(Dobbs) Today’s Inarguable Reality: Journalism Has Slid Downhill

Exhibit A: Failings from the war in the Middle East.

For all its many faults, I still often defend the news media because there are still good journalists out there— hard-working journalists, hard-hitting journalists. Some dig deep at the sometimes dangerous risk of offending their sources, some put their lives on the line to deliver news from war zones, some do penetrating interviews, some bring us stories of hope. We are lucky to have them. 

But defending the media is harder than it used to be. Although lots of excellent work is still being done, there are more failings than before in all kinds of reporting and compared to the quality of journalism not too long ago, the general state of my profession today is only a shell of what it once was. The war between Israel and Hamas offers abundant examples. 

The most graphic instance of second-rate journalism, just ten days into the war, was the reporting about the missile that hit… or hit near… the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. 

In the initial confusion that one can expect from such chaos, the first accounts from Gaza said that something on the order of 500-600 people had been killed. Soon the Palestinian Ministry of Health came up with a specific figure: 471. The New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and others ran with that and what’s worse, they uncritically published the claim by Hamas that an Israeli missile was the cause. That is what the world heard first.

Before long, as intelligence agencies spoke up, the story changed. From video and audio and forensic sources, evidently it was a Palestinian rocket, fired from within the Gaza Strip, that went bad. Even Human Rights Watch, which in the past has accused Israel of crimes against humanity, published a piece last week saying the fatal explosion “resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition, such as those commonly used by Palestinian armed groups, that hit the hospital grounds.” What’s more, while the death toll was still horrific, Western intelligence puts it closer to 100 than to 471.

But the damage was done. Rather than doing due diligence, major news agencies took claims at face value from a terrorist organization known for its lies, and fed them to their audiences. In many people’s minds, it is an impression that has not disappeared.

Three weeks later, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a deservedly respected veteran of conflicts, also used numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health to report that in Gaza, “over 4,300 children have been killed.” This raises two questions. First, why would she just broadcast one side’s narrative, since that side’s credibility is marginal? And second, as journalist Melanie Phillips wrote for The Times of London, even if the figure was accurate, “the designation ‘children’ includes its many teenage terrorists.” That is the demographic from which organizations like Hamas recruit. Amanpour would understand that. But she didn’t report it.

Then just a week ago, a blatant abandon of good journalism by the Sunday New York Times. A front page sub-headline said, “Israel has killed more women and children than have been killed in Ukraine.” 

The trouble is, it just wasn’t true. Once again, The Times relied on numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health which, as David Adesnik of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies writes, “never distinguishes fighters from civilians” and, as he also points out, “Hamas gunmen fight in civilian clothes.”

The upshot of all this is that the numbers The Times used from Hamas, if history is any guide, evidently were exaggerations, while in the case of Ukraine, it went with data from the United Nations which, as David Adesnik says, “has a very high bar for reporting fatalities.” What that means is, the real count is usually much worse. The bottom line, as horrific as it is, is that the death toll in Gaza isn’t equal to the death toll in Ukraine, let alone higher. But for many Times readers, the impression had sunk in.

To be fair, Israel also released numbers early on that turned out to be wrong. It said the death toll from the massacre on October 7th was about 1,400 people. Nobody disputed those numbers and journalists, myself included, repeated them. But to its credit, Israel eventually revised the figure to 1,200, explaining that of the bodies that were burned and mutilated that day, about 200 were terrorists from Hamas.

There are explanations for the decline of good journalism. When cable TV news came into our living rooms— and that’s already more than 40 years ago now— its immediacy as a 24/7 medium meant that some reporters began to think it was more important to get the story first than to get it right. 

Then, when the internet came along, no one had to run home and sit on the edge of their seat to see what had roiled the world that day, nor jump out of bed in the morning to pick up the paper or turn on the news and see how the world had changed overnight. They only had to turn on their computers.

As news sources proliferated, audiences got divvied up and each newsroom got a smaller piece of the pie. A smaller slice meant fewer followers and fewer followers meant lower revenue. Budgets were cut, staffs were pared, coverage was sacrificed. When the editor of one big city newspaper told her newsroom a couple of years ago about cutbacks that were coming, she said, “We’ll just have to do more with less.” A staffer shot back, “We can only do less with less.”

That’s what we’re seeing. There’s less fact-checking, less training, less backup. There are exceptions, but almost everyone’s doing less with less. Even Sports Illustrated’s credibility suffered just last week when it had to admit that an outsourced company had created articles for its website under the names of authors who didn’t actually exist. Here’s one of their phony author profiles, created by AI. Is this where journalism is headed?

The public sees what’s happening and doesn’t like it. Public trust in the news media has been sinking for many years but a Gallup Poll published in mid-October revealed the stark reality: “The 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal' or 'a fair amount’ to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading.”

Citizens draw on news reports to make judgments about everything from who to support in a war to who to support in an election. So this matters. As they detach themselves from traditional news media, they attach instead to social media. That’s like jumping from the pan into the fire. There is no training, no vetting, no due diligence behind too many social media posts. People can be persuaded by everything from half-truths to untruths. They have no way to know the difference. As former International Herald Tribune editor Mort Rosenblum wrote last week in his “Mort Report,” “Information crucial to electing competent leaders is too often secondhand guesswork bounced around in social-media circles, if not deliberate lies masquerading as ‘news’.”

A good friend of mine, who himself worked for years at the highest levels of the traditional news business, wrote me the other day and referred to today’s “so-called news media”— which is a stinging description on its own— as “a bunch of kids parroting news releases.” I don’t agree that it’s that bad, but many people do, and whether the portrayal is fair or not, perception does become reality. To be sure, journalists have made mistakes since the invention of the printing press. But that doesn’t change today’s inarguable reality: journalism has slid downhill. 

I don’t want to be holier than thou and pick on the journalists I’ve cited for faulty work. In their shoes I might have done the same. Working in journalism for more than fifty years, and having reported from wars myself, I know I’ve made my own share of sloppy mistakes. Bombarded with the stresses of covering a conflict, it can be hard for the mind to keep up. However, while that might explain it, it doesn’t excuse it. Whether it’s what the public knows about wars or about elections, there’s too much at stake.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.