{"id":338882,"date":"2018-09-24T15:29:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T19:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=338882"},"modified":"2018-09-27T15:19:36","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T19:19:36","slug":"fake-news-whats-a-journalistic-expert-in-a-social-media-age-338882","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/fake-news-whats-a-journalistic-expert-in-a-social-media-age-338882\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a journalistic \u2018expert\u2019 in a social media age?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Awash in the free-for-all public discourse of the internet era, it\u2019s easy to feel nostalgia for national news broadcasts that authoritatively summed up the day\u2019s events. As iconic CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite used to intone nightly, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

But maybe it wasn\u2019t that way, after all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that since the election of 2016, we\u2019ve entered a new era of fake news\u2014I\u2019m highly skeptical of that argument,\u201d says journalist Nicholas Lemann, the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism at Columbia University\u2019s School of Journalism. For one thing, it assumes that there was a bygone era of \u201creal news.\u201d And it also posits a direct relationship between news coverage and voter behavior.<\/p>\n

\"Nick
Nicholas Lemann’s lecture, \u201cAre Journalists Experts? Does the Public Want Them to Be?\u201d is on Thursday, September 27, at 5 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson Room of Rush Rhees Library.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to re-center the discussion,\u201d he says. Lemann is the first speaker in the Humanities Center\u2019s 2018\u201319 Public Lecture Series<\/a>, dedicated this year to the theme of expertise and evidence. His talk is titled \u201cAre Journalists Experts? Does the Public Want Them to Be?\u201d<\/p>\n

As a former dean of Columbia\u2019s journalism school, and as a faculty member and a working journalist\u2014Lemann is a staff writer for the New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>and has also written for the New York Times<\/em>, the\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/em>, the New Republic<\/em>, and Slate<\/em>\u2014he has sought to inculcate and practice standards of journalistic expertise.<\/p>\n

He prefers the term \u201cprofessional\u201d to \u201cexpert\u201d for journalists and argues that what defines that professionalism is rigorous information gathering and concerted efforts to determine truth and falsity.<\/p>\n

Most journalism doesn\u2019t clear that bar\u2014and never has. \u201cIf you took all the journalists that had ever existed and said, what percentage of them meet this standard? I\u2019d say 5 percent, really optimistically\u2014and that percentage is decreasing at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Insisting on journalistic professionalism is a vexed business. A free press isn\u2019t a licensed one, and the internet has made it easy for anyone to publish and call the piece journalism. \u201cAs we\u2019re experiencing now, it\u2019s very, very hard to eliminate bad journalism, or journalism that has no relation to expertise, without limiting freedom of speech,\u201d says Lemann.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s important to enhance the odds for good journalism to be produced. \u201cThe urgent task at hand, to me, is to expand the space for real journalism, journalism that does meet the test of expertise or professionalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The market suggests there\u2019s no overwhelming public demand for careful, objective reporting on matters of public importance, and studies have yielded no clear evidence that information is what motivates voters. Those considerations make determining what people want from journalism \u201ctricky,\u201d Lemann allows.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, he\u2019s frustrated that people are turning to Facebook for a remedy to the shrinking percentage of good journalism, asking the social media giant to curate its content more vigorously.<\/p>\n

\u201cFacebook doesn\u2019t create news content,\u201d he says. \u201cIt just disseminates news content that other people have created\u2014and less and less real news content is being created as news organizations lose headcount. The concern about Facebook just doesn\u2019t address the real problem, which is an undersupply of real news about public affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s disquieted, too, by a turn toward private corporations to fix public crises. That\u2019s what the public sector exists to do, he says. And it\u2019s time to talk about that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to have a more daring and a richer conversation about what to do about these problems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we’re surrounded by “fake news,” was there ever a golden age of “real news?” Journalist and former dean of Columbia’s journalism school Nicholas Lemann kicks off the Humanities Center Public Lecture Series, this year focusing on themes of expertise and evidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":338932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[14,29502,25132,16072],"class_list":["post-338882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-events","tag-featured-post-side","tag-humanities-center","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat is a journalistic \u2018expert\u2019 in a social media age?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Journalist and former dean of Columbia's journalism school Nicholas Lemann kicks off the Humanities 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