7 - Judgmental Heuristics and News Reporting

Summary

A kind of cultural folklore has grown up around the practice of news reporting to explain how journalists do their job. It's a vibrant and enduring set of stories, spurred largely by the intersection of two factors. One is that, although news products are ubiquitous features of the cultural landscape, the processes that underlie these products are hidden from the users. Despite the fact that viewers can often see the newsroom looming behind well-groomedanchor people duringTVnewscasts, they are never permitted to see news actually being constructed. The second is that our culture (as well as others) regards the effects of media messages as both powerful and problematic. That is, we are much more likely to worry about the negative impacts of media messages than to celebrate the positive ones. Legends build rapidly around any process that combines mystery with the potential for evil.

These folkloric explanations are summoned to provide reasons for what people see when they attend to news. More specifically, they serve to rationalize people's perceptions that their media diet is awash in flawed accounts. Here are a few of the explanations that we hear from friends and family:

• Generating the largest audience possible is the primary goal of a journalist, and he or she will accomplish this by selecting stories that pander to the “lowest common denominator.”

• Entertaining is more important than educating, so journalists will “sensationalize” information with few moral qualms.

• Social responsibility will always play second fiddle to the economic bottom line; journalists are out to “sell newspapers,” not to provide a public service.