The Humans of <em>The New York Times</em>
In 2004, in its inaugural State of the News Media report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the collective now known as the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, put its finger on one of the paradoxes of contemporary American journalism: “Journalists believe they are working in the public interest and are trying to be fair and independent in that cause,” the report noted. “This is their sense of professionalism.” Later, it shared the flip side of journalistic self-regard: “The public thinks these journalists are either lying or deluding themselves. Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes, and generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s.”
And then the report really let the axe fall. “After watching these numbers closely for years,” it concluded, “we at the Project suggest that all of these matters—the questions about journalists’ morality, caring about people, professionalism, accuracy, honesty about errors—distill into something larger. The problem is a disconnection between the public and the news media over motive.”
A disconnection between the public and the. With that, pretty much a decade in advance, Pew articulated one of the many tensions that would come to define this defining cultural moment: a news system—a political system—in a state of simmering emergency. Jarring collisions of information and personality. Missed connections; misunderstandings; “fake news.” The of “bad faith.” The crisis of authorship itself.
