Is Google keeping you well informed? Thank a reporter.

These are grim days for the news media. Audiences and circulation are shrinking, ad revenues and share prices falling. In the United States, mass buyouts and layoffs are sweeping through newsrooms like tornadoes; even the august New York Times has been hit. The storm hasn't reached similar proportions in Canada but the trends suggest it will. And soon.

Please stop shrugging. Yes, I know my judgment is clouded by self-interest. And I know lots of people have reason to feel nervous about the way the economy is headed.

I also know there are plenty of critics who -- for good reasons and bad -- loathe the mainstream media and are delighted to see journalists take a kick in the backside. After all, they've got the Internet and Google and blogs galore. Who needs the media? Goodbye and good riddance.

But you should care about the fate of newsrooms. And that schadenfreude some people are feeling is just plain stupid.

A press release I got a few weeks ago helps explain why.

It appeared in my e-mail, as press releases do every day. The headline read "Majority of Canadian Women Feel Unsafe Walking at Night."

"The majority of Canadian women do not feel safe while walking at night," it began, "yet few have taken the precaution of carrying a protection device, says a recent survey commissioned by Energizer Canada."

And guess who manufactures protection devices of the sort which Canadian women do not carry? Energizer Canada, naturally. "Energizer has made it a priority to provide these products because they have been identified as crucial in allowing women to feel safer and more empowered," an Energizer executive says in the press release.
[Top]

Also quoted is a woman identified as "a former police officer and renowned expert in child and family safety." What women need to know, the expert says, "is that they can empower and protect themselves by using common, everyday techniques and devices."

Like, oh, the devices manufactured by those thoughtful altruists at Energizer Canada.

Now, I happened to know that Statistics Canada periodically asks Canadians about how safe they feel. And I knew that StatsCan's results look very different.

More than nine in 10 women reported feeling satisfied with their personal safety, StatsCan reported in 2004. And when women were asked how they felt about walking alone in their neighbourhoods after dark, 84 per cent said "safe."

For a company that wants people to believe most women are afraid and can feel better if they buy one of the company's fine products, StatsCan's numbers are not helpful. So Energizer got its own data by paying for an Angus Reid poll that asked women if they "experienced fear or feel concerned for their safety when walking alone at night" -- a question so vague and open-ended that almost any twinkling of worry, at almost any time, under any circumstance, would call for the respondent to answer "yes." I don't find it impressive that 65 per cent answered Energizer's poll in the affirmative. I find it impressive that 35 per cent didn't.

My point here isn't to hammer Energizer, its poll, or the PR company that put out the release. This stuff appears routinely in reporters' e-mail and, by the standards of these things, this one wasn't bad. The source was clear. So was the self-interest. There are far more devious ways to worm a message into the media.

More alarming is that a lot of reporters took the bait. At least half a dozen newspapers turned out stories that cited the dubious statistic, connected it to the carrying of personal protection devices, and quoted Energizer's chosen expert. None mentioned the StatsCan data or offered the perspective of independent experts. In effect, these stories were nothing more than re-writes of the press release.
[Top]

Fortunately, most of the guilty newspapers were small. No surprise there. Small newspapers have, at most, a handful of reporters. And those reporters are run off their feet. When a PR company delivers a press release containing all the necessary ingredients for an interesting little story, it's awfully tempting to just go with it. There's no time to call independent sources. There's no time to question the information and dig around. And a reporter who somehow manages to do these things may well discover there's nothing to the story -- which means she will have burned time and have nothing to show for it.

It's so much easier to just write the story and move on.

As big newsrooms shed reporters, the workloads of those who remain will grow and their workdays will increasingly resemble those of their harried colleagues in small newspapers. Inevitably, critical scrutiny of information will decline.

The news media are a filter that stands between the public and the countless marketers who wish to manipulate the public on behalf of their clients. That filter is getting thinner by the day.

Simultaneously, the marketing and manipulation industry is growing steadily. It's one of the first places laid-off reporters look for a new job.

And no, the Internet does not make all this irrelevant. Original opinion writing -- like this column -- may be flourishing on the Internet but reporting is not. News aggregators like Google deliver a torrent of articles but take a closer look: Most of that work comes from the much-reviled mainstream media.

And so, as the MSM atrophy, so will the information available on the Internet. Only the illusion of abundance will remain.

Buy a newspaper, ladies and gentlemen. For your own good.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

Back to Columns

Home

Copyright © 2005  Dan Gardner
Website Design & Management by:  GRA Web Site Design Ottawa