Informing the News by Thomas E Patterson

Informing the News by Thomas E Patterson

As the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters "if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news." Today's journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong.

Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion and debate suffer when citizens are misinformed about current affairs, as is increasingly the case. Though the failures of today's communication system cannot be blamed solely on the news media, they are part of the problem, and the best hope for something better.

Patterson proposes "knowledge-based journalism" as a corrective. Unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources. In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education. The book speaks not only to journalists but to all who are concerned about the integrity of the information on which America's democracy depends.

Patterson is the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government He was previously a distinguished professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship. He was educated at South Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota, where he got his Ph.D., and grew up in a small Minnesota hamlet on the Iowa and South Dakota borders. Tom is the author of six books and dozens of articles on the media and elections. He is currently the director of the Vanishing Voter research at the Kennedy School of Government, which has been widely used in the media and on college campuses.

When President Bill Clinton declared that every politician and journalist should read his book, 'Out of Order,' it gained national notice. 'The Mass Media Election,' published in 1980, won a 'Choice' award for Best Academic Book, 1980-81. Another of Patterson's works, 'The Unseeing Eye' (1976), was recently named one of the fifty most influential books in the field of public opinion by the American Society for Public Opinion Research. A study of White House communication and a study of the function of the news media in Western democracies are among his ongoing projects.

Major funding from the National Science Foundation, the Markle Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts have supported his research.