GOOD ADVICE – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 1:16 P.M. ET:  Lots of talk about journalism these days.  Some of it is actually worth hearing.    From the Washington Free Beacon:   

CNBC editor Nikhil Deogun said members of the press needed to stick to facts and remind themselves that their readers "are not as ignorant, as stupid as we think they are" during a discussion Wednesday on media in the Donald Trump era.

In a panel moderated by Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Deogun and Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, Time editor Nancy Gibbs, and USA Today editor Joanne Lipman delved into the challenges of covering Trump and declining trust in the news media.

In one portion, Couric brought up the problem of confirmation bias in the media.

"Consumers are increasingly gravitating toward outlets that basically tell them what they want to hear, reinforce their beliefs," she said. A friend of mine said they're seeking affirmation, not information. So given that, how do you restore trust in the media writ large if people are so divided about which media outlets are actually fair and accurate?"

Deogun said the media should not fall into the "trap" of applying one standard to one person and a different standard to everyone else. He pointed to his former Wall Street Journal colleague Paul Steiger's mantra that "in the end, stick to the facts."

"I think sometimes there's too much of a tendency to interpret a fact to a degree that it goes into opinion," he said. "And I think part of our job is to, again, remind ourselves that our … readers, viewers, users, are not as ignorant, as stupid as we think they are, and I think part of that is to be more transparent. Part of that is to be more forthcoming about what we know and what we don't know."

COMMENT:  I'm getting a sense that a number of journalists are waking up to the fact that their profession is in trouble.  One reason it's in trouble is that it talks down, or writes down, to its audience.  I was a "legitimate" journalist, at The New York Times, as readers know, and I saw that snobbery and condescension all the time.  We are the observers, and we are oh, so intellectual and so knowledgeable.  A number of journalists are not knowledgeable at all, outside their beat, and the word "intellectual" can be twisted to mean almost anything.

Charles Kuralt, who did the "On the Road" series for CBS, once told me how amazed he was at how well-informed Americans are.  He was correct.  The average American may not be able to articulate a news point the way a professor or journalist can, but he, or she, usually understands what is happening and its significance.  And Americans recall what has happened in their lifetimes.  We are not a stupid people,

June 30,  2017