Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

journalism

“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

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Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and co-hosts Newsweek’s podcast “The Debate.” Before joining Newsweek, she was the opinion editor of Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in the United States. She’s written for The New York Times and Washington Post. She’s appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and NBC. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is not the person you would expect to have written a book like Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. But she did.

Bad News is not a book written from a conservative, right-wing, or alt-right perspective. It’s not a hastily compiled mishmash of everything that’s wrong with the news media. Instead, Ungar-Sargon has published a carefully researched, well-documented, and well-written story of where American news media has gone seriously wrong and how that is harming the United States.

If the problem could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: the business model of the news media has shifted from reporting the news to giving its demographic the perspective that it wants. Some call this reporting the narrative instead of the news. Whatever it’s called, it’s making a significant contribution, perhaps the most significant, to destroying trust it itself, in American Institutions, and what Americans have believed about their country. And that has implications far beyond the 50 states

This is what Ungar-Sargon documents in Bad News:

The people who are the reporters and editors have not been working-class for two generations. The economic and social status of reporters changed fundamentally, and the author points to the Watergate scandal as one of the starting points.

The major news media have abandoned the working class, not unlike the Democratic Party did beginning with the Clinton Administration. The working class is still large group of people, and Fox News isn’t so much the conservative media outlier as it is the channel that covers what the working class cares about.

Social media and the internet, far from “democratizing” society, have been the mechanisms by which the major news media centered their efforts on narrative instead of news – and turned the narrative into a business model.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

The media’s coverage of racial issues fits its audience’s understanding about race and itself, but it is completely out of kilter with what most Americans believe or experience. One example: 81 percent of Black Americans do not want the police defunded. Ungar-Sargon argues that the media is besotted with race because a discussion of class, which she sees is the real issue, would undermine the media’s own position.

The media’s cartoonish coverage of Jews, crime, and Trump voters exemplify what is happening. She doesn’t say it exactly this way, but Donald Trump is like the drug to the news media’s addiction. It needs Trump, and not only to prop up its ratings and subscriptions but also to be the ever-present Bogeyman out to destroy America as the media understands it.

She doesn’t present a laundry list of how to fix the problem; the solution will take generations. But she does suggest things that Americans can do to stop the media from exercising the negative influence it has. And it’s not things like cancel your newspaper subscription.

Bad News is an important book, one likely to be ignored by the news media. But the rest of need to read it and understand it. It’s that important.

Related:

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

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A work colleague in a Latin American country sent an email, asking for help. A manufacturing plant had been proposed, and while most people wanted it, a small number of radical environmentalists did not. There had been protests, road blockades, and rallies. And then, when it appeared that both the company and the authorities were going ahead, the ante was raised.

Using anonymous Twitter accounts, the protestors targeted the company’s spokesman. Scores of people were tweeting. A bounty was placed on the spokesman head — $5000 US was being offered for the spokesman dead or alive. And the tweets included his home address. Stripes were published in the local media.

I was asked to contact Twitter, which I did immediately. Then, as now, Twitter and the other social media giants were difficult to reach. They were, and are, all about communication, except when you needed to communicate with them. The company spokesman and his family went into hiding. Twitter responded two days after being contacted. The tweets, Twitter said, did not violate their community standards and would remain. 

Think about that for a moment. A US-based company was allowing its platform to be used to threaten and possibly accomplish violence against an individual.

I should mention this happened in 2014. This continued to be Twitter’s policy until about a year later, when its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, received a death threat. On Twitter. Overnight, death threats were deemed violations of community standards. It’s amazing how that works.

In a very short period of time, roughly five or six years, social media had gone from the “great democratic experiment to give power to everyone” to something darker, more threatening, and more dangerous. The first few years had been something almost euphoric; very few people today would say anything about social media is euphoric. We’ve seen its ugly side, and we’ve seen it over and over again. Today it’s called cancel culture. 

But it’s more insidious that people ganging up on someone online. What is worrisome is that it’s becoming embedded as policy with the social media giants. The concern, usually expressed by conservatives, is that a progressive / leftist mentality guides the social media platforms when they determine what’s true, what’s false, what is “missing context,” and what’s “fake news.” The Wall Street Journal took a look and determined that left-wing factcheckers were controlling the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawsuit by conservative journalist against Facebook brought forth a really curious statement in Facebook’s court filings – that its factchecking was nothing more than opinion. I wouldn’t call that the best defense. 

In general, Big Media is comfortable with the factchecking done by the social media platforms. That’s no surprise if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others are aligned with your own narrative and view of the world. 

Consider what happened with the Covington Kids in January 2019. The power of big media and social media converged to destroy a bunch of teenaged boys whom they believed epitomized the prevailing media narrative. As The Atlantic pointed out, the media botched the story, and the damage to their credibility has been lasting. Not to mention costly. On that Friday and Saturday, I sat horrified while I watched online friends on Facebook and Twitter hysterically embrace the role of lynch mob.

Social media are powerful and influential. According to Pew Research, more than half of the people on Twitter get their news from that platform. For Facebook, the number has been declining to slightly less than a third. My own experience has been to stop considering Twitter as a source for hard or political news and discount most of what I see labeled as news on Facebook. I follow virtually no news accounts on Instagram or MeWe. 

We have to learn how to assert, or reassert, some control over what is called news.

Related:

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

When Journalism Began to Change

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When I read Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, I was struck with how much his experience at the newspaper tracked with my own experience in corporate communications. The worldwide web and what followed was upending his world at the newspaper at the same time it had begun to change mine – and for the same reasons. We began to deal with it earlier, while The Guardian and other newspapers were affected more quickly, but we were grappling with many of the same issues and at roughly the same time (1995-2015).

I left corporate communications for a time – almost four years. I felt worked to death, spun off, and finally laid off, and I was done. I set up my own consulting firm, and I was focused on two areas of communications – writing speeches and community relations. In late 2003, a friend dared me to apply for the top communications job at St. Louis Public Schools, which I did, thinking I’d never hear anything. I was wrong. They called, I interviewed along with nine others (we were all told to report at the same time and sat in the same room until we were interviewed). I got the job and started work the next morning.

The school district was in crisis. A reform board had been elected, an outside management firm was hired, the district was found to be bankrupt, and underway were layoffs, school closings, and staff restructurings. The old communications department had been 13 people. The new one was me and one-half of another person, and we shared a secretary with another group. 

I’ve never had a job like that one. On my first day of work, I was filling out papers in HR when I was told the news media were waiting for a statement. The teachers were having a sick-out to protest changes in sick-leave policy. I did five media interviews that day, three of them on camera. One of the reporters laughed when she saw me. “We heard they’d hired you. Welcome to St. Louis Public Schools.”

For the next eight months, there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t give a media interview. I was followed home at night by reporters. I was tracked down at a car dealership on a Saturday when I was having my car serviced. Sometimes it was national media calling and doing interviews by phone. I lived, breathed, and dreamed journalists and journalism. And sometimes the news happened right next to me, like when a school board member drenched my boss with a pitcher of water or people in the aisle next to where I was sitting were arrested at a school board meeting. A good meeting, my boss told me, was one where fewer than three people were arrested.

It was a crazy and rough-and-tumble experience, but I was dealing with journalism as I’d always known it, as I was trained in it, and as I had experienced it in corporate communications. A bit more intense, to be sure, but I recognized people who saw their jobs as getting the news and telling the story. 

By the time I returned to corporate communications in 2004, something had fundamentally changed, and especially with national media. I was working in a narrowly defined area, communications for so-called “legacy” assets. A spinoff from seven years before had declared bankruptcy, and the company had regained responsibility for all of the issues that had been spun off with the bankrupt company. I was hired because I had the background for it.

Generally, the reporters I dealt with specialized in business or environmental issues, or they were local media in various locations. I was in familiar territory, and the journalists were familiar. But with the company’s main line of business, the journalists were anything but familiar, and the people involved in media relations were going crazy.

Simply put, reporters were casting news stories in a broader context of opinion. It wasn’t all thinly disguised editorials masquerading as news stories, but it was close. And it wasn’t all reporters, but it was a few key ones. I’d sit in staff meetings, listening to the problems. And it wasn’t simply a case of “PR people always dislike reporters and vice versa” kind of problems. I read the stories, and I could easily see that the problem was serious. The media relations people had tried everything – from uninviting the reporters to events to traveling to meet with the reporters’ bosses. Nothing had worked. 

At one staff meeting, after yet another example of what should have been a balanced story had been turned into a disaster, I offered a suggestion. “We have a web site. You’re going to have to critique the story and publish the critique on the web site, showing exactly what’s happening.”

By the looks I received, they must have thought I’d landed from Mars. You didn’t do that with reporters. It would make it worse. They would hate you and get even. That was not a solution, and no one had ever done that before. “You don’t get into a spitting war with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

“Embarrassment at doing a shoddy job is the only thing I know you can do that might work,” I said. “Seriously, what’s the downside?”

My advice was not accepted. The problems continued. For years. Until the day a worse-than-usual outrageous story was published, inventing “news” out of whole cloth. It was all bogus. It was so bad that a major journalism school called out two reporters for what they had done. But only people following journalism had seen it.

By that time, one of my responsibilities included the company’s blog. We often published links to stories about the company. Without asking permission, I published the link to the journalism school’s statement, without comment, and lots of people saw it, including people inside the company. The offending reporters were pulled by their editors from covering the company for six months. 

Today, we have a phrase for the problem, and it is a serious problem. Many people will tell you that our national media no longer report the news, but instead maintain, promote, and defend the narrative (a post-modern concept if there ever was one), whatever the narrative happens to be. And it’s exacerbated by social media. 

How all of this might have started is unknown. A lot of things fused together – post-modernism, fundamental changes in university academics, the growing political divide in the United States, and more. The narrative is not an active conspiracy of publishers, editors, and reporters colluding to report the news in a certain way. It would likely be easier to deal with if it was a conspiracy. Instead, it’s group think, group think shared by many of the nation’s elites, and it’s killing journalism. And the rest of us

Related:

How Email Started a Revolution

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Lower photograph by Absolut Vision via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

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I’m not going to offer any commentary on whether the jury verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case was right, wrong, or something in between.  But something struck me about the entire incident.

Virtually no one, other than a tiny handful of people, saw what happened on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Not one of the talking heads on the networks was there. Virtually no reporters were in the vicinity. Few police officers were in the area. The people who censor on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were (mostly) in California. Each of us who read, saw, or heard the story on Aug. 26 (and months afterward) were nowhere near Kenosha. 

And very few of us watched the televised proceedings of the trial. We can’t really speak firsthand to everything the judge said, the attorneys said, and the witnesses said, and what the jury heard. And no one except the jury was in the jury room. We used to trust the trial-by-jury process, and we still do – when they deliver the verdict that fits our politics.

Our knowledge of everything involved with Kyle Rittenhouse was mediated. It’s why the news media are called the media – they’re in the middle; they sit between the news and the people who consume the news. And the news is more mediated than you might think. The reporter writes it or records it; an editor edits it; sensitive stories are often edited by multiple people. And then someone places it on a page or in a newscast. The commentators mediate the news yet again, taking a news story and rewriting it in a personal commentary style. Sometimes the commentator does it directly, and sometimes staff writers do it for the commentator. 

The mediation is even deeper, framed by the particular technology the news medium is using – newspaper, television, radio, blog, social media, or whatever.

Deeper still is the narrative.

While we can’t say firsthand what happened in Kenosha, what we can say is that the media – liberal and conservative alike – didn’t report the news. Instead, their reported their particular narrative. The Kyle Rittenhouse case fell right into chasm between the racism / white supremacy narrative of the liberal media and the Second Amendment / self-defense narrative of conservative media. The liberal media narrative dominated because most of the media are liberal. 

While it will be some time before the smoke clears, what we do know is that the media in general got this story colossally wrong. The errors and mistakes weren’t just minor or simple typos; they were major and almost designed to inflame passion and anger. And I’m speaking about both sides. 

What we know and believe about Kyle Rittenhouse is a narrative, courtesy of our favorite news medium and commentator. You’ve heard and believed those reports within your own echo chamber, with your own set of suppositions and political inclinations. But that doesn’t mean that’s what happened in Kenosha.

There was a time when the media could help people sort through the news. But that time has passed.

The media also missed the larger story. What happened on Aug. 25, 2020, happened because society broke down. Nothing worked like it was supposed to work. Armed bands of people of both extreme persuasions were in the streets of Kenosha. Many were armed. And no one was there to stop them.

This is how drug cartels operate in Mexico. 

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

The U.S. News Media and Russian Collusion

Photograph by William Topa via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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.