Should journalists tweet?

Posted on 1 September 2018

Are trust and voice allies or at odds?

Consultant Andrew MacDougall writes in the Ottawa Citizen that journalists are addicted to Twitter and it’s poisoning their journalism:

“It’s a mystery why straight news reporters would want to reveal anything about themselves or their views on public policy. Most politicians already think the press is biased — why risk confirming it for them in real-time?

“They should instead go back to being a mystery. To valuing personal scarcity over ubiquity. To ditching Twitter, and forgetting Facebook. Or, at least limiting appearances there to the posting of their work. They should also say “no” to shouty panel appearances alongside partisans.

“Political journalism is at a crossroads. Reporters need to keep doing their valuable work. But do the work, full stop. Keep your opinions to yourself. More people will believe the good work you do if they have no idea who in the hell you are, or what you think about what’s going on.”

I read this column the same day I read Taylor Lorenz’s piece in The Atlantic on how teenagers’ relationships to the news is changing in the Trump (ie modern) era:

“For ‘non-biased news,’ the teens I spoke to said they turn directly to journalists themselves or news-related pages on social media vetted by people they trust. ‘I follow a few political Instagram accounts,’ [16-year-old] Colin said. ‘They’ll post memes and headlines and stuff and people discuss them. Political Instagram is a thing. It’s sort of like a weird mesh between a meme page and a news page.’

“[16-year-old] Pearson said that he thinks it’s much more valuable to follow individual journalists online than faceless media networks. ‘I put the same weight on tweets from reporters as a story they actually have a byline on,’ he said. ‘If you have a checkmark there’s a lot of credibility that comes with that.'”

So on the one hand, you have an older communications strategist for the former Prime Minister (MacDougall worked for Stephen Harper) arguing journalists should strive for anonymity, limiting your name to appearing on bylines within the publication you work for.

And on the other you have the next generation saying they don’t trust anonymous news organizations and favour personal relationships with journalists via social media.

I don’t know where I fall on this. I do think Twitter and other forms of social media have created an environment in which people feel they need to have hot takes on everything from the latest Trump tweet to the death of celebrities they might not even have a relationship with, and that stepping away from that is healthy, regardless of your profession.

But I’m reticent to extend that all the way to MacDougall’s advice which is, essentially, “never tweet unless it’s a link to one of your articles.”

In trying to work out my feelings on this, I jumped into the archives of the PressThink blog by Jay Rosen. The first post that came up when I typed “trust” and “twitter” in the search bar was his November 2017 post titled Pricing Access to the Trump White House: the Strange Case of the Times’ Social Media Policy. It documents the fall-out after Donald Trump retweeted a video edited to make it look as if Trump was hitting a golf ball into the back of Hilary Clinton’s head and a New York Times journalist tweeting in response, “Classy retweet by the leader of the free world, man with nuke codes, fella who reads TelePrompter on national unity and respect for women.”

The result was the journalist, Glenn Thrush, taking an extended break from the platform and the Times releasing a new social media policy warning its staff against “appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively” and to ask “Could your post hamper you colleagues’ ability to effectively do their jobs?” 

“If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.” 

So far, so fine, except Rosen digs a little deeper into the meaning behind the overall thrust of the policy:

“I keep coming back to these words: If our journalists are perceived as biased… that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom. Dean Baquet — who approved these words and made them law — doesn’t seem to realize that if the perception of critics can edit the actions of his staff then he has surrendered power to enemies of the Times, who will always perceive bias because it is basic to their interests to do so. This is part of a larger problem in mainstream journalism, which is unable to think politically because it is constantly accused of acting politically by hyper-partisan critics peddling fixed ideas.” 

That underlying message is the same one flowing throughout MacDougall’s piece when he writes:

“Why, for example, would a freelance journalist want Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to know that his views on Scheer’s views on government are that they are a ‘ridiculous collection of straw men?’ They might be, but good luck convincing Scheer’s people that anything you ever write will be a fair shake.”

Re-reading this paragraph after reading Rosen’s piece I’m struck by the fact that MacDougall isn’t actually worried about whether this freelance journalist is tweeting something true or not– it’s whether it will make Andrew Scheer happy.

Writing the truth is secondary to the goal of convincing members of a political party that you are unbiased.

Rosen is a vocal critic of this “View From Nowhere” style of journalism. More recently he’s been making the argument for “Show Your Work” which places transparency at the centre of a reporter’s relationship with their audience, rather than the “voice of god” neutrality that’s driven the profession for so long. And one way that more transparent relationship can be driven is through social media. 

I sit in an interesting spot in the media landscape. I’m employed by a national organization (frequently accused of bias by people across the political spectrum) but my beat and coverage is very much local.

And I think my position as a person from this place and genuinely interested in its well-being and future as a citizen confers in me a certain amount of credibility within my community.

I’m not often tweeting about U.S. politics because it’s outside my expertise and I have very little to add on the subject, but I will tell you that the inflatable duck from the jacuzzi place knocked out the power last night, just a few hundred meters away from the spot where a giant parrot fell off a local restaurant because of the snow.

btw this sort of depth and context is the sort of thing you only get form having reporters embedded in your communities. please support local journalism

— Andrew Kurjata 📻 (@akurjata) September 1, 2018

That last tweet is obviously somewhat facetious, but it’s also true. Who else but someone who’s lived here would even know that a giant parrot fell off a restaurant five years ago, let alone care to connect it to a power outage from an inflatable duck? And where am I able to share this information on a Friday night outside of Twitter and Facebook?

The power of being embedded within a place shouldn’t be underestimated. Earlier this summer I was off covering wildfires in a neighbouring community and I when people heard I, too, am from a place in north-central B.C. rather than somewhere further afield, I could see people open up to me more, in recognition of a bond that comes from being outside more major centers of power. And I worked sources from Facebook inside of community Facebook groups that I’ve long been a member of, interested in the local yarn shop as much as I am in a state of emergency.

Just over a week ago, the Poynter Institute published an overview of their annual Media Trust Survey which found that after decades of decline, trust in the press is up among Americans, at least. And that’s most pronounced in local news – “76 percent of Americans across the political spectrum have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in their local television news, and 73 percent have confidence in local newspapers. That contrasts with 55 percent trust in national network news, 59 percent in national newspapers and 47 percent in online-only news outlets.”

“The divide in attitudes toward local versus national news is especially pronounced among Republicans: 71 percent said they trust local TV news in their community, 43 percentage points higher than those who trust national network television news. Similarly, 62 percent of Republicans said they trust their local newspapers, 33 percentage points higher than their confidence in national papers. Democrats had high levels of trust across the board.

“The findings are reminiscent of Fenno’s Paradox, the notion that Americans disapprove of Congress, but support their own members of Congress. Just as members of Congress cater to constituents and bring money into their districts, local news tailors its coverage to useful information for local audiences, said Jason Reifler, a political scientist at University of Exeter in the U.K. and a co-author of the Poynter study.”

Circling back to that Atlantic piece on teenagers, it seems as if contrary the potential pitfalls, there can also be real value in using social media as more than a tool for broadcasing your latest byline– by opening yourself up as a bit more of a person to your audience, your audience is more willing to see you as a person they can trust rather than a faceless mainstream media organization they can write off as being biased with an agenda (by the way this is far from a solely right-leaning phenomena, see the NDP’s Charlie Angus’ recent tweets for an example of that).

None of this is to suggest journalists shouldn’t think before they tweet (we all should, really). Accuracy and fairness, slippery as they may be, are worth striving for. Nor is any of it to suggest people can’t do their job without social media or that there aren’t those skilled and dropping in to a place, establishing relationships and fairly and accurately reporting on events happening there.

But I would argue that there is also a value to establishing long-term, ongoing relationships with places and people you report on and social media is one place where those relationships can be developed outside of traditional reporting.

Filed under: media