For the past few weeks I have been noticing the different techniques journalists use depending on what publication they are writing for. It is clear that there is a fine line between a healthy level of skepticism and cynicism. I have found that it is often hard to detect when there is a healthy level of skepticism and not as hard when an article is downright cynical.
While emerging myself in all of these news websites I have noticed the bar set for quality news tends to fluctuate depending on the site. For example, The New York Times has their bar set very high when it comes to the quality and content of their news. However, the news website Gawker does not seem to have the same goals with their articles. The stories on Gawker are often short, easy to read, humorous, and they appear to be geared towards a younger audience. It seems that when the bar for good news is set at a lower level, the line between skepticism and cynicism becomes completely blurred and sometimes non-existent.
All of the articles that I have read on Gawker have a high level of skepticism and many of the articles reek with cynicism. One of the articles I chose this week was about students at a high school who made a sign for a basketball game reading, “You mad bro!?” The sign was said to be based on Cam’ron’s remarks towards Bill O’Reilly on the O’Reilly Factor. The episode of the show quickly became a Youtube phenomenon and the remarks (which included “you mad bro”) became a running joke among anyone who had seen the clip. The kids who had posted the saying on the sign got in trouble with the school for “racial intimidation”. If this article had been covered by The New York Times, which if it had would have been approached from a different angle, the story would have taken the matter very seriously. The Times would have remained neutral on the subject and no bias’s would have been easily detected. This is the closing remarks on the Gawker article,
“ it seems unlikely that the Kirtland students intended racial animus in the sign, though, high school students being racist? Stranger things have happened! (The kids will likely get punished anyway, for "lack of sportsmanship," or something.)”
To say that this statement has a high level of skepticism would be an understatement. It is just about to fall over the boarder between skepticism and cynicism and plummet head first into cynicism’s side. Although this leans more towards cynicism, based on the other articles I read on Gawker this one seems to still be on the boarder.
The other article I chose to examine was on Gawker as well. The story was about a congressmen who claims he spends two hundred thousand dollars a year on food for his family. I would hope that this statement would raise a level of skepticism in anyone. Gawker however took this statement and ran into the land of cynicism a hundred miles an hour. The article concludes with this quote,
“See? This guy's barely keeping his chin above water! He can even hold onto a lousy 600 grand without his enormous family of ravenous truffle addicts whittling it down to just $400,000. So how many kids does it take to consume four times the U.S. median household income in food each year? None. According to his bio, Fleming is "married to his wife Cindy for 30 years and the father of four adult children."
Maybe he sends them each like 12 gourmet fruit baskets a day, every day.” Although this makes for a good read, this high level of cynicism takes away from the quality of the news article. In Gawkers case, this is fine because they are not trying to get a highly intellectual crowd returning to their site everyday to read their stories. At least this is what one can assume by reading anything on the website. Although I like Gawker, and I have it on my list for sites I will return to week after week, I think this style of writing raises some problems.
If the reader is not approaching these articles with an open mind, their mind will be made up for them after reading the story. If I wasn’t looking at these articles and being critical of them, if I was just another young adult visiting Gawkers site and using it solely as my way of getting news, this could be a problem. These articles don’t give the reader a lot of room to take the information, digest it, and decide how they feel about what has been presented to them. I think that ability to make up my mind on what I’m reading is one of the main purposes of reading news in the first place. It allows for one to develop a healthy level of skepticism on their own, and by teaching them to have this skepticism they are able to approach situations in the real world the same way.
However, I also think it is important to have sites like these where news is easily accessible to young people. Nothing on this site is an intimidating read. Maybe if Gawker added a debate section where different journalists could post articles on the same matter, but approach them from different angles, it would help young people take more away from the stories they have read. The journalists could keep the same sense of humor and level of cynicism, however the reader would be getting the story from different sides. In order to make this work, Gawker would also need to raise the bar for “good” news, which doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.
My List
The New York Times
The Gaurdian
The New York Times Magazine
Gawker
The Star Tribune
The Chicago Tribune
The Huffington Post
Politico
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