Categories: OLD Media Moves

Blaming the audience is a bad idea

Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review thinks that Heidi Moore of “Marketplace” shouldn’t have criticized one of her listeners who got upset about Wall Street wanting to cut government subsidies for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

Chittum writes, ” One problem is that passing along what (powerful) ‘people are saying’ is only part of the journalist’s job. You can’t really expect your readers—who, unlike us, aren’t paid to sit and read news and commentary all day long—to figure out what’s really going on by telling them “X said we need to this about the debt,” or “I have talked to a lot of people on Wall Street and … they say they won’t take this deficit-cutting talk seriously until they see the government cutting programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

“So, is there another point of view? Yes! Maybe that’s what the listener, not unreasonably, was asking.”

He later writes, “Moore’s been an ardent defender of the business press in the past, particularly over whether it served readers well in the runup to the crisis. We’ve had our disagreements and that’s okay.

“But even those who have paid attention to this story haven’t been well served by the press. And I doubt you’d find many readers or listeners who would tell you different.

“So while ripping the audience is almost always a bad idea, it’s really something when coverage has fallen well short.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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View Comments

Joey says:
August 10, 2011 at 4:18 pm
(1) I love Heidi.
(2) Readers complain about sloppy journalism only when they suddenly realize they weren't paying attention. Journalists complain about uninformed readers all the time.
(3) Journalism critics complain for a living, and prove that some things in the universe have no function. This whole tempest is just a waste of hot air we could be using for Point 2.