news media

“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

February 9, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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 U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

November 17, 2021 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

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.

A Conversation about Journalism

October 27, 2021 By Glynn Young 8 Comments

*Paul Cezanne (French, 1839 – 1906 ), The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Evenement”, 1866, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.*

We have to start talking about journalism in the United States, and specifically the decline of journalism. Newspapers, television programs, and online news sites have been talking for years about how to fix the problems of circulation, readership, viewership, and competition from social media platforms, but I don’t think they’re going deep enough.

I’ve been working on a new fiction manuscript for some months now. The story is rooted in a community and the people who live there. An event happens that attracts the news media, both local and national. While the event and the role of the media are only a small part of the story, I’ve spent time researching news media, news, and how (and often why) certain event are covered.

This wasn’t a big stretch; my B.A. degree is in journalism, and I worked with journalists for most of my professional career in corporate communications. For three decades after I graduated from college, journalism remained recognizable. In 2003-2004, I was the director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, amid a highly controversial reorganization. I dealt with journalists daily. I was interviewed daily, and usually by multiple reporters. (My first interview occurred 15 minutes into my first day on the job, when a TV reporter wanted a statement on a teacher sickout. I hadn’t even filled out my HR paperwork when I was standing before a camera.)

As crazy and hectic as it was, this was journalism, and particularly local journalism, that I knew and understood. The reporters were covering news that people in the community cared about. They may have liked it or hated it, but there was no question it was important to them.

In 2004, I returned to corporate communications, responsible for a very specific slice of company issues. I was still dealing with journalism that I knew. My colleagues responsible for more general media issues, however, were dealing with a journalism that seemed almost alien. The reporters were less reporter and more activist. They asked questions like reporters, but their stories often reflected nothing of what the discussion had been about. Staff meetings often became brainstorm sessions on how to deal with this.

The issue lasted for years. Ultimately, only one thing was going to work: calling out the reporter for a bad or misleading story – and publishing the reprimand on the company web site or blog. It’s difficult to imagine the internal opposition to this – embarrassing a reporter was something you simply did not do. It was resisted for years, but nothing else worked. What finally broke the opposition was a story that postured as news but was so obviously propaganda that even a publication widely read by journalists called the reporters out. The company published the reprimand on its blog site. The awful reporting subsided for a long time after that.

What was new in reporting back then seems to be standard operating procedure today. Newspapers like to think the internet has eaten their lunch. And it has – particularly in classified and other kinds of advertising. But reporting barely disguised as activist opinion has had its effect as well – I know a lot of people who stopped subscribing to the local newspaper because the bias was blatant.

And there’s no question that the newspaper has a bias, but what’s interesting is that the bias occurs mostly in national news stories, obtained by the paper’s subscription to wire services like the Associated Press and syndicates like Washington Post. Local coverage has severely diminished over the years, but the paper generally does a credible job with local news. (That is, unless local news becomes national news, then it reports like everyone else.)

Where I live is increasingly unusual in that my suburb of St. Louis shares a weekly community newspaper with a few other adjacent communities. It covers what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch cannot – local council and school board meetings, local development proposals, sales and property tax issues, and other issues that affect and often deeply concern people in the community. It has a lively letters-to-the-editor page that usually has only letters about local issues, events, and concerns. What the newspaper does, sometimes well and sometimes imperfectly, is facilitate democracy and self-government.

People are looking closely at the connection between newspapers, and the decline of newspapers, and the increasing inability of the United States to govern itself, except by crisis. Next week, I’ll have a post about a newspaper that tried some rather innovative – it dropped all references to national news and issues from its opinion pages.

Photograph of The New York Times by Wan Chen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Fleet Street and St. Bride’s Church

April 9, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Fleet Street in London has been long associated with newspapers and journalists. But it’s been a long time since any newspapers were actually located there, since all moved to other part of the metropolitan area. In the fall of 2017, I walked Fleet Street and some of the side streets on a cloudy, rainy Sunday, and say only one vestige of the area’s newspaper past – fading letters on the side of a building. A few former newspaper buildings have been listed on the historic register and preserved, but no newspapers operate here today.

St Brides interior — The interior of St. Bride’s

The area includes the Temple, still a part of the legal industry, notable buildings like St. Dunstan-in-the-West Church, the Samuel Johnson House, the Royal Courts of Justice at the western end of the street and the Old Bailey near the eastern end, and many more. On my visit that Sunday, I stopped long enough to take a photo of a lawyer’s gown and wig for sale at a shop.

St Brides Courtyard — The side courtyard of St. Bride’s, where Michael has a press conference

The church long associated with Fleet Street, so much so that it’s still called the “journalists’ church,” is St. Bride’s. The site may be one of the oldest church sites in London, dating back to the 7^th century. Seven church buildings have stood here; one was burned during the Great Fire of 1666 (and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren) and another was bombed during the German Blitz of World War II. After the war, it was rebuilt according to the Wren design.

The church contains considerable history. One of the first printing presses (and thus the origins of the newspaper business) was set up next door in 1500. The parents of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America, were married here. Author Samuel Richardson is buried here.

One of its distinctive features is the steeple, which looks exceedingly like a wedding cake (another connection to the church’s name). The interior is beautiful; the day and time I was there the church service had just ended and the parishioners were having a fellowship time and it was rather crowded and joyfully noisy.

The area of St. Bride’s and Fleet Street have a small role in Dancing King. St. Bride’s is one of the churches where Michael Kent-Hughes preaches a sermon. And Trevor Barry, who becomes a consulting attorney for Michael for the coronation, parliamentary law, and the history of the monarchy, has offices near the Royal Courts of Justice, between Fleet Street and the Thames, on a small street called Essex Street. Law offices actually exist on this street, which is close to the Temple tube station. Barry finds himself frequently taking the District or Circle line to the St. James’s Park station, about three blocks from Buckingham Palace.

Fleet Street Temple — Gown and wig for sales in Fleet Street

After his sermon at St. Bride’s, Michael does have a short press conference in the side courtyard with reporters, but it’s mentioned in the book only in passing. There are a number of more extensive scenes involving the news media, but those are mostly set at or near the palace. They include the BBC interview, the media present at Michael’s meeting with protestors, and others.

Essex Street Temple — Essex Street, where the attorney Trevor Barry has his law offices

The news media play an important role in Dancing King because they play an important role in British society and in the lives of the royal family. Michael’s experiences with the media reflect my own career background in communications and media relations, where I learned that your have good reporters, so-so reporters, and bad reporters, like every other profession.

Top photograph is the famous wedding-cake steeple of St. Bride’s. Photograph of the interior of St. Bride’s by Dilff via Wikimedia. Used with permission. Top photo and all other photos are by me and my trusty iPhone.

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