Tufts alumnus and NBC News President Neal Shapiro (LA '80) returned to campus Friday morning to discuss the current phenomenon of public distrust of the press and what can rebuild the lost confidence.
"[In the] latest Gallup Poll I saw, nurses have an 80 percent trust rating," Shapiro said. "Reporters are at 20 percent. We're still higher than congressmen and car salesmen."
According to Shapiro, one of the most common problems with press accuracy is that "context often gets lost." To compensate, he argued for greater press transparency, whereby the media "let[s] the viewers in on excruciating detail" about their reporting.
Shapiro also discussed the issue of reporters who completely fabricate their stories. "[All reporters] are competitive and want to succeed," he said. "When it gets competitive 99.9 percent [of reporters] don't make things up. You wouldn't be a journalist if you didn't want to get the news right and get it first."
"The scary thing is that the others may slip [their stories] through," he said, referring to Jack Kelly of USA Today and Jayson Blair of the New York Times.
Such an uncertainty of reporter accuracy results in higher stress for editors. "It's hard enough being an editor," Shapiro said. "Then you have to worry, is someone lying to me?"
Shapiro also attributed public distrust of the media to the current trend of blogging, or online discussion of current events. With blogging, "the public often confuses facts with advocacy," he said.
In contrast to these bloggers, Shapiro said, the mainstream press aims to remove as much bias as possible. "Our jobs are to say, 'Here are the facts and you make the judgment,'" he said.
To account for lack of trust in the media, Shapiro offered a few basic tenets which he believed all reporters should follow.
He emphasized the importance of reporters ensuring their sources' accuracies. "Look at every source you get and ask, 'Why do I believe it?'" he said. "Be transparent, tell who the experts are and why you picked them."
Shapiro argued for transparency even when an error occurs during reporting. "We're going to make mistakes, but how we handle it is important," he said. "If you make a mistake, admit it and admit it promptly. Otherwise it adds to the image of not listening to criticism."
In addition, a reporter should not determine the course of a story, Shapiro said. "Follow the story wherever it takes you," he said. "You have to follow it, willing to know that it could go nowhere."
Shapiro spoke about his own efforts to remove himself from his own reporting and look at it through the eyes of a viewer in order to preempt any issues that might emerge. "[At Dateline,] we wrote the angry letter that we were going to get," he said.
Such a method, he said, has worked. "I think the best stories we've done is to pull along the minds of the viewers," he said.
All precautions taken to optimize accuracy, however, should not alter the value or controversy of a story. "Above all we better be right, but we can't lose why people are turning to us," he said. "The thing is to be brave and be distinguishable."
Shapiro applied his reporting requirements to a story on Paula Jones taken during his time working at Dateline. "The story had trouble written all over it," he said.
"But at the end of the day, a lot of you probably don't remember this story," he said. According to Shapiro, a Dateline reporting mistake would have been more memorable.
Following his lecture, students and faculty asked many questions on the press' role in the modern, technological world. Shapiro gave his thoughts on Fox News, media polarity, and entertainment as news.
"The media is splintering a little bit," he said, referring to the new trend of networks tailoring themselves towards certain audiences, as Fox News has done. "We're not like in England, where there's a Labour paper and you know what you're reading. Here, we are broadcasters."
In his assessment of the Fox News phenomenon, Shapiro compared politics and sports. "Fox did very well at the Republican Convention, it's like watching it on the home team channel," he said. "But they would totally disagree with me."
Shapiro alluded to CNN's Crossfire in his criticism of the huge media polarity. "It gets to be boring after a while," he said. "I want to hear from passionate people, but I want them to be smart and not be putting on an act. We divide the country into red and blue, but there are a whole lot of other ways to separate it."
In order to compete with popular figures in entertainment for front page headlines, Shapiro said reporters must pay particular attention to their stories' angles. "OJ captured the media because it was a huge racial issue," he said. "If [the media] is smart, [it] will find all the interesting angles."
