A rchive Date
[ 04-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
|
[The distance between us and them
By VAL SEARS
Ottawa Sun
April 12, 2000
I will do anything for the poor but live like them. Does this mean I can't interest them, connect with them, write stuff that is relevant to their lives?
Perhaps so. Certainly I can't remember when I last shook a calloused hand.
People in the business of selling newspapers have long been bothered by the fact that journalists lead far different lives from the people they write for and that likely means a good many potential readers are being lost.
Now an editor at the Orlando Sentinel has completed a survey of journalists' lifestyles using the home addresses of 3,400 journalists and a look at 500 residents and 487 journalists in five cities.
"There is a gap," says Insight editor Peter Brown, "between what one could refer to as normal people and journalists." And it is a fact that journalists' view of the world determines not just how they cover a story but what stories they cover.
In terms of salaries, Brown found that whereas only 18% of the American public earned $50,000 or more, 42% of the journalists in medium-sized cities did.
These numbers are not greatly different from earnings in Canada, according to Statscan and they do suggest there is a gap between ourselves and our readers. The intriguing question is: Does this mean we can't write for them?
I think in a measure it does and this may well account for antipathy between the media and the guys in the beer parlour. It doesn't take many phrases such as "shabby houses" or "blue-collar workers" or "high-school education" to piss off people who'd rather eat pizza than salmon and asparagus.
Journalists, Brown found, are less likely to form families, have children, go to church, do volunteer community work, own homes, belong to the Legion or Kiwanis and go to prayer breakfasts.
In most cases, Canadian journalists tend to be younger than their audiences, although in big cities, with strong unions, newsrooms are still stuffed with old lags and publishers have been forced to put a stop to the hiring of anyone over 30. And few papers these days will hire anyone without a university degree, even if it's only a journalism degree, and this sets them apart from the bulk of Canadians.
An effort to reconnect journalists with ordinary citizens has given rise to a somewhat misty concept called "public journalism."
Communications philosophers usually divide papers into three groups: The market model which seeks to give readers what the editors think they want (the Sun); the advocacy model which gives readers what the owner wants (the Citizen) and the trustee model which offers readers what they ought to want (the Globe and Mail).
None of these is particularly satisfactory in terms of connection if the decisions are made by editors who are unconnected and reporters who can't remember when they last had a rye and Coke.
So along comes public journalism which tries to have the public involved in the news agenda, through public forums, newsroom meetings and sponsorship of community activity that allows citizens to deliberate and arrive at solutions. The results have been mixed. Journalists fear their power may be diluted and don't much trust the lower orders anyway.
But whatever the approach toward connection, the problem won't go way.
Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, told Editor and Publisher Magazine last month: 'More and more journalists are of the elite, socially and economically, of the country.
"That gap between them and the mass of citizens who rely on them and depend on them makes you nervous."
Sears can be reached by e-mail at valsears@magi.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|