The role of media then and now

We watched the news for 30 minutes in the evening when I was growing up. The broadcast consisted of one person, Walter Cronkite, in black and white. We assumed what he reported was factual because it was on the news we trusted.

We subscribed to the area’s daily paper, The Courier Post. It covered the local news of Camden County, New Jersey, which was right across the bridge from Philadelphia. If you wanted news from the city, you had to get the Philadelphia Inquirer. Believe it or not, in the summers, their newsboys walked the hot sands of the beaches at the Jersey shore. You could buy the city newspaper without leaving your beach blanket.

My maternal great-grandmother read the newspaper cover to cover every day. She lived with my grandparents as her husband had died at a much younger age. She never updated her glasses. She wore rimless glasses with wire sides that curved all around her ears. I would watch her carefully put on those fragile things as she got ready to read her paper. The family teased her that she read the ink off the newspaper. She replied that the papers were made more cheaply than in the past and the ink came off on her hands. That was a long time ago and a different world for the media.

What media shaped you while growing up? Do you remember questioning its veracity or even thinking about it? Today, we are bombarded with input from a 24/7 news cycle and social media. Where we get our news, how we get it and who makes money from it are all relevant issues. Trying to sort it out is exhausting.

The role of the media in shaping the community was the topic of a presentation and discussion last Sunday at Story & Song as part of the program, “Our Town: Fostering Healthy Communities.”  This program features different topics over 10 months from January to October of this year. T.R. Richardson is the facilitator, who is a trainer with Richwood International.

T. R. Richardson

The respondents at this forum spanned 50 years of media experience, ranging from print-only to online-only media. The group brought their own wealth of experience and insight. This topic had been on the schedule at this time for the Our Town series. It happened to fall when the role of media in the community had come into the public spotlight with a recent change in publisher and staff at our local print outlet. The controversy that ensued over a local event being excluded from the publication brought the issues about the role of media into the public eye.

If you had walked down the suburban street where I grew up and front doors were open, as they often were, you would have seen the flickering of black and white televisions on the same channel or one of the three that existed. That couldn’t be further from reality today. Every media outlet is competing for a fraction of our attention. We also know that our attention spans have grown increasingly shorter. Headlines are written to grab what little attention we have to give.

Media is “direct to consumer,” which was a new phrase to me. Lines are blurred between reporting information, entertaining and seeking influence. I learned that NBC News is now under the entertainment division of the company! I was shocked, but should not have been.

There is so much being thrown at us, we don’t know how to critically evaluate and analyze the content being received. We do have control over the amount we allow into our psyches and from which sources we consume. It is easier and quicker to have our usual “go to” sources that we know align with what we already think. This becomes what is called “confirmation bias.” This is “… the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs.” (scribbr.com)

The youngest on the panel at age 27, Noah Hertz, is a reporter and editor for Jacksonville Today, an online journal. He said something that made the rest of us laugh and think. He said everyone needs to ask themselves if they’ve become a “sock puppet” for a preferred media source, repeating what they have heard without question or analysis.  Think about that analogy.

Who wants to be used by someone else to broadcast their message? Even though it is time-consuming work, we have a responsibility to understand and evaluate what we take in and what we pass on as truthful information.

A notable and well-respected community member who participated in the discussion was Dr. Jeannetta Betsch Cole, a cultural anthropologist and former president of two historically black colleges and a native of American Beach. She said, related to confirmation bias, that we too easily become “… prisoners of our own gestalt.”  She also offered this quote by an American sociologist at the conclusion of our gathering:

“I’ve tried to be objective; I do not claim to be detached.”  -C. Wright Mills.

I left the forum committed to more critical evaluation of the media I consume and with a willingness to ask myself, “Have I thought of it that way before?”