Journalism on the Ropes – The Assignment with Audie Cornish

Nicholas McBride 00:00:06 Hey Audie. Nicholas McBride 00:00:12 I'm really good. Am I allowed to say, Nick? I feel like I still have to call you Professor McBride, even though I

know you don't like it. Nicholas McBride 00:00:19 Nah, if your comfortable... Back in college. I really had no interest in being a journalist or, frankly, meaningful understanding

of what that meant until this guy. Nicholas McBride 00:00:31 I'm okay. It's good to hear you smiling. Nicholas McBride is an associate professor at UMass Amherst, where I went to

school and where he still teaches in the journalism department. Unlike the other professors who focused on the who, what, when, where, why and how, a basic news writing. He played

us a VHS copy of Akira Kurosawa's legendary crime thriller about unreliable narrators Rashomon. And Professor McBride introduced his syllabus with an essay he wrote that began like

this. News writing and reporting is both science and art. Nicholas McBride 00:01:13 News writing and reporting is both science and art. We observe, collect what we believe to be

facts and verify those facts using established methods. But too often now we have become stenographers. I've been thinking a lot about that essay, trying to square it with the

moment that we in the media face now. Nicholas McBride 00:01:39 We have become stenographers. We become criminals through our own laxity, laziness and lust for comfort and

celebrity. Nicholas McBride 00:01:55 I mean, he wrote this in the nineties, but we are still having the same conversations around what it means to be a good and honest journalist.

And I am well aware that many of you listening right now have lost trust in that idea in us. I'm not going to give you a question. Can you state? You are fake news. Trust in media

has declined, but for a lot of younger voters in particular. They've never known an era where you're just trusting at face value the stuff you see in your news. They don't trust

the media. They don't trust the election process. And that is a fundamental threat to our future existence. And we have to overcome it. According to the polling folks over at

Gallup, around 16% of people trust newspaper journalism. A whopping 11% trust TV news. And why is it so low? I mean, the list is long. Critics say journalists share too much of

their opinion, acknowledged too little about their biases, are prone to both sides ism putting bad faith or even immoral arguments on par that common sense and that the media

mainly amplifies partisan talking points. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times is one of several journalists we're going to hear from in this episode about the objectivity wars,