Last week, Boing Boing, the popular technology and culture blog, trained its spotlight on a hilarious and painful project by British comedian Tom Scott. He created a set of printable warning labels meant to alert consumers to some of the major flaws that plague journalism.
With statements such as “This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted” and “Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about,” the stickers were met with amused guffaws from consumers and a resigned acknowledgment from practicing journalists.
Scott’s joke played into existing consumer attitudes about the trustworthiness and reliability of modern news coverage. Gallup recently published the 2010 results of its Confidence in Institutions poll. Once again, news media fared higher than Congress, but that isn’t saying much.
Only 25 percent of respondents have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and 22 percent said the same for television news. Neither institution has fared very well in the periodic survey. When Gallup started asking about confidence in newspapers in 1973, 39 percent expressed confidence. When TV news was added in 1993, 46 percent expressed confidence.
Gallup frets:
Against this grim backdrop, Scott’s labels struck a chord. I caught up with him via e-mail and asked what he hoped to achieve with the journalism labels.
“I wouldn’t call it a project, really — it’s a cheap joke that seems to have become rather popular!” he wrote. “If I can make people laugh, and make people think, that’s great; if the labels actually start being placed on newspapers around the world too, that’s fantastic!”
Scott cheekily decided to name-check the tabloid-esque British newspaper Daily Mail and its right-wing journalist Richard Littlejohn as part of the list. “The Richard Littlejohn gag was very much a cheap crowd-pleaser,” he explained, but then noted, “I imagine there’s not really a great crossover between Mail readers and folks that’d consider using these stickers!”
I asked Scott what journalists could learn from his project. “Very little,” he said. “That’s not me being flippant — it’s just that any journalist who gives a damn about integrity already knows about this. I’ve had a couple of e-mails from journalists — who wanted to stay anonymous — and rather than being angry with me, they bemoaned the fact that they frequently had to write posts that fawned over PR stories, simply because of pressure from the higher-ups at their organisation.”
Indeed. Scott has already earned a fan in New York Times television and digital media reporter Brian Stelter, who linked to the journalism labels on his Tumblr blog, “…the deadline.” His post, presented without commentary, inspired close to 3,000 fellow Tumblr users to spread the word.
Consumer reception to Scott’s labels has been mixed. Wendi Muse, founder of Retail DJ, cautioned that “one man’s trash is another man’s news,” telling me that while facts and fact-checking are important, the framing of articles will always reflect some kind of slant.
Muse questioned whether people will ever agree on what is biased and what is unbiased and said she believes that the question is less about news spin and more about encouraging better reporting.
Dany Sigwalt, a community organizer and youth activist in Washington, D.C., called the labels “snarky” and said she would be offended if one were plastered across an article she wanted to read. Sigwalt said she believes that bias is being perpetuated, but on the part of those who deem the stickers worth using.
The stickers, she said, assume “that I, the reader, am completely uncritical in my thought processes … It’s really not much better than the article itself, because you don’t know where the sticker-ers’ allegiances lie.”
Interestingly enough, in the breakdown of the Gallup numbers, 18- to 29-year-olds said they trust newspapers substantially more than all other age groups, with 49 percent of them rating newspapers favorably.
Yet, according to another Gallup poll, this same age group is least likely to pick up actual newsprint. Gallup admits that it is “unclear how much respondents factored in the online and cable offshoots of ‘newspapers’ and ‘television news’ when assessing their confidence in these institutions.”
However, it could be that younger consumers have learned to discern where news comes from in the digital space. Ozioma Egwuonwu, director of cultural insight and anthropology for the marketing agency RAPP, said that Scott’s warning labels resonate because they tap into “what we have intrinsically known — that news is biased at its core.” Still, Egwuonwu enjoys the provocative nature of the labels and said she wishes there were a digital version for use on websites like Facebook.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly described Ozioma Egwuonwu‘s gender.
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