“Should the Government Determine What Counts as High Quality Journalism?” Ideas Arena: The Future of News. The Economist, vol. 430, no: 9130, 16 Feb. 2019.
Summary and Review
The article begins with a summary of journalism’s current state:
more news publications exist than ever
traditional news organizations are struggling, especially in print
most people get their news online
most people get their news through social media
social media algorithms prioritize headlines that get more clicks over quality coverage.
These changes to journalism have decreased civic engagement at a time when it’s needed more than ever, according to a report by English economist and former Economist journalist Dame Fraces Cairncross. To remedy that, Caircross recommends governments provide financial support for two areas where journalism is essential to civic engagement: reporting that “investigates corruption and the abuse of power” and reporting that recounts local government functioning, such as “planning meetings” and “trials in local courts.” These types of coverage are often among the first cut when journalism organizations struggle financially because they don’t generate enough revenue to cover their high cost of production.
Caircross’s most surprising recommendation is that democracies employ “a regulator” to enforce a “news quality obligation”—a system for alerting users to inaccurate or harmful content--on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Caircross's recommendation alarmed many, including Rasmus Nielson at Oxford’s Reuters Institute, who commented, “This is really unprecedented. I can’t think of another democracy in which there is a call for regulatory oversight of what constitutes ‘quality’ in the news.”
The vague nature of Cairncross’s recommendation has created problems for its implementation. Making a government or platform regulate content creates conflicts of interest, such as leaders using their regulator to promote their political party's stances and suppress their oppositions' stances. Microsoft got caught in one such a conflict when the third-party regulator it employed for Edge flagged MailOnline, the The Daily Mail’s online outlet, as an inaccurate source of news. Mail’s leadership complained, and Microsoft removed the warning. As illustrated by the example, questions remain despite Caircross’s recommendation: Should an entity be charged with regulating online news? If so, whom and how? What conflicts of interest might that create? What penalties should that entity be capable of enacting?
This article provides a clear, concise overview of how complex news reporting, editing, and consuming have become. It serves as a jumping off point for discussions about free speech and access to information important for courses in journalism, civics, history, computer science, speech, and political science, along with any course that teaches critical thinking and information/media literacy.
Lesson Plan: Should Government Regulate Journalism Discussion
Have students read and summarize (in 100 words or more) “Should the Government Determine What Counts as High Quality Journalism?”, either in or outside of class. Put students in groups of 3-4 and have each group combine its individually-written summaries to create one cohesive summary that they write on the whiteboard. Facilitate a discussion in which students compare and contrast the summaries, noting what each included, excluded, and emphasized. Have students vote by putting a tally mark beside the summary they think is the best with the caveat that they can't vote for their own group's summary. Facilitate a discussion about the winning summary and why students voted for it.
Evaluation of Discussion
Use the Synchronous Discussion Rubric to evaluate students' work.
Lesson Plan: Regulating News Quality Discussion
Have students read and summarize (in 100 words or more) “Should the Government Determine What Counts as High Quality Journalism?”, either in or outside of class. Then, facilitate a discussion using the questions below.
Should any person or organization be charged with publicly rating the quality of news? If not, why? If so, who should do it?
Write three or more criteria an entity should use to rate the quality of news.
If an entity existed to publicly rate the quality of news, what power(s) should it have? For example: flagging content with a warning? removing content from the Internet? limiting access to flagged content? putting age restrictions on access to content?
What benefits would society gain from having a regulator of news quality?
What harm would be inflicted on society by having a regulator of news quality?
Evaluation of Discussion
Use the Synchronous Discussion Rubric or Asynchronous Discussion Rubric to evaluate students' work.
Lesson Plan: Evaluating News Quality Activity
Have students read and summarize (in 100 words or more) “Should the Government Determine What Counts as High Quality Journalism?”, either in or outside of class. Put students in groups of 3-4 and have each group create three or more criteria for evaluating the quality of news coverage and write their criteria on whiteboards. Facilitate a discussion in which students compare and contrast the criteria. Have students vote by putting a tally mark beside the criterion they think is most important. Put together a list of criteria ranked by number of votes.
Give each small group two short news stories about the same event. The stories can be the same for all groups or different. If time is limited, use the same story for everyone. Ask the groups to apply the list of criteria to both stories and come to the following conclusions for each:
Rank its quality on a scale from 1-5 (1 being lowest quality and 5 being highest quality). Explain your ranking.
If you were the entity in charge of publicly evaluating news quality, which of the following actions would you take and why
let the article appear as-is with no comment or warning?
let the article appear as-is with no comment or warning but prevent it from being shared by platform users?
let the article appear as-is but with a warning about its quality?
let the article appear as-is but limit users' access to it?
change the article and let it appear and be shared freely?
remove the article from the platform?
Evaluation of Activity Participation
Use the Synchronous Activity Rubric to evaluate students' contributions.
Use the Summary Rubric to evaluate summaries separately from the in-class activity.