This Week: The Key to Media Literacy is Asking Questions

"Quote" of the Week

Journalism Starts With Asking Questions: Which Ones?

Greetings,

Pledge Drive over! Goal met! Thank you to ALL of you who sent in pledges, and ESPECIALLY the first-time contributors. I'm sure you all have lots of things you want to support, and the fact that you consider Nygaard Notes to be worthy of inclusion on your list, and that you actually send me some of your hard-earned money, is deeply moving to me. I will try my best to continue to be worthy of your faith and trust in my work. The survival of a project like Nygaard Notes is, as I've said, a small miracle, and I hope you are proud to be a part of it. Thank you!

The feature piece this week, as you can see, is the ONLY piece this week. That's because it ended up being a little longer than I had expected. (Where's my editor?!) So Part 2, on values and priorities and where journalists get them, will come your way next week.

Also, I must say that I am accumulating quite a large number of interesting tidbits and shorter pieces, and some of you readers know what that usually means: Soon it will be time for a Stroll Through the News With Nygaard.

And, just so you know, I'm also working on a few other, longer, pieces, on things like inequality in the U.S., the Non-Aligned Movement, political strategizing, and malaria. Before long we'll see which ones of those projects bear fruit. Other important things always come up, too, and that unpredictability is what makes this newsletter endlessly surprising and interesting—at least to me!

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Here's a headline from my local newspaper, the Star Tribune, from May 1st: "Report Shows Sharp Increase in Terror Attacks in ‘06."

Well, sort of. The report is the U.S. State Department's highly-political "Country Reports on Terrorism, 2006."

Here, in contrast, are a couple of sentences from the New York Times' story on the same subject on the same day:

"Terrorist attacks [in 2006] are up 91 percent in Iraq and 53 percent in Afghanistan, according to statistics compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center. In the rest of the world, total terrorist attacks declined by 3 percent."

And kudos to the Times for including the following words early on in what should have been a front-page article (it appeared on page 10):

"The numbers underscore the ineffectiveness of battling terrorism with conventional military means, said John Arquilla, who studies terrorism at the Naval Postgraduate School. ‘It is most curious that the areas where we have military operations have the most attacks,' Mr. Arquilla said. ‘These statistics suggest that our war on global terrorism is not going very well. It suggests we need to try a new approach.'"

Most curious. Indeed.

Journalism Starts With Asking Questions: Which Ones?

Before any news story is written, somebody has to have a curiosity, and must go looking for the answers to some questions. When those answers are found, they are written down, and that's when they become what we call a "news story." But the process of writing a news story starts with the questions, which guide the whole process. That's why I said in the last Nygaard Notes that the first job of a journalist is to ask questions. I also said that the understanding of this simple idea is the key to media literacy. Now I'll try to explain why I would say such a thing!

I have often said that the two most important questions a reader of the newspapers can ask are these: "So what?" and "Who says?" The "So what?" question is the key to understanding the values of the person asking the questions, and I will deal with the values aspect of this in a separate article in the next Nygaard Notes. For now, let's have a look at the other questions, starting with "Who says?"

Who Says?

The "Who says?" question is the "source" question, and it's nearly as important as the "So what?" question. After all, people say all kinds of things, especially when they're talking to the media, so a good journalist never settles for only one source for anything.

Which sources are good ones? And how does a reporter go about choosing them? This gets into values a little bit, but what is important here is the order in which things are done. That is, does a reporter go to a source (chosen for whatever reason) and ask them, in effect, to tell him what is important? Well, that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is for the reporter to decide beforehand what is important, then go searching for credible sources to talk about it. These are two very different approaches.

If a reporter is assigned simply to listen to the words of "powerful" people—for instance, government officials, military leaders, think-tank spokespersons—then that reporter is likely to hear and report only, or mostly, the values and priorities of those powerful people. If, on the other hand, a reporter is assigned to explore an issue and come up with a story that explains its significance to the citizens of her community, then the journalistic task takes on a different shape. For one thing, the "powerful people" that had been primary sources now become just some, among many, sources. And the importance of those many sources is a function of their credibility, not of their power. (This difference fades in importance to the extent that the reporter herself is a powerful person, as many elite journalists are getting to be. More on that next week.)

In other words, in the construction of a news story, does the questioning start with the source? Does it start with the reporter? Or could it start with you and me, as residents of the community, citizens of the world, activists, voters? "Who says" something is important, or true, or relevant is the question to ask when looking at media, or when starting your own media.

Other Questions for Reporters: Logic, Premises, Timing, and Smells

One would think that reporters would routinely ask what I call The Logic Question. That is, "Does this make sense?" The best example in recent memory where this question was neglected was in the reporting in the lead-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003. It was said by many powerful people that "Saddam is in league with Osama." This was implausible on the face of it, for several reasons. For one thing, would a dictator like Saddam want a strong leader like Osama roaming around Iraq posing a threat to Saddam's authority? I don't think so. Also, would a secular leader like Saddam be likely to team up with a leader who bases his claim to authority on a reading of religious texts? That's not likely, and it's even less likely that Osama would choose as an ally a strong secular leader like Saddam, since he would likely be seen as a threat to his "movement."

Since the allegations of a Saddam-Osama alliance really didn't make sense from the get-go, reporters who asked the relevant Logic Question when administration officials made these claims would have been obligated to demand a high level of proof to make this illogical statement stand up. Of course, as we now know, there is and was no such proof. An early and dogged asking of The Logic Question by the elite media in this case could have helped to prevent untold human suffering.

Another important question is The Basis Question. That question asks, "What are the premises upon which this statement stands?" I sometimes call this the "Key Fact." (See Nygaard Notes Number 210: Decoding the News by Finding The "Key Fact") In terms of propaganda decoding, this question might be, "In order for this statement to be believable, what would I have to believe?"

Let's take here an example from the so-called Left. Let's say that I, as a journalist, am told that the media functions as a mouthpiece for elite propaganda due to a media conspiracy. The first question that occurs to me is The Basis Question: What is the basis for this claim? Or, what would I have to believe in order to believe in this conspiracy? I would have to believe that somehow, some way, a fairly large group of reporters, editors, and other journalists were secretly meeting and planning to put certain things in the news and keep other things out.

In addition, I would have to believe that the group has been disciplined enough so that not a single conspirator has ever come forward to talk about this conspiracy. And, remember, this conspiracy supposedly involves people who make their living telling stories to the public. Hmmm... I'd have to see some powerful evidence to convince me that this conspiracy theory holds water. (Which is not to say that the media does not function as a conduit for propaganda; it simply suggests that something besides a conspiracy must explain that phenomenon.)

Two related questions that journalists should ask are The Timing Question ("Why is this coming out at this particular time?") and The Smell Question ("Does this smell funny?")

Sometimes it's easy to see the importance of timing. For example, the New York Times ran a big front-page story on February 10th with the headline, "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says." The sources in the article were unnamed "officials from a broad range of government agencies." (The reporter was Michael Gordon, whom some readers may recall as the co-author of the infamous September 2002 article that reported the charges by the Bush administration that Iraq was trying to make a nuclear bomb. This was not true.)

Since no one could fail to notice that the U.S. government was in the middle of a campaign to demonize Iran at this particular time, someone asked the question the answer to which Gordon reported in paragraph six as follows: "The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran."

Despite that qualifier, five days later the Times ran another front-page article, this time with the headline, "Bush Declares Iran's Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain." On the same day the non-profit St. Petersburg Times ran a front-page story with the headline, "‘Made in Iran' Isn't Proof of Complicity." What we see here is that the St. Pete Times (owned by a non-profit journalism school) took The Timing Question a little more seriously than did the New York paper, and framed their story differently as a result. The New York Times, of course, is far more influential than the Times in Florida, which is why White House "officials" take their anonymous leaks to the New York paper.

How About The Smell Question?

One of the valuable things that comes with journalistic experience is that any seasoned reporter will have been deceived or propagandized in the past, and will likely remember what it feels and looks like—what it SMELLS like—to be used in this way. An experienced reporter, for instance, is hopefully less likely to fall victim to "mind-reader" syndrome than an inexperienced one. You know this syndrome. That's when you read that "Administration officials believe" that so-and-so will accomplish so-and-so. Journalists should never report what officials "believe." They should report what officials say and do. Unless they're mind-readers. Or propagandists.

For example, many political leaders will say that they believe in "free trade." But what they almost invariably do is to support agreements that strengthen copyright and trademark laws—so-called "intellectual property" laws—which are anything but "free." So, when an official tells an inexperienced reporter that "I believe in Free Trade," it may "smell" fine to him or her. But an experienced reporter will check the history and the actions of that politician, and notice a funny smell. They will still report what the official SAYS they believe, but they will also report any apparent contrasts between the words and the actions. If it is an editorial, they may say that the politician spoke in error, or even that he or she lied. If it's a news story, they'll leave out that last part, and let the reader put two and two together. Or, they'll find a "Source B" who is willing to say that "Source A" lied. It is, after all, quite easy to editorialize in a news story, if you want to.

The Key To Media Literacy

Why is this understanding of the importance of asking questions so important to media literacy?

Simply this: If we—readers of the newspapers and watchers of the news—can learn to ask our own questions, rather than simply reading the answers to someone else's questions, then we are far more likely to find the answers we want. Doesn't that seem obvious? It's not only obvious, I think it has the additional virtue of being true.

I said earlier that one way for a reporter to approach a news story is to decide beforehand what is important, then search for credible sources to talk about it. We can do the same when reading the news.

Like reporters, news "consumers" should also start their process with questions. That is, before we go looking at the news, we can give some thought to what it is we want or need to know in order to meet our needs for information, for understanding of the world, and so forth. Once we have some questions in mind, then we can go to "the news" and look for the answers. If we don't have our own questions in mind, then we will be inclined to accept the values and priorities of the journalists that arrange the day's news for us, based on the questions that THEY think are important, which may or may not be our questions.

I've never explained this point quite so specifically before, but I give clues about its importance all the time. For example, my periodic feature "Off the Front Page" is aimed at reminding people that some of the most important things in the news—what we might call the "front-page stories"—are often not found on the front page! That is, I am showing that the answers to my own questions, which arise from my own values, can frequently be found in the corporate media, but not necessarily where a passive news "consumer" would be looking.

Which brings us back to the primary question that we should be asking as we read, or as we create, the daily news. And that question, again, is: So what? The answer to that question has everything to do with values and priorities, and is the subject of the next Nygaard Notes.