Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Journalism

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

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In December of 2016, shortly before the presidential inauguration, a story appeared in the Washington Post about an electric utility in Vermont being hacked by Russians, threatening the entire U.S. electric grid. The version of the story that is now on the Post’s web site is different from the original. That’s because, over the course of a few weeks, the story was discovered to be largely wrong.

The electric grid was not threatened. The utility involved was not hacked; what was hacked was a laptop of a utility employee. The original story was even more unusual because it had no reference or comment by the utility itself, which had not been contacted by the reporter. It’s standard, basic reporting that all journalists are (supposedly) taught: you contact the victim and ask for a comment or response. If none is forthcoming, you say “the subject declined to comment.” 

You write a story about a utility being hacked by Russians, threatening the U.S. electric grid, and you don’t ask the utility for its explanation of what happened? And you heard about the story in the first place from an anonymous official in the outgoing presidential administration?

The story did fit the Russian collusion and election interference narrative that had rapidly taken hold in the U.S. news media. It went something like this: the 2016 presidential election had been stolen from Hillary Clinton; the Russians had subverted Facebook and flooded the site with fake news and advertising to make Donald Trump was elected. Over the course of next many months and years, this became one of the leading narrative strains in American journalism, fed by leaks all over Washington, including by Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who publicly claimed there was “incontrovertible proof” of Trump’s collusion with the Russians. 

Except there wasn’t. The Mueller investigation found no such evidence, despite headlines for months. The Steele Dossier, published in all its salacious glory by Buzzfeed, turns out to be fiction. The Washington Post has corrected and removed parts of two stories regarding the infamous Dossier. It now appears that the Dossier was paid for by operatives associated with the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign. 

To be fair to the media, it took a lot more than the press to keep this narrative fed and alive. Like an FBI that knew better. Like cheerleaders from the CIA and National Security Agency. And like a lot more.

You might hate or dislike Donald Trump for a lot of reasons, including those that are valid, but Russian collusion is no longer “operative.”

The news media put the United States through political and cultural upheaval for four years by advancing the collusion narrative. Trump Derangement Syndrome was and is not fiction; the national news media is Exhibit No. 1. The media was so besotted with its hatred of Trump that it abandoned its own standards of integrity. There were opportunities to do reality checks, and they were disregarded. The media took the brakes off and left them off, and now the vehicle has crashed.

Historians will likely spend decades sorting through the wreckage of trust. In my own case, there are columnists I now routinely ignore. I discount any news story with a Washington Post, New York Times, or Associated Press byline; if I read them, I deconstruct the sentences and phrases while I read to identify the bias. CNN and MSNBC pushed the collusion narrative harder than almost everyone, but they weren’t alone. 

In 2018, the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting was shared by The New York Times and Washington Post for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

How would you like to win a top prize for something that never happened? How would you like to be on the committee that determined who won that award? How would like to be among the millions or readers who followed those stories and trusted them?

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

Photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

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When we moved to St. Louis in 1979, the city had two daily newspapers – the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The Post-Dispatch leaned left editorially, and the Globe-Democrat leaned right. Both papers did a good job of local news coverage; generally, opinion and editorializing were confined to the editorial and op-ed pages, or an opinion columnist featured on the first or second page. Another source of local news were the weekly suburban newspapers, like the West County Journal and South County Journal. Along with local TV news, St. Louis was well-served with local news coverage. 

Fast forward 40 years. The Globe-Democrat disappeared for good in 1987. The Post-Dispatch acquired the Suburban Journals, and they, too, disappeared. TV news usually covers what it’s always covered – shootings, car wrecks, and other highly visual news stories. The Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to Lee Enterprises. 

The Post-Dispatch still sat atop the news in St. Louis, but it was a much-diminished position. From about 2005 onward, the news editorial staff (and presumably other staffs on the paper) shrank. The newspaper closed its Washington bureau. While the number of pages dropped, what was left was increasingly filled with wire service copy. Today, a reader typically finds more stories about national news, provided by Associated Press and the Washington Post. Local music reviews are still written by local reporters, but many movie and book reviews come from syndicated sources. 

St. Louis is not atypical. For most other metropolitan areas, one newspaper has survived. In some places, like New Orleans, the daily paper is not printed every day but is available online. 

Three communications academics have been studying what’s been happening. Joshua Darr is at LSU, Matthew Hitt is at Colorado State University, and Johanna Dunaway is at Texas A&M. The three have been studying the state of journalism for some time. One day, Darr discovered a reference to some of their work. The editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, had made a rather startling announcement. The editor has seen the work the three academics were doing, and she was intrigued enough to try an experiment. For the month of July in 2019, the Sun would publish nothing about national news on its editorial and op-ed pages. No op-ed columns, no editorials, no editorial cartoons, and no letters to the editor would be printed if they concerned national news. Instead, the focus would be local news.

The three academics swung into action; this was an unexpected opportunity to test their theories in a real-world situation. They set up a study, with another regional newspaper serving as the comparison. 

The Sun focused its opinion pages on local issues. And what happened? Readers engaged with local issues. People started listening to each other. People respectfully disagreed and debated with each other.

And what was happening in July of 2019 on the national scene? Robert Mueller testified to Congress about his report on the Russian collusion investigation. Democratic primary debates were held near the beginning and end of the month. President Trump was holding rallies. But the opinion pages of the sun focused on local news. One indication of what happened: references to Trump went from about one third of all editorials, letters, and columns to zero. 

You can read a short summary of the study’s findings at Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. The study itself, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, is available at Amazon. 

What The Desert Sun showed, lending evidence to the theories of the three academics, was that focusing on local news reduced political polarization. Now consider all those news deserts – places with no news media or newspapers (which are growing in number) and those, like St. Louis, where national news dominates the opinion pages. A focus on national news may be great for the bottom lines of The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal, but it’s impoverishing local communities and adding to political polarization. 

I thought about what the Post-Dispatch’s editorial and op-ed pages, and various opinion columns in other parts of the newspaper, would look like if they focused on local news. No more snarky editorial cartoons about Republicans, Trump, and conservatives in general. No more Leonard Pitts and Eugene Robinson wringing their hands over anything remotely conservative and championing anything the Democrats might do, no matter how ridiculous or damaging. No more Dana Milbank, the columnist who coordinated his 2016 articles with the Clinton Campaign and got caught doing it. No Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, with his screeching hysteria about Republicans, Trump, and evangelicals who won’t listen to him. No more local editorial writer Kevin McDermott aiming for the National Snark Writing Award. 

Instead, we might see people writing about how to grow St. Louis. We might participate in discussions and debates about crime, our dysfunctional county government, redistricting of wards in the City of St. Louis, and how some schools managed to function during the COVID-19 pandemic when so many closed. We could take a hard look at how public education is organized and funded. We might find out why so many communities (like my own) allowed street maintenance to fall way down the priority list.

In other words, we might learn about and participate in the things that really matter in our day-to-day lives. 

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Top photograph by Waldemar Brandt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Rise of News Deserts

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In 1970, Congress passed legislation to create the Newspaper Preservation Act. The act exempted “joint operating agreements” (JOAs) from antitrust law, and in effect allowed two competing newspapers to share the same business operations – printing presses, buildings, advertising operations, distribution methods – as long as the news operations remained separate and competitive. It was touted as a way to preserve competition between newspapers, especially in cities with two (or more) newspapers. The legislation had been introduced after the Supreme Court found a joint operating agreement in Tucson, Arizona, to be a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

The intention was (seemingly) laudable – preserve newspaper competition. What followed was very different from the stated intention. Other forces were at work. The economic foundation of traditional journalism was changing rather profoundly, and this was in the days before the internet. Joint operating agreements proliferated across the United States; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat operated under one. But St. Louis couldn’t support two newspapers, and eventually the Globe-Democrat, after being sold, shut down in 1986. 

One newspaper in a JOA closing operations became almost normal. Looking back, people who’ve studied what happened have raised the question of who benefitted from the JOAs and the closing of newspapers. The answer is no surprise; it was the big newspaper chains. 

Independent newspapers have become an increasingly rare enterprise. In practice, what happens is that news takes on a sameness, with the same national stories replicated across the landscape, and local news diminished. The internet didn’t cause the development, but it certainly advanced it. I can remember the shock of seeing the Shreveport, Louisiana Times sounding exactly like what you’d find in St. Louis, Detroit, or anywhere else – the same wire service stories, the same columnists, the same editorial slant. Here is St. Louis, even book reviews and movie reviews are purchased from syndicates. 

The upshot is that local news, and issues of local importance, get short shrift. The term “news desert” has come to be applied to the death of weekly and community newspapers, but it has equal application to the subject of local news as well. (Few realize this, but the pages and the headlines for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now owned by Lee Enterprises, are assembled in another city.) I suppose we should feel grateful that it’s still in the United States; it could be China. Lee, headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, publishes some 75 newspapers and touts its commitment to local news. 

When journalists talk about news deserts, they are usually referring to the widespread decline of weekly newspapers in the United States. In the past 15 years, some 20 percent of weekly and community newspapers have disappeared, according to The New York Times. Thousands of communities across the country have no local newspaper. No coverage of local council meetings or school boards. No coverage of local crime. No coverage of local politicians or elections. Where newspapers have managed to survive, they resemble shadows of their former selves. 

This is true even of many newspapers in cities like New Orleans, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Not that long ago, the St. Louis region had two major newspapers, a chain of suburban journals, and a host of community newspapers. Now it’s one newspaper, owned by a chain and usually dominated by national news. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat closed; the Suburban Journals were bought by the Post-Dispatch, their function officially “incorporated” but in practice eliminated.

We still have local television news, but TV news can’t do what newspapers do, and that’s to report in depth and detail. TV news focuses on what grabs attention – like crime, car wrecks, and the weather. And for TV news to cover something as mundane as a zoning change isn’t going to happen, no matter how important that change might be to a group of residents.

News deserts are of two kinds – the disappearance of newspapers in countless communities, and the disappearance of local news in what newspapers have survived. I can still find local news in the t. Louis Post-Dispatch, but more often than not I find a lot more stories from elsewhere, produced by the Associated Press and / or syndicated from the Washington Post.

This “death of the local” is more than a loss of familiar news and community- mindedness. The evidence is beginning to mount that the end of local news is contributing significantly to political polarization in the United States. We’ll look at that next week.

Related: A Conversation about Journalism.

Top photograph by Cason Asher via Unsplash. Used with permission.