In 2008 I delivered a keynote at a conference on law and journalism.  The mood among the journalists present was one of palpable contempt for blogging and “citizen journalism.”  You  would think we were witnessing the undermining of Western civilization at the hands of a rabble of pajama-wearing, due diligence-ignoring amateur (God forbid!) know-nothing ideologues.   During the post-talk Q&A  I felt compelled to tell the audience  that I was quite happy with my news choices and I sought online alternatives in large part because I had lost faith in traditional media’s role as the fourth estate.  This new study  from several Harvard students at the Kennedy School puts a fine point on that loss of faith.  You can read it here (pdf) but the  abstract is devastating:

“The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

While there is plenty of need to discuss the business models under which proper journalism can thrive (that was the purpose of my keynote two years ago)  it would be good for those in the journalism business to be thinking about how to maintain public credibility by focusing on the purpose of journalism rather than just the business of it…