Journalists are not very good at explaining what they do, and they keep embarrassing themselves. Newsweek is just the latest example.
So it’s no surprise there was a negative tone to e-mails responding to a May 1 column I wrote about a study that found most high school students don’t appreciate the First Amendment.
“There was not one syllable I agreed with,” one high-school student wrote.
The study, called “Future of the First Amendment,” said the future looked pretty bleak: Only 51 percent of high-school students (and just 70 percent of adults) think newspapers should be allowed to publish whatever they want without government approval; 75 percent think incorrectly that that it’s against the law to burn the U.S. flag.
This did not sit well with a number of students in Sean Keefe’s creative writing class at Mullen High School. More than a dozen sent e-mails disagreeing with that column – in no uncertain terms. Their comments were sharp in two senses of that word – bright and biting.
They said oh yes they do understand basic rights, and the column insulted them and their generation.
One said the press is too conservative; others said it’s too liberal. Most showed considerable mistrust of the media, of polls and of journalism ethics.
When I e-mailed these students to ask if it would be OK to use what they said in a future column, they were more than skeptical.
“You are more than likely going to misquote me,” one assumed (as did many of her classmates), “so how are you inspiring me or my peers to be interested in what you say or the paper you represent?”
A number pointed out the column didn’t compare adult ignorance of the First Amendment. True enough. That’s because the survey was of high school students.
Some didn’t seem to appreciate the detached nature of reporting someone else’s findings. “The first paragraph of your editorial makes a statement that your research didn’t support,” wrote one.
It wasn’t my research; I was just writing about it. But that excuse isn’t sufficient detachment for a lot of students – or for a lot of adults, either. They blame the messenger for the message.
Some thought it unfair to “generalize all students based on a study of 100,000.” Yet that’s a huge survey, 100 to 200 times as many as are surveyed for a typical national poll.
“Your survey results reminded me of some type of ‘survey’ Michael Moore would give; that is, only showing the numbers that help your cause and make one thing look completely one-sided,” one student wrote.
Another said: “Any media type poll can be manipulated to say what you want it to say … . A lot of people see the news as a way to bash the government, but they also see the liberal bias that goes along with every broadcast of ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news.”
One writer said the problem isn’t that the press is too liberal, but that it’s too conservative.
“The press has become a sniveling lapdog of the government, afraid to take more than a nibble,” he wrote. Since Nixon, “the media has never been more than a minor annoyance to the government … a husk of its former self. We will never again see a president destroyed by investigative journalism because, in the hunt for profit, the newspaper has become as much advertising as news.”
Is destroying presidents something journalists should strive for? Another student would seem to disagree. “I don’t think that it is fair to say (as I did) that ‘Journalists tend to measure their successes by how well they reveal the failures of others,”‘ she wrote.
So there was some disagreement, but not so much in overall tone. The e-mails are more evidence that readers, regardless of age, tend to focus on the negative more than the positive.
“I do not read the paper every day,” one student wrote, “but there is nothing wrong with that because there is a major lack of truth and important issues in the news today. I am concerned more about the war than a ‘runaway bride,’ so why should I waste my time with the news?”
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
