What They Left Out

A conversation with friend and colleague Charles Madigan about how social media is affecting our society.

Charlie: So, Jim, thanks to the Washington Post we now know there was plenty going on behind the scenes in the January Sixth House Committee that never reached the public until now. And it’s a very telling piece of information. As dramatic as it might seem under the headline: “What the January Sixth probe found out about social media but didn’t report” it’s nothing new to people who have worked as reporters and editors in traditional media. We were the gate keepers in our era. But today’s internet journalists are the sluice-gate keepers. They open the gates and whatever they think of comes rolling out.

photo by Camilo Jimenez

It's easy to see why the Committee stepped gingerly around this subject. The first reason would be that it would carry them deep into the bowels of a festering Republican Party that is having trouble deciding where it wants to be on the “right-wrong” spectrum. Former President Trump obviously loved the social media that praised him and put him on a pedestal, even if he had to buy it and produce it himself. The second would be that it would squeeze them like a vise on an issue they have never been comfortable about: Freedom of speech.

Traditional media was not very confused about that responsibility. It had to be provably right before it was published. Political correctness and the need not to offend anyone rarely played a role in those kinds of decisions. But here in the Brave New World, those standards are not agreed on, and certainly not discussed enough by the people who publish all the time. How do we find a way to bring this problem under control? Or do we have to do that at all?

Jim: When you raise the legitimate question about what kind of information should be shared with the public, I get nervous when I hear the word “control.” There’s no question that social media lacks the standards set when we worked on newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Like any media organization, we had many readers who didn’t like what we published, but they knew the newspaper embraced values and standards that Tribune journalists cherished. Many of those values were literally carved into the walls of Tribune Tower. In other words, when someone bought the Chicago Tribune, they knew what they were getting, warts and all. The news standards that prevailed had evolved over decades of trial and error. 

Although social media surfaced when we were still working at the Tribune, it’s a relatively new phenomenon historically. The various sites and propaganda platforms remind me of the pamphleteers that prevailed in journalism’s early days. Would some anonymous “content” guard at Twitter or Facebook have published Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” call to arms in the dawn of our democracy? 

We raise delicate questions when we talk about slapping controls on the media.

Who exercises that control? How much is enough? When does it slip into censorship or the abridgment of the First Amendment, which, in my mind, is the most important one? I think we must call upon the social media companies to adopt some editorial standards and clearly disclose them to the public. The public can then decide whether they accept or reject the likes of Twitter boss Elon Musk.  

Although I applaud the work of the House January Sixth committee, the Washington Post report shows the committee clearly looked the other way when it came to the role of social media in fostering the violence. That’s really a shame. They had an opportunity to stimulate some sorely needed debate on a crucial issue.

Charlie: In my early journalism career, particularly at UPI, my colleagues and I would often sit in our lonely bureau in the basement of Penn Center in Philadelphia and debate what we should and should not report. One stupid mistake I made was to write a radio brief about the police stationing snipers at prime locations around an airliner that was being hijacked. It took about thirty seconds for the cops to call and ask whether we were trying to to get everyone killed. I said no and took down that story.

Just to make it clear about who was in control, a couple or hours later a canine patrol that was usually very friendly stopped in and parked a big German Shepherd right by my knees and told him if I ever did that again he should just bite my balls off. It was a very funny moment, but it made me think twice every time I sat down to type. That was not prior restraint, just a prudent warning with big teeth attached. The most important thing was thinking about what you were doing. Bloggers and their like generally work alone and there’s no one to talk to about what is okay. Maybe a clear set of standards would help with that.

Jim: I’m sure they would help. Social media practices extend far beyond Twitter. The ethos adopted by the companies behind these sites infects the practices of many journalists and contaminates the craft. Social media’s mantra seems to be: We don’t report, we repeat. 

Rumors, inaccuracies and unchecked propaganda flourish in the stream of content that flows across the internet. The January Sixth committee had an extraordinary opportunity to delve into the practices that contaminates the news and undermines American democracy. Unfortunately, as the Post documented, the committee took a pass. At some point, the public must deliver to the captains of social media that age-old journalistic message infamous in the Tribune newsroom: If your mother told you, check it out. 

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.