In today’s out-of-the-ordinary presidential campaign, voters need all the education and information available, and a former CNN senior White House correspondent spoke on campus last night to give it to them.
Jessica Yellin spoke to a group of over 200 students, staff and community members in the Michel Student Center Ballroom, sharing her experiences within the field of political journalism and addressing changing media coverage in politics.
Yellin, who has covered a variety of political topics, covering President Barack Obama’s campaign and presidency, said her experience in White House reporting allowed her to address the role of a journalist in relation to political coverage.
“The role of a journalist in society is to be a human being who takes your experiences and your knowledge and your eyes and observations out into the world and holds our leaders accountable,” Yellin said. “[A journalist] reflects our world back to other people and speaks truthfully about what you hear and see.”
Yellin said voters today find themselves without enough knowledge on candidate’s policies or stances.
“I am not surprised that voters right now seem not that informed,” Yellin said. “I am not surprised that news channels are not doing a very good job of reporting what I call actual information … meaning facts and explanations and context. And I am not surprised that we have ended up where we are in part as a result of all of this.”
The problem stems from networks seeking ratings and entertainment value rather than presenting facts and analyses, according to Yellin.
“Our editorial meetings, which were once, ‘What is the news today? What is the most important thing?’ are now, ‘How are we going to increase ratings and profits by our next quarterly meeting?’” Yellin said.
Yellin also explained the media’s manner of reporting Donald Trump’s campaign.
“For the last year plus, the media handed the microphone over to Donald Trump unchecked and unmediated,” Yellin said. “Whatever your politics, this isn’t a Democrat-Republican thing, this is a TV-ratings thing. Donald Trump is killer-good for ratings. And so a number of news networks just let him have a platform to talk without reporters intervening, fact checking or qualifying what he said. After [he] got into the primaries, people started to think, ‘Huh, he’s winning. I wonder why that is happening?’’’
According to Yellin, the networks’ desires for ratings has caught up with them and how they have reported on Trump in recent weeks.
“It wasn’t until recently when it looked like he might win that the networks decided that wait, we have to start doing our job and let reporters report,” Yellin said. “They’ve thrown so many resources and reporting on him that it actually does appear as something that looks like bias … the fact that they back loaded their reporting to these last days makes the media outlets often look as though they are now trying to tank Donald Trump when in fact what they are doing is unleashing their reporters to do the job they should have done all along.”
However, Yellin said she is optimistic that the millennial generation has the ability to make a change in the political media landscape.
“It is about finding the voices you trust, the people you trust,” Yellin said. “It is in your hands, you can do something about it. Either get organized to change the media institutions or you can help create the new institutions because I think you guys are the generation that is going to save the free press of America.”
Sara Netzley, chair of the Robison Lecture committee, said Yellin brought up a lot of great topics for students to think about.
“I love that Jessica Yellin was positive about the change that your generation can make,” Netzley said. “I think so often millennials get such a negative message from the media and from older generations, and she was so optimistic about what you could do and what could happen.”
Students who attended the lecture said Yellin made great points.
“I thought it was great. I always kind of laugh because my dad says, ‘The mainstream media is so biased, they don’t care about the truth,’” Mackenzie Payne, a senior English major, said. “On one hand, I always thought, ‘Dad, you’re just old and don’t really know what you’re talking about.’ But I see now it wasn’t just my dad being a conservative … She made really good points about how [news outlets] care about the bottom line and the profit more than what’s necessarily the most important thing to report. That’s something I don’t think we necessarily talk about enough.”
When an audience member asked what to do if you don’t want to vote Clinton or Trump, Yellin stressed the importance of voting no matter what.
“My advice is, vote,” Yellin said. “There is nothing more important that you can do as a citizen.”
