The local media should take the “high road” when confronted by abusive public officials, according to Professor Alan Miller of the Ohio State University (OSU).
Miller, who is also the Managing Editor of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio, made the comment on Wednesday at a public lecture entitled “The Media is Not Dead” at the Theatre Guild Playhouse, Kingston.
The statement was in response to a question from an attendee on how the media could report positively amidst the negativity and attacks from public officials.
“My advice to the media … is to take the high road. Don’t play at the same level …,” Miller said.
He added that, having dealt with city officials in his community who did not always like what he wrote, he learnt that it was his responsibility to avoid the games of “tit for tat”.
“They can call me whatever they want once they give me the information I need. That’s the way I look at it. I just think we as the media have to take the high road; you can’t leave yourself undone but get some thick skin and go out get the truth,” Miller urged.
Addressing the theme of the event, the journalism teacher said that rumours of the death of the print media with the upsurge of the internet were “exaggerated”.
“If your question were modified to ask me whether newspapers were sick the answer would be yes. Is it fatal, the answer is no one knows for sure,” he said. Miller said the problem facing newsrooms was not the loss of readers but rather finding a way to get people to pay for online content. According to him, the Dispatch has some 300,000 Sunday subscribers and had over 44 million page views online in the first quarter of this year.
Miller said what could prove fatal for the print media was the dwindling advertising dollars since advertisers across the board were finding the marketplace challenging. Another effect of this, he pointed out, was the reduction in the number of journalists worldwide with as many as 15,000 newspaper workers losing their jobs in the US in recent years.
“The loss of those journalists has resulted in a lowering of the public’s knowledge base.
A polarised society that is allowed to go uninformed is one that’s headed for disaster in my view,” he stated. He posited that newspapers were “a form of glue” that holds communities together by allowing people to share each other’s losses and successes.
Miller has just finished conducting a USAID funded two-week print production workshop for reporters under the aegis of the University of Guyana’s Centre for Communication Studies and OSU.
