USA Today Media Columnist Rem Rieder is confident that the future of journalism is not all gloom and doom. Hopefully.
Rieder spoke on this topic to a crowd of students at an installment of the Walter Cronkite School’s Must See Mondays speaker series.
Rieder first acknowledged that new media has strangled the traditional model of the newspaper and is becoming a threat to television news, but he said he still doesn’t place all of his faith into digital news.
His main concern with digital media is that the business model of online news can often lead to the ownership of content, leading to censorship.
“You need to cover the news in a democracy,” he said.
Rieder also said he isn’t so much worried about whether newspapers will survive; he’s more concerned that the style and quality of news survives into the digital era.
And Rieder said he is optimistic that consumers’ desire for the quality associated with ink and paper news has not totally dissolved.
“The day that Buzzfeed started their long form journalism, I thought the world had changed,” Rieder said.
But the pressure for speed in the digital world has proved to be a growing obstacle to accuracy and independence, according to Rieder.
He pointed out that the presidential races within the last decade, especially this 2016 campaign season, have led to both a lack of fact checking and an abundance of reporting on the polls.
Rieder and Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan agreed with complaints that news media isn’t analytical enough, saying this is at least partially driven by the public viewing politics in the same way they view sports.
“There is something to be said, that the horse race story is easier to write,” Callahan said.
Rieder thinks the obsession with polls has become increasingly problematic for the media. He even called political polls “nonsense.”
Rieder said he believes that the level of partisanship in politics now makes people not care to hear views that don’t align with their own — or even to hear if views are fact-checked.
Former political journalist Jackie Young agreed.
“Everybody is bombarded with so many opinions — so many sources of news — they have a hard time determining which of the sources is reliable, factual,” Young said.
Rieder also said that some journalists are reporting what a political candidate says without any investigation.
He maintains that the job of journalists moving forward is to hold to a standard of factual accountability.
“I think it’s abundantly clear that, if you make a conclusion in a nonpartisan way and just lay out the facts, you are doing a huge service to the reader,” Rieder said.
Contact the reporter at latravis@asu.edu.
