As they explained,
news outlets were commercial enterprises, so they could not be
trusted to present the unvarnished truth — they twisted and
exaggerated as a matter of course, to “sell stories”…
This general impression of news coverage as massaged and
sensationalized to maximize profit encompassed not only celebrity
and crime news, but also political news on the occasion it came up
in the discussion. Consistent with their tendency to think of
journalism and politics as overlapping spheres, interviewees
described politicians, too, as profit-seekers. For example,
[interviewee] Amelia said she did not understand what the different
political parties stood for, but that she assumed, “they all kind
of want to do the same thing, which is get rich.”
Some shifted from cynical to conspiratorial, placing the media
as colluders in a system of “dark forces [who] were deliberately
hiding or twisting information to keep citizens ignorant or
distracted from what powerful people were really doing.” (Like,
you know, fall
the pedophile cannibalism.)
News is all just political spin for whatever party the reporter or
the outlet likes.
This was a more strongly held view in the researchers’ Spanish
interviews. “What I do see is that the journalism is there but
it’s manipulated,” said Miguel. “I mean, you watch a news
broadcast on Channel One, for example, and they tell you one thing,
and later you watch Telecinco, and they give it a different focus.
Or if you read El Mundo it’s one thing, and if you read El Pais
it’s another.” Or here’s Sofia: “All the news channels and
the newspapers show information in their favor, according to their
politics or their way of thinking, so in the end you’ll never get
a ‘virgin’ piece of news. They can manipulate it however they
want.”
(This is also a common view for Americans who think specifically
of the cable news networks when they think about “news.”)
“I think the media covers up a lot of things — that because
of ideology or whatever they cover up a lot of things so maybe you
only get half the information, you never get all the
information,” Jose said. “I think they keep some things for
their own benefit, because the government doesn’t want it known
or different people don’t want it known.”
Now, if you’re a stubborn idealist like me about the
importance of good journalism, you probably want to scream at these
people. (“Money-hungry profit-seekers don’t cover night cops in
Akron, Amelia.”) You probably want to bring up all the great
things that high-quality reporting has accomplished in the world
— the corruption exposed, the wrongdoers arrested, the
downtrodden lifted up, the secrets revealed. But these folks
weren’t really having it:
On the rare occasions when interviews turned to something akin
to watchdog journalism, participants were dismissive, usually
citing it as another example of the kind of news they found tedious
and overly negative. Adam conceded that reporting about
politicians’ finances was “an important subject,” but added
that “I’m sick of hearing about it, cause it’s been dragging
on so long”…Jessica gave stories about politicians using
government money to buy swimming pools as an example of the
unnecessary, bleak news she’d like to see less of, explaining
that it “put the attention on all the wrong people, rather than
highlighting all the good in the world.”
Researchers showed a number of their U.K. interviewees a BBC
article on a “fairly typical watchdog topic,” a look at the
finances of then-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Their responses
didn’t seem to give reporters any credit for their work.
“I just look at it, and I just think to myself, I should be
interested, because it’s telling me that he’s not paying enough
tax. But then, I feel, deep down, whoever is writing it, are they
trying to create a witch hunt against him? Why is it being written?
Why is it being exposed?…I question why somebody has written
that, what’s the ulterior motive to somebody writing something
like that.”
Not only did interviewees appear not to value the BBC’s close
scrutiny of a politician’s finances; if anything, some, like
Nicole, saw it as inappropriate for a news outlet to pursue this
kind of story. They seemed more suspicious of the news
organization’s motives than of the politician’s. Perhaps their
suspicion stemmed partly from an inclination to defend the Labour
leader, but it was consistent with a broader belief, expressed
throughout the interviews, that news organizations were primarily
motivated by their own interests, not public service.
Remember: These news avoiders are really on the extreme fringe
when it comes to news consumption; they’re not anywhere close to
a perfect sample of the broader public. But I imagine every
journalist has seem some version of these “folk theories” in
their readers, friends, or family. Most journalists I know hold the
idea of service to the public at the center of their identity —
but large swaths of our audience see us very differently. (If
you’ve been around a comments section on the internet in the past
two decades, this likely isn’t news.)
A basic recognition that news operates as a separate sphere from
political power is a pre- condition for the credibility of the
press’s watchdog role. We did not find that interviewees believed
that separation existed. They did not subscribe to the watchdog
ideal or believe that news media actually held power to account on
behalf of the public.
Instead, they offered up their own alternative folk theories,
which described journalism in very different terms: They saw
journalism and politics as embroiled in a single system of distant
elites out mainly to serve their own interests. They saw news
coverage about politics as relentlessly negative and pointless,
with little connection to their lives. Rather than seeing news
about political officials as serving the public interest, most
viewed such coverage cynically, as primarily motivated by a
single-minded pursuit of profit, as in the UK, or partisan
political gain, as in Spain. Ultimately, they felt more
disempowered by news than empowered by it to make any meaningful
intervention in politics.
Is there anything we can do about it? Palmer, Toff, and Nielsen
note that many of these folk theories — as folk theories tend to
be — are based less on first-person experiences with news than on
a sort of collective wisdom (“wisdom”), which can limit the
effectiveness of any potential remedies:
Many of our interviewees had little direct experience with news,
yet they “knew” they could not trust it, or found it boring, or
that it was part of a shady system intended to hide important
matters from them.
Our interest here is not whether these alternative folk theories
are accurate or not. In terms of their consequences it frankly does
not matter whether they are true or how they were formed. Folk
theories provide toolkits for making sense of the world and
strategies for acting in it.
If people see journalism as part of a powerful establishment
rather than as independently holding that establishment to account,
they will engage with news accordingly. That is true whether such
beliefs are primarily shaped by firsthand experience, hearsay,
political rhetoric, or immersion in a negative climate of opinion
about the press — or whether scholars and journalists think their
beliefs are well-founded or not…
No doubt some journalists and journalisms should not be trusted
and are not, in practice, watchdogs. However, whether or not they
are deserved, watchdog-skeptical attitudes can be understood as a
point of weakness in the news media’s relationship to the general
public. A news media that the public perceives as less trustworthy
than politicians themselves, or in the same untrustworthy camp, is
vulnerable to accusations by populist figures who lump the news
media into a group with political and economic elites and claim for
themselves the role of public defender. Indeed, our findings
suggest that news avoiders could be particularly receptive to such
appeals, especially if they are made through alternative media
channels. Although they did not yet embrace populist movements,
news avoiders we interviewed already more or less embraced that
populist view of the news media.
Have a good weekend!