Madison is not a news desert, like so many cities, journalist Judith Valente observed last week during her Upper House presentation on The State of the Media Today & What We Can Do About It. Madison area residents are served by more than one newspaper as well as multiple broadcast news outlets.
But even cities that have newspapers are not well-served when distant corporate owners are obsessed with the bottom line. “When profits aren’t there, reporters lose their jobs and truth suffers,” she said.
Valente, who has reporter for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, public broadcasting, and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, is clearly disturbed by the current media climate. “The people who condemn the press have a powerful advocate, the president of the United States,” she observed, as she credited the press for helping expose problem areas in our culture, such as the abuses within the Catholic church, the Flint water crisis, and the celebrity abuses of the #MeToo movement.
Valente still reports for a public radio station in Illinois, writes for several Catholic publications, leads retreats, and is a lay associate of the Benedictine monastery Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. She said that part of the problem with the many news deserts in cities across the country is that religion news reporting has gone from not all that great to almost nonexistent.
“Faith is the foundation that undergirds the lives of so many Americans,” she said. “Religion is worthy of the same kind of specialized reporting that is given to politics, business, etc.” Many of the faith oriented stories she has covered have gone against conventional wisdom in one way or another and have been stories that make a difference in people’s lives.
She acknowledged some of the sins of main stream media that have been compounded by the climate of social media, such as the recent mishandled report of the incident involved Kentucky Catholic high school students on the national mall in Washington, DC. “The narrative there was more nuanced and complex that was first seen,” she said. “Journalists need to get their facts straight and not report stories until all the facts are checked out.”
She’s concerned that too many journalists are going on talk shows to give their opinions and damaging their credibility.
But she also said that we news consumers need to be more discerning about where we get our news and demand better reporting from our news sources. “Support your local newspaper,” she said. “And don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and talk to the editor. A lot of things happen because w’ere asleep as a nation, as news consumers.”