About 2-300 words each
Routines of Journalism
Routines are the standard procedures of journalism, the standard ways
journalists go about their work. Todd Gitlin writes,
The routines of journalism, set within the economic and political interests of news
organizations, normally and regularly combine to select certain versions of reality
over others. Day by day, normal organizational procedures define ‘the story,’
identify the protagonists and the issues, and suggest appropriate attitudes toward
them.
Routines are necessary in journalism, in part because of time pressure
“They worked swiftly and in virtual silence, their minds and news judgments so
finely attuned that rarely was there disagreement, and in these rare cases Jordan . .
. quickly deferred to Bernstein, his mentor, his idol . . . “
— Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor
Routines protect journalists from being scooped
They also keep political divisions from interfering with journalistic work.
The importance of routines means that news doesn’t necessarily reflect
journalists’ personal views at all; sometimes, actually, journalists following
routines produce news, and effects in the world, that are very much counter
to their personal views–for example, news reporting encouraging violent
demonstrations, or promoting the candidacy of Trump
The concept of routines is very important in media studies. Most scholars
consider routines crucial to understanding how the news media work. To
explain why the news is the way it is we typically say, it’s a product of the
routines of journalism.
Note connection with readings, e.g. Klinenberg. Klinenberg sometiomes
uses the term “routines,” and sometimes related phrases, like “institutional
processes and reporting techniques,” or “conventional frames and themes,”
or “regular practices of daily news reporters,” or just “common practices.”
At one point he writes, “Like other professionals, they are continuously
trained on the job, and their approaches to the news are regularly reinforced
when they consume, critique and mimic the work of their colleagues.”
Those “approaches to the news” are routines, and this is a good statement
about how they are learned by journalists.
Routines are not completely rigid–often journalists have a choice of which
routines to use.
Routines are of many different kinds
Routines of News Gathering
E.g. beat checks. Beat system in general. Use of embargoed journal articles
in medical reporting.
Calling Sources–getting a comment from someone accused of wrongdoing.
In health news, getting a comment from a scientist not involved in the study.
Shooting B-roll
Finding exemplars for human interest.
NYT Reporter, “But then we had to have a narrative that would just sort of
carry you through, so I thought well I would hang out at a cardiac intensive care
unit and see what happens. And I really lucked out, because at the very end of the
first day the perfect patient came in and I mean he was perfect for the story; and
he was very articulate and he was pleased to be in this story. . . .
Oh, he was amazing–that deer in the headlights look–and I remember when he
came in I said, ‘Oh! He’s such a young guy.” And I heard it happened at the gym
and I said, “oh my gosh, I can’t believe it!””
This carries us right in to routines of news selection–because this kind of
routine, for selecting exemplars, is closely tied to the criteria for what makes
a story newsworthy. Often stories are character-driven, and if you can’t find
a good character, you don’t have a story.
Routines of News Selection
E.g. “man bites dog.” As Galtung and Ruge point out, this illustrates the
principle that events that are unexpected are news. But at the same time,
events have to be comprehensible and consistent with our expectations.
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More examples of factors that affect news selection, from Galtung and
Ruge’s “The Structure of Foreign News”:
(F9) The more an event concerns elite nations, the more probable that
it will become a news item.
(F10) The more an event concerns elite people, the more probable
that it will become a news item.
(F11) The more an event can be seen in personal terms, the more
probable that it will become a news item
(F12) The more negative the event in its consequences, the more
probable that it will become a news item. (But there are exceptions,
because media like to have a balance of positive and negative news.)
Another list of criteria for newsworthiness includes timeliness, currency,
impact, conflict, novelty, prominence and proximity. Each has specific
routines associated with it, ways reporters judge impact, for example will an
event affect the fortunes of important political leaders? How many people
does a story affect–how many suffer from a particular disease, for example,
if a pharma company announces a new drug?)
Rupert Murdoch’s formula for Tabloid news: violence, sex, money, children
and animals.
Routines of news presentation.
Hard news and feature leads.
Word choice.
Choice of angle — closely tied to criteria of selection.
Some routines are tacit and largely unconscious, some are written in a style
book.
Sometimes they do become subject to debate. And sometimes there are
conscious decisions to change them. E.g. LA Times discussion of about
whether to use terms like “illegal alien” “illegal immigrant,” “undocumented
immigrant.” But most of the time this is not necessary–if it were journalists
would never get their work done.
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Excerpts from Times memo to newsroom (Link to the story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/readers-rep/la-me-rr-la-timesguidelines-immigration-20130501,0,5876110.story)
The Times adopted its current style on immigration-related language
in 1995, recommending the use of “illegal immigrants” or
“undocumented immigrants” in lieu of “illegal aliens.” Those phrases
have become highly politicized since then, prompting the Standards
and Practices Committee to consider an update. The Committee has
been consulting with reporters and editors from accross the newsroom
since last Fall, as well as meeting with advocates seeking an end to the
media’s use of “illegal immigrant.” After hearing strong arguments
for and against the Times style, we concluded that it was time for a
new approach.
“illegal immigrants is overly broad and does not accurately apply in
every situation. The alternative suggested by the 1995 guidelines,
“undocumented immigrants” . . . is also untrue in many cases, as with
immigrants who possess passports or other documentation but lack
valid visas.
In covering both individuals and groups, the goal is to provide
relevance and context and to avoid labels.
Use the term “illegal immigration” to describe the phenomenon of
entering or residing in the country in violation of the law.
Avoid using “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented immigrant” to
describe individuals except when necessary in direct quotations. . .
Do not specify a person’s immigration status unless it is relevant to the
story . . .
Be specific whenever possible in describing an individual’s status . . .
Do not use “illegal alien,” an illegal” or “illegals” except in rare cases
in direct quotes; they should never be used in headlines or other
display type.
Sources
Among he most important routines of journalism are those that have to do
with the use of sources.
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[Read The Duel]
Most of the time journalists weren’t there, they simply state what was told to
them by certain sources. Even if they were there, the conventions of
“objective reporting” may force them in many cases to rely on sources,
especially for interpretations, since they usually expected to be careful about
making statements on their own authority. Sources are used both for
information and for interpretation and perspective, to provide meaning.
If you read a newspaper article carefully, you can see that almost all the
information is attributed to some source.
In television it is somewhat less obvious, though the soundbites are still part
of the basic building blocks of TV news.
Among the most important routines of journalism are those that have to do
with the use of sources. In selecting sources, journalists are deciding what
voices and what interpretations will be included in the news. And in many
cases, it is really the sources who shape the interpretive frameworks in the
news, although as we will see this varies–sometimes sources shape the news
primarily, sometimes are more active, and use the words of their sources to
toll the story they want to tell.
Because sources are so important, it makes a big difference who they are.
And who are they? Elites, mostly government officials.
U.S. Officials
Foreign Officials
State, Local Officials
Nongovernment Americans
Nongovernment Foreign
46.5%
27.5%
4.1%
14.4
2.1%
Why do journalists rely so much Government Officials?
1. They often have the information
2. They are well-organized to serve the media
(in 1977 15 of the top 49 White House Officials was involved in
media and p.r.) Beat system. Other kinds of actors also can sometimes win
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a larger voice in news coverage by organizing to provide the media with
information. Corporations, lobbying organizations. In health reporting,
besides public health officials, the sources include pharma companies,
universities and hospitals, all of which employ public relations professionals
who can provide “information subsidies.”
Importance of press releases, also video press releases in TV news.
Importance of knowing the conventions of journalism. Sometimes social
movements, e.g. environmental groups.
3. They have authority
Here’s what the use of sources looks like in health news. In this case,
another kind of authority is involved, the authority of scientific expertise:
1960s
2000s
Public Health Officials
19.0%
7.9%
AMA, Doctors
26.8%
8.0
Biomedical Researchers
20.2
26.8
Business Sources
3.6
14.0
Patients, Ordinary People
4.5
9.2
4. They have power, and what they say and think therefore affects people
The journalist’s relation with their sources is often very close, and it is
important to understanding how journalism works, and to understanding the
interaction of the news media with other social institutions.
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It’s a relationship that can be antagonistic, but is also one of cooperation and
interdependence. Government officials and other important institutions and
actors–businesses, NGOs, etc–need journalists, and journalists need them.
They need journalists to reach the public, and also sometimes to reach other
actors they want to influence. And journalists need them for information,
for material. So cooperative relationship have developed over time. News
media are independent of government and are a “watch-dog,” but in some
ways they are really part of the governing process.
Journalists work closely with their sources, and to some extent write for
them. These arrangements have advantages and disadvantages. We get
much more information about government than we otherwise would. At the
same time, official sources dominate the flow of information, and journalists
often become part of their culture.
Use of Anonymous Sources
One specific manifestation of the closeness of this relationship is the use of
unnamed sources.
It’s a controversial practice, both inside and outside journalism.
But it is very central to the practice of journalism–and very widespread, not
only in political reporting but in business reporting, sports reporting, etc.
It’s part of the ethics of journalistic professionalism, that journalists protect
their sources. And it is one form of legal protection they have that is similar
to that of other professions: shield laws. Similar to attorney-client privilege.
As journalists sometimes point out in their stories, it is not the journalists
who choose to make sources anonymous. Journalists would always prefer to
have on-the-record sources. It is something sources ask for.
Why do sources ask to remain anonymous?
• They are likely to be in danger
• They are not authorized to speak to the media
Mission Press Guidance, U.S. Embassy, San Salvador, 1985
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Only the Ambassador, the Chargé, and the Public Affairs Officer may
speak on the record (for attribution by name and title). . . .
Should you decide to speak to the press, make sure the “ground rules” are
clear before you begin. . . . Be specific! It is awkward, but you will not
regret taking the time to say something like: “This is for guidance only.
You may not put quotation marks around this or attribute it to the embassy
in any way.” . . . You are not authorized to speak as an embassy official
without coordination with the Public Affairs Officer. You are officially
responsible for such quotations.
•
•
•
•
They want to maintain relationships with colleagues, clients, etc.
Because of diplomatic sensitivity
Because they want “deniability”
So they can speak frankly, and not worry about reactions
Use of unnamed sources is important to journalism, and a lot of the best
journalism is based on it. But it is also subject to abuse. People speak to the
media on a not-for-attribution basis for many reasons, some noble and some
not–some are whistleblowers, some are egotists, some are political “hit
men”–etc.
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Framing
The concept of Framing is one of the most important in media studies.
It was first used in media studies by Todd Gitlin, who wrote:
“Media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation and
presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion, by which symbolhandlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual.”
“Frames enable journalists to process large amounts of information
quickly and routinely: to recognize it as information, to assign it to
cognitive categories, and to package it for effective relay to their
audiences.”
Examples of Protest Coverage
The concept is connected to Frame Analysis of symbolic interaction in
Sociology by Erving Goffman—how we define situations in everyday
life—and to Frame Semantics in Linguistics, and Schema Theory in
Cognitive Psychology.
Frames define a problem, specify causes or responsibility, and identify
solutions.
Related to the concept of journalistic routines. Connection between a
frame and an “angle”.
They are necessary to journalism, as to all human communication.
Frames are therefore not “bad.” But critical analysis of journalism does
often focus on framing.
Frames matter because they shape people’s responses.
Much of politics is therefore about framing. Is health care reform
“government takeover,” or “affordable care”? Is abortion “murder” or a
“medical procedure”? Are mask mandates an essential public health
measure or an attack on individual freedom? Frames typically tell you
what kind of a problem something is–or maybe whether it is a problem
or not; what its causes are, or who or what is responsible for it; and
what kinds of solutions might be appropriate.
Journalists often face pressure, for this reason, about which frames they
use.
Frames are “persistent patterns” of interpretation. The frame is not just
what the story is about, or the story line, but places the story within
some standard story line or interpretive framework.
Frames can be multiple. This is true in a couple of different senses.
There are different levels of frames, some more general, some more
specific. News is itself a frame, as opposed say, to fiction, or “fake
news.”
There are also generic frames you can see in many different types of
story. A generic frame might be “controversy”; and there are different
kinds of controversy frames, e.g. a “partisan political controversy” or a
“clash of views among ordinary people.” Some stories are framed as
“consensus” stories.
Other generic frames would include scandal, or disaster frames, or hero
frames about people who have overcome some adversity or done
something for others.
One important distinction is between game frames and issue frames.
Example of Affordable Care Act coverage: ABC News, July 22, 2009.
Another common distinction is between episodic frames, which focus
on single events, and thematic frames, which connect particular events
to general trends of problems. (In Entman and Rojecki’s article, TV
stories on crime are episodic, while newspaper stories are in some cases
thematic.)
Other frames are issue or event specific. Immigration stories, for
example, can be organized around security/enforcement frames, or
human rights frames that focus on the lives of individual migrants.
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Epidemic stories can have threat or reassurance frames, they can have
security, or personal hygiene or medical technology frames.
Frames can also be multiple in the sense that conflicting frames may be
present in a story. Sometimes journalists thematize the existence of
conflicting frames.
In analyzing frames, you need to look for what the cues are that invoke
the frame for the audience–cues that have to do with language choice,
choice of images, which facts are included or not included, or
emphasized or deemphasized, what kinds of people appear, etc.
Example of Health and Medical Coverage
Common Frames in Health and Medical reporting
Biomedical, Lifestyle and Social Frames
Biomedical frames focus on biological causes of disease and
biomedical technology as a solution. They are usually assumed to
dominate.
“Prevention possibilities are almost entirely framed as if they are
entirely within the capability of individual actions . . . and system
accountability is, relatively speaking, ignored. Pharmaceutical and
other medical solutions are described as interventions directed towards
individuals, one at a time. These popular frames individualize the
responsibility both for diseases and for their treatment.”
But other frames can also be found.
Lifestyle frames focus on individual choices and behaviors as causes
and solutions.
Social frames focus on social forces as a cause of disease or as a
solution.
Here’s an example of a story that poses the social and lifestyle frames
against one another:
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Who bears responsibility for an impoverished child with a
mouthful of rotting teeth? Parents? Soda companies? The
ingrained inequalities of capitalism?
Dental decay rates, numerous state and federal studies say,
are linked to income, education and access to health insurance,
but also to lifestyle, diet and parental choices in insisting on a
toothbrush. Such conclusions give fuel to both sides, with
supporters of fluoride seeing a social problem to be solved by
government, while opponents focus on unhealthy habits they say
will not be affected by chemicals.
— “Doubts as Portland Weighs Fluoride and its Civic Virtues,” New
York Times, Sept. 9, 2012.
Our study found that biomedical frames did dominate in network
television coverage, but other frames had significant presence too.
Biomedical
Lifestyle
Social
Dominant
39.5%
15.5%
15.5%
Present
20.4
20.7
16.8
Absent
40.1
63.8
67.8
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Transformation and Crisis in American Journalism
Major trends in the History of US News Media, 1980-2010
include:
• Commercialization
• Deprofessionalization — or at least weakening of journalistic
professionalism
• Collapse of the business model of traditional journalism
• Rise of “infotainment,” hybridization
• Rise of multi-channel media; audience fragmentation and
“unbundling”
• Rise of interactive media, “citizen journalism,” “parajournalism”
• Re-emergence of partisan media
All of these are interrelated. Notice also that the changes we are
talking about here began roughly in the 1980s. That is important,
because it means that these changes began before the Internet was
a significant factor–the Internet as we know it today, as a factor in
media industries, dates from 1993.
Digital media are definitely an important factor today, but they are
not the whole story of the set of changes taking place.
Commercialization
The earliest changes have to do with commercialization. When
Herbert Gans asked journalists in the 1970s, most said that
concerns about circulation, ratings, advertising revenue weren’t
something that affected their jobs at all. Today it is obviously
different.
One early part of the change had to do with the growth of local TV
news in the 1970s. Network news was insulated from commercial
pressures, because TV was a regulated industry, and news was the
way they showed the FCC that they were serving the “public
convenience and necessity.” Also, they had plenty of money,
because they shared 90% of the huge TV audience.
Local TV news was more important to the bottom line of the
companies, and more market-driven.
Then in the 1980s, television news became more competitive, with
the growth of cable, DBS, also the creation of new networks.
Later of course streaming. 3-network share declined.
And broadcasting was deregulated. License renewal became a
formality, and stations no longer had to show they were serving
“the public convenience and necessity.”
This period saw the growth of a lot of new forms of infotainment,
and a much more intense focus on ratings, that led to big changes
in the style of TV news. Baym reading is related to this. The
growth of hybrid forms of infotainment one of the major trends
of the last 30 years on our list. It’s not something totally new—
journalism has always combined news and entertainment. But it
has intensified in recent years, compared with the late 20th century.
It is very strong in digital media.
In the case of newspapers, there were two big developments that
affected them. They had monopolies in their primary markets, so
in much of the late 20th century they could afford to spend money
and let the journalists report the news without worrying about
commercial considerations.
But then two things started to change. They faced increased
competition form other media, and their audiences started to
decline.
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And more and more of them became corporate-owned, rather than
family-owned, which meant there was a big focus on increasing
profit margins.
Then of course when digital media came along, they were involved
in highly competitive markets, fighting for the leftovers of a
revenue pie that was mostly gobbled up by Google and Facebook,
and they often were strongly commercially-driven, making heavy
use of audience analytics.
De-Professionalization
We learned that the professionalization of journalism was one of
the most profound transformations in the history of news media.
Professionalization reached its peak in about the 1970s. Since then
it has in important ways in decline. I think it will probably not
disappear, as many people were predicting about the time Page
One was produced.
The three criteria of professionalization we discussed earlier in the
class were autonomy, consensus on ethics and standards of
practice, and principle of public service all have been weakened.
Autonomy declined first of all due to commercialization.
Journalists had to defer more and more to business managers, and
worry about ratings and circulation. The “separation of church and
state”—in the sense of a separation of the journalistic and business
sides of the news organization, was weakened. One former
journalists wrote a book titled, “When MBA’s rule the newsroom,”
reflecting the change in the kinds of people who became top
editors.
One event that dramatized the change occurred in 1993, when Dan
Rather, who was the anchor of CBS news, the successor to Walter
Cronkite, gave a speech at the Radio and Television News
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Directors Association complaining about the state of TV news:
“They’ve got us putting more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-shop
stuff, so as to compete not with other news programs but with
entertainment programs, including those posing as news programs,
for dead bodies, mayhem and lurid tales.”
A weakening job market also reduces the ability of journalists to
insist on autonomy. Surveys have shown that while 60 percent of
journalists in the 1970s-1980s said they had “almost complete
freedom” in selecting stories, by 2013 only 34 percent reported
such freedom.
As far as consensus on ethics and standards of practice this has
been undermined by the increasing diversification and
hybridization of news media, and the blurring boundaries of news
media that result.
Is John Stewart a journalist? What about the people who produce
Cops? What about activist citizen-journalists? What about Tucker
Carlson, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who as we have seen
make the attack on traditional journalists central to their appeal to
audiences.
Boundary forms, that share some characteristics of traditional
journalism but don’t fully accept traditional professional norms,
include:
•
•
•
•
Opinion-based commentators, in talk radio, cable news, etc.
Partisan news in general
Activist journalists
Citizen journalists and bloggers (who may or may not be
activists)
• Infotainment-based journalists
• Public-relations-based journalists, who produce sponsored
news, or work for web sites for institutions
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• Tech companies and aggregators
And of course these forms don’t remain separate from mainstream
journalism; that in a way increases the strain to consensus on ethics
and standards of practice. When journalists blog, are they bound
by the same rules as when they are doing standardized reporting.
Blogs are usually more subjective, they have more opinion,
sometimes they use first person. They do not separate news and
opinion or keep the personality of the writer in the background.
The third criterion for journalist professionalism we discussed
earlier, and in some ways the most basic, was the idea of news as a
public service. When Dan Rather gave his speech to the RTNDA
in 1993, The New York Times’ television critic published a column
criticizing him:
The ratings may not be all that scientific, but the bottomliners have learned that they are a more reliable guide to the
nation’s taste than high-minded journalists. Corporate
executives are not by and large suicidal. If they were
persuaded by the figures that news from other countries,
economic news and serious, substantive news of any kind
would bring more money than game shows or crime shows,
American would have an hour’s worth of such nourishment
every night. The problem faced by Mister Rather and his
allies is that mass merchandising does not permit much in the
way of boutique programming. . . . [T]he fat cats he is
fighting have nothing more devious in mind than catering to
the enormous audience he wants to serve. . . He has to hope
that the watering down and dolling up of the “CBS Evening
News” do not increase its ratings, for otherwise he may be
driven to flee the studio and charge about the land, trying to
stir up new hurricanes against old windmills.
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This represented a dramatic change from an era when it was taken
for granted that a news organization–particularly a publiclylicensed broadcaster– had an obligation to serve the public
interest, and not merely to generate the highest ratings. This shift is
related to all these changes we have talked about specifically in
media industries, of course, but also to the general shift toward
“neoliberalism” as a dominant ideology in society—an ideology
that is skeptical of the idea of the “public interest” and assumes
that all of society should be governed by market mechanisms.
Is the deprofessionalization of journalism good or bad? I don’t
think it really makes sense to see it in black and white terms.
Professionalization is important in many ways, and if it really
disappeared, I think that would be a bad thing. Protects the
integrity of information, protects against manipulation, both
commercial and political. We can see this more and more with the
spread of misinformation following the election, misinformation
on the pandemic, and also the growth of hyperpartisanship.
But the fact there is more diversity of different forms of
journalism, or that there is more subjectivity and opinion, or that
journalists have to be more responsive to audiences–these things
aren’t necessarily bad. It’s not necessarily bad either that
journalists have lost their monopoly as mediators of public
discussion. Example of talk-show format in presidential debates.
So will journalistic professionalism disappear? Probably not. It’s
still pretty strong in some of the legacy media—in some ways you
could say it is as strong as ever. It’s changing, but that can be a
good thing.
There are also signs that “new media” are becoming
professionalized, and there is a lot of interdependence between
new media and traditional media. Yahoo News is full of
journalists hired from traditional media, including Katie Couric,
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who was hired as its “global anchor” a few years ago and Megan
Liberman, its editor in chief who was hired from The New York
Times. Huffpost started out just as a platform for unpaid bloggers,
but increasingly moved to hire journalists. Politico.com recently
hired the former editorial page editor of the Boston Globe to be its
Executive Editor. Politico.com is largely staffed with former
print journalists. Wikileaks has partly replaced mainstream news
media as the place “whistleblowers” go to bring information into
the public sphere. But Wikileaks has more and more found it
necessary to cooperate with mainstream news organizations, which
provide legitimacy and also expertise on how to organize and
interpret documents.
To some extent, what may happen is a transformation of
journalistic professionalism, rather than a complete displacement.
But certainly, journalistic professionalism is not as unified or as
strong it was in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and the beginning of the
1980s, and it’s not as central either professional journalists have to
compete with other kinds of actors, and don’t dominate the flow of
information as they once did.
Collapse of the business model of traditional media;
disinvestment of journalism.
The traditional business model of journalism has clearly collapsed,
and we are going through a kind of social disinvestment in news.
Here are some indicators of the trend toward disinvestment in
journalism:
• Newspaper editorial spending down $1.6 b, 2006-2009
• Newspaper staffs by about half since 2000, to about 33,000.
Many bureaus have been cut. The San Diego Union-Tribune,
for example, now has no Washington bureau. This is typical
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•
•
•
•
•
•
of local newspapers; they rely on wire services now to cover
national politics and often even state politics. Total
newsroom employment, across all platforms, is down 26%
from 2008. One thing this means for the working conditions
of journalists is that they have to do a lot more, especially as
media have moved to become multi-platform, and face the
constant time pressure of on-line publishing.
“Hamsterization.”
Many newspapers have disappeared, about 100 between 2010
and 2014. Newspapers have shrunk in size.
Network TV news staffs down 50% since 1980s
All news radio stations down from 50 in 1980s to 30 today
Membership in Investigative Reporters and Editors
Association down from 5,391 in to 4,000 in 2010
Society of Environmental Journalists down from 430 to 256
Submissions for Pulitzer Prize in Public Service down 43%
from 1984 to 2010
This is due to a collapse of the business model of the legacy news
organizations. Like a lot of the changes we are talking about in
this part of the course, it didn’t start with the Internet. It goes back
to the period we talked about earlier, in which commercial
pressures increased, with increased competition and also corporate
ownership of newspapers. Corporate ownership has actually been
replaced in many cases in recent years by a new phenomenon,
ownership by private equity firms. The most notable case, and the
most notorious, is Alden Global Capital, which bought out Tronc
(the company that David Carr was reporting on), and now owns
200 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun,
New York Daily News. (It’s the second largest newspaper chain,
after Gannett). The strategy of this kind of firm is generally to buy
up companies in leveraged buyouts, that leave those companies,
rather than the buyers, with heavy debt, cut costs and extract profit,
and then often abandon them. And the owners are definitely not
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interested in journalism, and don’t subscribe to the idea that
newspapers are an institution that serves the community. So these
newspapers have suffered particularly heavy cuts.
Then business models really collapsed with the coming of the
Internet and then the 2007 recession.
The internet didn’t actually make legacy media irrelevant in the
sense that they no longer had an audience. Newspapers had had
declining circulations since the 1950s, due to the rise of TV. But
the Internet actually gave many print media more audience.
What the Internet did do was to undercut the advertising revenue
legacy media depend on. American newspapers have historically
gotten about 70-80% of their revenue from advertising (much
higher than in most other countries).
Circulation revenue has actually held steady in recent years. But
advertising revenue has plummeted. As we heard in Page One,
Craig’s List and Monster.com decimated classified advertising.
Movie theatres have their own websites, so they don’t need to
advertise in the newspaper. As advertising migrated online,
Google and Facebook sucked up most of it–60% in 2017. And as
David Carr mentions in the film, advertisers pay much less for
digital readers. The internet has changed the balance of power, in
a sense, between advertisers and media—it’s now a buyers market,
rather than a seller’s market.
So what possible solutions are there?
Papers like the NYT, of course, have introduced paywalls, and that
works for them. This has meant an important shift from
dependence on advertising to dependence on circulation revenue.
But most newspapers, and most media in general, will not be able
to do this. One of the main effects of the internet is that it forces
9
local media to compete with the biggest national media, and that’s
very hard for them. The chapter from the Usher book is in part
about the consequences of this, that news, particularly high quality
news is likely to be increasingly produced for a small segment of
the public, the “rich, white and blue.”
Some digital media also have been able to survive, in part because
their costs are lower. As we learned, though, digital media are also
susceptible to downturns in the advertising markets, and many
have had to downsize.
Another solution has been patronage, in the sense of finding a
wealthy individual who wants to buy a newspaper, invest in it, and
see if it can make it as newspapers used to do, with a modest profit
margin. Bezos and Washington Post. Soon-Shiong and LA Times,
San Diego Union-Tribune. This can have drawbacks, because
such owners might not give full freedom. So far there hasn’t been
much evidence of this at those papers.
Another solution is non-profit media. These are definitely starting
to develop. Pro-Publica is one, which does investigative
journalism. The St. Petersburg Times is another, owned by the
Poynter Institute. And there are many local on-line news
organizations around the country. Voice of San Diego is one of
the best known, as is The Texas Tribune. These are usually fairly
small-scale, with relatively limited readerships, and a limited
scope—not full-service newspapers like a traditional newspaper,
that covers all kinds of news.
Another solution could be some kind of state support for media.
This is common in Europe. I’m not sure it’s likely any time soon
here. But there is serious discussion of it today. There is a bill
called the Sustainability of Local News Act that was introduced
this year. Includes tax credit to incentivize subscriptions or
10
donations; tax credits for small businesses to buy ads; and a payroll
tax credit for hiring journalists.
Rise of multichannel media, audience fragmentation
Legacy media, in the second half of the 20th century, were
conceived of as serving the whole community, and with some
exceptions—many Blacks, for example, relied at least in part on
the Black press–everyone basically depended on the same sources
of news—the television networks, network radio, local television
and the dominant local newspapers. News didn’t serve everyone
equally, of course. But in significant ways it was something
common, that everyone shared.
By the 1980s, this was starting to change. Religious broadcasting
had already become an exception in the 1970s, and then with the
rise of cable TV, the multiplication of television channels and the
elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1989, niche media began to
develop. Cable TV was based on this sort of targeting of audience
segments, with channels such as MTV and BET, which produced
their own news. The Internet, of course, accelerated that trend in
multiple ways, creating very targeted niche media and also
tailoring content for particular individuals (which mostly happens
on social media). Some core media still serve a fairly broad mass
audience—especially local newspapers and broadcast TV. But
niche media are much more important than they were.
Reemergence of Partisan Media
One of the most important consequences of this was the
reemergence of partisan media. The party press declined in a
context where media markets were becoming very concentrated,
and identification with a particular partisan position was
considered bad for business, a limitation on capturing the whole
market.
11
But in the context of a multichannel environment, partisanship
could be a means to find a market niche, a form of product
differentiation. Partisanship is still not characteristic of the
broadest markets—network TV, local TV, national newspapers,
and also metropolitan newspapers, though local media do reflect
the political character of the communities in which they are based.
But in multichannel markets, partisan media have become
important—they started reemerging in radio after the repeal of the
fairness doctrine, then in cable TV and then in the Internet. Most
Internet-based media have distinct political identities—e.g.
Huffpost. And some take an activist stance (Daily KOS, for
example)—so in that sense they are a return to an earlier era when
news media were considered as a vehicle for collective political
action.
Probably, also, the reemergence of partisan media is rooted in
increased political polarization, which began to develop in the
1970s, with the breakdown of the Cold War consensus, the rise of
new social movements, and the beginnings of the “culture wars.”
The most important actor in the reemergence of partisan news was
clearly Fox news, created in 1996.
The two key actors were Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.
Murdoch is an Australian media mogul, who is in many ways a
throwback to the era of the Press Barons. In the US, he owns Fox,
The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. He came from
media cultures in which partisanship was always common, and he
never accepted the idea that media should be politically neutral,
nor the idea that owners should keep their politics out of the news.
His British newspapers, particularly the tabloids, played a key role
in the Brexit movement, and have a similar appeal to Fox in the
12
US, for example promoting anti-immigrant sentiment. Not all his
media reflect his politics. Local Fox affiliates don’t necessarily,
and The Wall Street Journal, although it has a very right-wing
editorial page, retains a high degree of journalistic autonomy. But
Fox news definitely does.
Roger Ailes was the other key figure. He was a television
producer who innovated in the use of television as Richard Nixon’s
campaign manager, and a media advisor to Republican presidents.
He also produced the Rush Limbaugh show at the beginning of the
1990s.
Fox was a big innovator in many ways.
• First network to use political identity as a marketing strategy.
• Emphasized talk and opinion over straight news.
• Incorporated “low-brow” presentational styles—tabloid
styles.
• Innovated personally-involved, emotionally expressive
approach to news anchoring. People trusted Walter
Cronkite because he was seen as detached and neutral,
because he seemed to let the facts speak from themselves.
They trust people like Hannity or O’Reilly because they
seem authentic and express an identity that the audience
shares. There are distinctions—and tensions—at Fox news,
between the charismatic political agitators like Hannity and
O’Reilly, and others with backgrounds in mainstream
journalism who are involved in producing more standard
news programs.
13
• Uses populist frames in programming and marketing—the
elite vs the ordinary people.
Fox has had a huge impact. It has huge impact on the Republican
party and the political culture generally. Fox is a unique
phenomenon as both a business and a political actor. It played a
key role in the rise of the Tea Party movement, for example,
promoting its early rallies and meetings. And Its populist style and
ideological message laid the groundwork for the Trump
movement—it was really Fox, not Trump, that devised that
political appeal. And today, Fox seems to have great influence on
Trump—it’s said he often watches Fox and Friends in the
morning, and many of his sudden policy decisions are motivated
by what is said there. Trump can be seen as an extreme version of
the “mediatization” of politics.
Fox’s model has been imitated, of course, with quite a bit of
success, by MSNBC, and CNN is moving in that direction as well.
And more extreme competitors to Fox have grown, particularly
since the election—Newsmax and One America Network.
This is resulting in an increased partisan division in what media
people rely on, and also on what media people trust.
[Show graphics]
There is a general decline in trust in media over time, by the way.
This is in part consistent with a general decline in trust of all
institutions, but is in part no doubt due to the increase in partisan
polarization.
Partisanship is common in many media cultures, and it can be a
very reasonable way for a media system to be organized.
European democracies typically have a variety of media that
14
represent different points of view—newspapers, particularly.
Broadcasting tends to be more neutral.
But the form of partisan news we have today in the US is scary in
many ways, and I think it is not unreasonable to worry that it is
threatening to undermine democracy. I am thinking here of the
fragmentation of the public into bubbles of people that live in
different realities, and the rise of the post-truth culture.
Info-wars is a perfect symbol of that post-truth culture, with its
attitude that information is essentially a weapon of war.
This has clearly contributed to polarization of American society.
The new partisan media didn’t create this polarization all be
themselves. It started developing in the 1970s, and was led by
political consultants originally. But partisan media now certainly
drive it. This is illustrated by research on the use of the term
“hate” in Fox news, which is a very central part of its discourse.
We can see the consequences of this in the difficulty of getting
things done in Washington, and the lack of consensus on the basic
rules of the game, lack of consensus on the legitimacy of
institutions.
The new partisan media also form a key part of the context for the
circulation of misinformation.
What’s happened with public opinion on the pandemic is an
important illustration of the consequences of this. (27% of Fox
news viewers still were skeptical of the vaccine in August; 46% of
OAN and Newsmax viewers. It’s also more extreme for people
who rely mainly on social media.)
The aftermath of the election is another very dramatic example.
15
And climate change is similar to the pandemic, I would say, on a
more long-term scale. It used to be that the typical pattern of
development of public opinion on many issues was that you would
start with big partisan divides, but then views would converge. On
climate change, that started to happen, but then the issue was repoliticized. Fox had a lot to do with this.
Of course, the circulation of “fake news” is a manifestation of this
post-truth culture.
Rise of interactive media, “citizen journalism,” “parajournalism”
In the “old order” of legacy media, professional journalists and
traditional news organizations were the gatekeepers, who for the
most part controlled the flow of information to the mass public—
even if they often deferred to political leaders. With the advent of
the Internet, many other communicators could reach the public
directly. That means the sociology of news is changing in
important ways. In the 1970s, when the field began, the big insight
of the new generation of scholars was that news was produced by
organizations, rather than just being just a mirror of reality, or
something produced by the “great reporters.” This was the
research traditions that led to the focus on “routines.”
Today, the focus is shifting from news organizations to news
networks, that include journalists working in traditional news
organizations, but also lots of other kinds of actors, who share
functions of journalists, and can communicate directly with the
public. Some may be trained as journalists, but work for other
kinds of organizations—e.g. people who produce the web site of a
sports team. Some are not trained as journalists, but perform
journalistic functions; They may or may not see themselves as
journalists, and they may embrace parts of the ethics and routines
16
of professional journalists, while also following other routines and
ethics of their own. Activist journalist are like this, and many
bloggers. Some may characterize themselves as journalists mainly
for the legal advantages it gives them. In the early days of the
Internet, a lot of people were predicting that professional
journalists and legacy news organizations would quickly become
irrelevant. That hasn’t happened. But the process is more
complex than it was. These kinds of actors interact with traditional
journalists in the process of making news. C.W. Anderson reading
is a good example of what this looks like
Other examples: citizen journalists during war. But also militaries
themselves.
In health coverage, networks of patients, as in the case of the
controversies over mamograms.
17
Major Trends in the History of U.S. News
Media, 1980-2019
! Commercialization
! Rise of “infotainment,” hybridization
! De-Professionalization
! Collapse of business model of
traditional media; disinvestment and
“crisis of news”
! Rise of multi-channel media; audience
fragmentation
! Reemergence of partisan media
! Rise of interactive media, “citizen
journalism,” “para-journalism”
Commercialization of News
Media
” Rise of Local TV
” Increased competition in TV
markets
” Deregulation of broadcasting
” Declining newspaper readerships
” Corporate ownership of
newspapers
” Rise of digital media, audience
metrics
Decline of Journalistic Professionalism
!Autonomy reduced due to
commercialization, weak job market
!Consensus on ethics and standards
declines due to commercialization,
polarization, and blurring boundaries of
profession
Major Trends in the History of U.S. News
Media, 1980-2019
! Commercialization
! Rise of “infotainment,” hybridization
! De-Professionalization
! Collapse of business model of
traditional media; disinvestment and
“crisis of news”
! Rise of multi-channel media; audience
fragmentation
! Reemergence of partisan media
! Rise of interactive media, “citizen
journalism,” “para-journalism”
Disinvestment in News
Reporting
#Newspaper editorial spending down
$1.6 b, 2006-2009
#Newsroom employment down 26%
since 2008
Disinvestment in News
Reporting
#Newspaper editorial spending down
$1.6 b, 2006-2009
#Newspaper staffs down 25%
#There are fewer newspapers, and
they are smaller
Reasons for Collapse of
Traditional Business Model of
News Media
” Increased competition
” Deregulation of broadcasting
” Corporate ownership of
newspapers
” Tech companies suck up
advertising revenue
” Internet puts downward pressure
on advertising rates
Advertising Rates in 2010, in CPM (Cost
Per Million Impressions)
Network TV
Large-Market
Newspaper
Online
$19.74
$19.72
$2.52
Possible Solutions to the
Crisis of News
# Paywalls
Possible Solutions to the
Crisis of News
#
#
#
#
Paywalls
Digital native media
Patronage
Non-profit news media
Ten Most Visited News Websites, 2021
1. Yahoo News
2. Google News
3. Huffington Post
4. CNN
5. New York Times
6. Fox News
7. NBC News
8. Mail Online
9. Washington Post
10. The Guardian
Major Trends in the History of U.S. News
Media, 1980-2019
! Commercialization
! Rise of “infotainment,” hybridization
! De-Professionalization
! Collapse of business model of
traditional media; disinvestment and
“crisis of news”
! Rise of multi-channel media; audience
fragmentation
! Reemergence of partisan media
! Rise of interactive media, “citizen
journalism,” “para-journalism”
The not-so-invisible primary for 2024
By Jon Allsop
On Thanksgiving in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a candidate for the
2020 Democratic presidential nomination, found herself in the
midst of a brutal news cycle. The Washington Post reported that
her campaign was floundering
(Links to an external site.)
as she struggled to define herself, while the New York Times
reported on disarray among her staff
(Links to an external site.)
. Politico referred to these together as “two nail-in-coffin stories”
for Harris
(Links to an external site.)
; less than a week later she was out of the race, leading allies (and
even one presidential rival
(Links to an external site.)
) to accuse the media of sexist and racist double standards
(Links to an external site.)
in coverage of her campaign. Two Turkey Days later and Harris,
now the vice president, could perhaps be forgiven for thinking it’s
Groundhog Day, amid a fresh barrage of unflattering coverage
(Links to an external site.)
. Last week, CNN dropped a mammoth piece
(Links to an external site.)
—headlined “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’
frustrating start as vice president”—suggesting, among other
things, that she’s struggling to define herself and that her staff is in
disarray; her allies again see a double standard. On Thursday,
Harris went on ABC where she defended her record and denied
that she feels “misused or underused,”
(Links to an external site.)
as her interviewer George Stephanopoulos put it. On Friday, she
won better headlines as she became the first female president of
the United States—a position she held for roughly eighty-five
minutes, while President Biden was under anesthesia for a
colonoscopy.
Unlike in 2019, Harris is not currently running a presidential
campaign, though you might not necessarily know it—indeed, the
explicit undercurrent of much of her recent bad press has been the
state of her presidential prospects for 2024, with questions swirling
(Links to an external site.)
as to whether Biden really intends to run again and whether, if he
doesn’t, Harris is his “heir apparent.” This coverage has assessed
Harris’s political standing both in relative isolation (her approval
rating is bad) and vis-à-vis other Democratic contenders,
hypothetical or otherwise. (“Science Concludes Kamala Harris
Would Be One of Worst Possible Democratic Presidential
Candidates,” a headline in Slate concluded
(Links to an external site.)
, based on one survey.) Of the latter, much has been made of
Harris’s supposed rivalry with Pete Buttigieg, who, as
transportation secretary, is enjoying a moment in the media
spotlight tied to Biden’s infrastructure legislation. Per Politico
(Links to an external site.)
, Buttigieg’s recent “positive press” has grated on “Harris-world.”
On Meet the Press on Sunday, Chuck Todd asked Buttigieg
(Links to an external site.)
if the “rivalry” narrative had strained the pair’s relationship;
Buttigieg replied that it hadn’t because neither is paying attention
to “what’s obsessing the commentators.” The press has assessed
Buttigieg’s political prospects in their own right, too
(Links to an external site.)
: the Post’s Toluse Olorunnipa, for instance, noted on CNN on
Sunday
(Links to an external site.)
that Buttigieg currently has a “nice portfolio” that he can use to
talk up Biden’s infrastructure achievements and the bipartisanship
that led to them. (“It’s obviously way too early to be talking about
2024,” Olorunnipa said, “but I’m going to talk about it anyways.”)
The political media’s recent 2024 speculation has not been limited
to Harris and Buttigieg. High-ranking politicians can scarcely set
foot in Iowa or New Hampshire without setting it off. The names of
several other Democrats who ran in 2019—Amy Klobuchar, Cory
Booker, Elizabeth Warren—have been mentioned
(Links to an external site.)
, as have the names of several who didn’t. Last week, CNN’s Erin
Burnett asked Stacey Abrams
(Links to an external site.)
, the leading Georgia Democrat, about a Politicoarticle suggesting
that she might run, calling the question “a crucial point”; Abrams
demurred, saying that she’s currently focused on fighting to pass
federal voting-rights legislation. (“We can have a conversation
about elections after we do the work of protecting the democracy
that undergirds those contests,” Abrams said.) Also last week,
Biden tapped Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, to
coordinate infrastructure spending. A couple of hours after that
news broke, Jonathan Martin, of the Times, tweeted
(Links to an external site.)
, based on a text he’d just received from a Democratic source, that
we should all “add another name to the 2024 roster”—though
Vanity Fair has since argued that Landrieu’s appointment
(Links to an external site.)
“could be interpreted as a strategic move” on Biden’s part to
“shutter speculation” that he’s actively positioning Buttigieg as his
heir.
Such speculation isn’t just rampant on the Democratic side: for
months now, reporters and pundits have been throwing around
names on the Republican side, too, mooting everyone from Ron
DeSantis, the media-bashing Florida governor, to Larry Hogan, the
Maryland governor who is a fixture on mainstream news networks,
where he has repeatedly been
(Links to an external site.)
asked
(Links to an external site.)
about his 2024 ambitions. Numerous journalists suggested
(Links to an external site.)
that Glenn Youngkin might run in the hours after he was elected
governor of Virginia this month, even though he’s never held office
until now. Chris Christie recently told CNN’s Dana Bash that he
doesn’t know yet if he’ll run
(Links to an external site.)
(“The idea of making predictions for 2024 is folly,” he added); Mike
Pence, NBC told us
(Links to an external site.)
, recently gave a “campaign-like speech.” Donald Trump, of course,
has loomed particularly large, generating what feels like at least as
much 2024 chatter as every other potential candidate combined, on
both sides. Last week, Bill Maher told CNN that Trump will
definitely run again; yesterday, Michael Cohen told CNN that
Maher is “absolutely wrong” in what was Cohen’s first interview
(Links to an external site.)
since his release from his Trump-induced house arrest. The
Washington Examiner’s David M. Drucker already wrote a book
(Links to an external site.)
, titled In Trump’s Shadow, about the 2024 GOP primary, which he
expects to be contested.
If you were to think that all this presidential talk is even earlier and
even more feverish than the early, feverish media norm, then you
wouldn’t be the only one: as the AP’s Steve Peoples put it on
Sunday, in an article full of presidential talk
(Links to an external site.)
, “the mere existence of such conversations so soon into a new
presidency is unusual.” These conversations aren’t just happening
among media pundits; loose-lipped politicians and donors are
having them, too, and are driving a lot of the press coverage as a
result, especially when they’re willing to put their names on the
record. More broadly, the early speculation has been intensified by
factors including Biden’s supposed recent political misfortunes (not
least the Virginia election
(Links to an external site.)
), his age (he turned seventy-nine on Saturday), and the apparently
widespread assumption in Democratic circles that he never
intended to serve two terms anyway. As the coverage has amped
up, Biden’s aides have briefed out that he will run again, driving
yet more
(Links to an external site.)
coverage
(Links to an external site.)
. Yesterday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, put her
name behind that claim in a conversation with reporters on Air
Force One
(Links to an external site.)
.
Still, the media bears some responsibility for amplifying all this—no
one is forcing us to cover 2024 already. Why is the media talking
about this?! debates sometimes take on an all-or-nothing quality,
rather than weighing proportion and prominence. The biggest
problem with horse-race election coverage, arguably, isn’t that it
exists at all, but that it overrides so much else of substance in
major outlets’ attention spans. By that token, it could plausibly be
argued that, while the 2024 chatter is already a big story, it isn’t
(yet) the big story, and that there’s enough space across the media
landscape for it to coexist with other big stories. (Olorunnipa
talking about 2024 on CNN, for instance, came at the very end of
the network’s Inside Politics show on Sunday, after a brief segment
on Biden’s pardoning of two Thanksgiving turkeys.)
Still, any amount of top-level media attention is a precious
resource, and there are hundreds of stories in the world right now
that merit more coverage than an election that’s three years away.
More to the point, even if you think the horserace should be a
preeminent story, that distant timeframe—and everything that
could change in the interim—makes much of the current chatter
more or less obsolete, something commentators sometimes seem to
acknowledge before chattering away regardless. For now, focusing
on 2024 to any meaningful extent risks undercutting, and even
distorting, the more important story of what Biden is doing in the
present by implicitly lame-ducking him. Some aspects of the 2024
race are immediately newsworthy; as I’ve written
(Links to an external site.)
often
(Links to an external site.)
in this newsletter, the Republican war on elections is one of those.
But even there, we must strike a balance with governance
(Links to an external site.)
. That’s the point of elections.
Below, more on politics and democracy:
● Kamala Harris, I: Last week, Harris’s communications
chief, Ashley Etienne, stepped down; Vanity Fair’s Abigail
Tracy reported that Etienne had always intended to stay in
that post for a year
● (Links to an external site.)
● , “but still her departure comes after a raft of stories on
infighting and low morale in the vice president’s office.”
Some observers have blamed certain Harris aides for the
poor coverage; some have blamed Harris herself. Rebecca
Katz, a progressive strategist, told Tracy that the intense
coverage of the insurrection derailed Harris’s moment in
the spotlight earlier this year, by (rightfully) taking “all of
the soft media off the grid.” Stories about Harris’s
pathbreaking vice presidency “never really happened in
the degree that they would have if our country wasn’t in
such a scary place.”
● Kamala Harris, II: Writing for TheGrio, the political
commentator Reecie Colbert argues that the media
narrative that Harris has been invisible is both false and
insidious
● (Links to an external site.)
● . “Competence is, frankly, too boring for the media, so it
resorts to gossip rag and premature horse race coverage
of the next presidential election,” Colbert writes. At the
same time, “Harris seeking a more prominent profile
would be frowned upon in the West Wing, and lambasted
by the same ‘invisible’ peddling critics as too ambitious.”
● “Backsliding”: Yesterday, the International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a think tank based in
Sweden, added the US to its list of “backsliding
democracies,”
● (Links to an external site.)
● the first time the country has ever appeared there; in a
report, the group described Trump’s lies about the 2020
election as a “historic turning point.” The report captured
significant media attention. “You will notice that the
Washington Post chose to illustrate the story with a photo”
of the insurrection, Chris Hayes said on MSNBC
● (Links to an external site.)
● . “That day, of course, is the most striking example of our
democratic backsliding. But this report reflects something
deeper that is happening in our political culture.”
● Personality and politics: Writing for Scientific
American, Asher Lawson and Hemant Kakkar, two
researchers at Duke University, shared their finding that
political ideology isn’t a sole determinant of whether a
person is likely to share fake news
● (Links to an external site.)
● —personality matters, too. Lawson and Kakkar found that
“low-conscientiousness conservatives” have a “general
need for chaos” and an “exceptional tendency to share
fake news,” and are also less likely to heed fact-checking
warnings appended to stories on social media.
BEST OF CJR
Adbusters and the roots of the contemporary left
(Links to an external site.)
by Sam Thielman
Few publications are as synonymous with the early-2000s political left, such as it
was, as Adbusters.
READ MORE AT CJR.ORG »
(Links to an external site.)
Other notable stories:
● Alden Global Capital, the cost-slashing hedge fund
● (Links to an external site.)
● that is already the second-biggest owner of local
newspapers in the US, is now moving to acquire Lee
Enterprises
● (Links to an external site.)
● , which owns nearly a hundred papers including the
Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Buffalo News. Alden,
which already holds a six-percent stake in Lee, is offering
twenty-four dollars per share, an increase of thirty percent
on Lee’s closing share price last week.
● Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith and Lucas Shaw profiled
● (Links to an external site.)
● The Athletic
● (Links to an external site.)
● , a sports site that is exploring a sale and new ways to
grow after realizing that subscription revenue alone “only
goes so far.” After the pandemic hammered live sports,
The Athletic laid off nearly fifty staffers, and the site has
also scaled back its video and podcast output, Smith and
Shaw write. Bosses are hoping that podcast and
newsletter ads will help grow revenue.
● Reporters at Gizmodo, which was part of a consortium of
news sites that was recently granted access to a trove of
leaked documents from inside Facebook, are working to
make “as many of the documents public as possible, as
quickly as possible.”
● (Links to an external site.)
● The site plans to work with a group of independent
experts to establish guidelines for publication; their ranks
include Priyanjana Bengani, a Tow Center researcher and
CJR contributor
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● Ariana Pekary, CJR’s public editor for CNN, writes that the
network is pushing ever further “into the realm of tabloidlike material” as it confronts a post-Trump decline in
ratings
● (Links to an external site.)
● . “This trend emerged in September with the death of
Gabby Petito,” Pekary writes; since then, CNN has aired
exaggerated coverage of inflation and paparazzi footage of
Alec Baldwin, after he was involved in a fatal shooting on
the set of a movie.
● In a highly unusual move, a judge in New York recently
restrained the Times from seeking or publishing certain
documents related to the right-wing site Project Veritas
● (Links to an external site.)
● , which is suing the Times for defamation
● (Links to an external site.)
● , and an appeals court confirmed the decision
● (Links to an external site.)
● . The Times is now asking the Supreme Court of
Westchester County
● (Links to an external site.)
● to remove the restraint; yesterday, fifty press groups and
news outlets backed the paper in a brief
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● Earlier this month, Adnan Kivan, a construction mogul,
abruptly fired the entire staff of the Kyiv Post, an Englishlanguage paper that he owns in Ukraine
● (Links to an external site.)
● , a decision that was widely interpreted as an assault on
the paper’s editorial independence. Now thirty of its
former staffers are launching the Kyiv Independent
● (Links to an external site.)
● , a new English-language outlet that will be funded
primarily by readers and donors rather than “a rich owner
or an oligarch.”
● A few weeks ago, Paul Dacre, the former editor of the
Daily Mail, a right-wing British tabloid, left his role as
chair of Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s parent
company
● (Links to an external site.)
● . Since then, Dacre withdrew himself from contention to
lead Britain’s media regulator (despite being the
government’s favored candidate) while the Mail’s current
editor (whom Dacre had publicly criticized) was ousted.
Dacre is now back at Associated Newspapers
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● Fernando González, the AP’s Cuba-based news director for
the Caribbean and Andes, has died following a heart
attack
● (Links to an external site.)
● . He was sixty. “Gregarious and seemingly inexhaustible,
González, known for his trademark long gray ponytail, was
especially strong and compassionate in crisis situations,”
the AP’s John Rice writes, “both covering the news and
tirelessly organizing help when colleagues were ill or
injured.”
● And hackers took over the Twitter feed of the Dallas
Observer, a newspaper in Texas, and used it, Vice reports
● (Links to an external site.)
● , “to push an increasingly common scam: offering a hardto-find PlayStation 5 console for sale on the social
network.” Twitter temporarily restricted the account,
while the Observer confirmed that it was “not offering
sweet deals on PlayStation 5 consoles. We play on a
gaming laptop and use Steam.”
The battle for the narrative at the border
of Poland and Belarus
By Jon Allsop
In early September, the right-wing president of Poland declared a state of
emergency at his country’s Eastern border with Belarus—the first such order
in Poland’s post-communist history
(Links to an external site.)
. Officials said that the declaration, which would last for thirty days, was a
response to migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan attempting to
cross into Poland, and thus the European Union; it also had the effect of
restricting activists and monitors, not least journalists, from getting within
two miles of the border, and explicitly aimed to
(Links to an external site.)
“limit access to public information on activities” within that sealed zone.
Photographing border guards, police, and military officers was also banned.
Access was hardly unimpeded before the declaration
(Links to an external site.)
—journalists resorted to photographing migrants from afar; activists reported
using a megaphone to talk to them—and numerous Polish lawmakers and
international observers characterized the state of emergency
(Links to an external site.)
as a government pretext
(Links to an external site.)
to further limit scrutiny of its treatment of asylum seekers. In response to the
decree, Reporters Without Borders declared a “press freedom state of
emergency” in Poland
(Links to an external site.)
. The former has since been extended by two months, and so the latter
continues, too.
The first charges for violating the state of emergency came the day after it was
implemented, with police summoning Bartłomiej Bublewicz, a reporter for
Onet, as well as a camera operator for the same site to accuse them of breaking
the rules
(Links to an external site.)
. Staying outside of the zone covered by the declaration hasn’t proved much of
a protection for the press, either. In late September, border guards pulled over
and interrogated Agnieszka Kaszuba
(Links to an external site.)
, of the Polish newspaper Fakt, even though she had been driving outside of
the zone; in the end, she was fined for not having a fire extinguisher in her car.
In recent days, we’ve seen an escalation. On November 14, Claudia Ciobanu
and Jaap Arriens, of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, were pulled
over and accused both of driving within the zone (they weren’t) and of having
stolen their cellphones (they hadn’t)
(Links to an external site.)
; the next day, the authorities detained and fined David Khalifa and Jordi
Demory
(Links to an external site.)
, who were on assignment for the French edition of the Russian state
broadcaster RT. The day after that, Maciej Moskwa, Maciej Nabrdalik, and
Martin Divisek, three photojournalists, stopped by a military camp and took
pictures; they identified themselves as press, but when they tried to leave, they
were forced out of their car and handcuffed so tightly their wrists bruised
while officers tried to search their cameras and phones. (In a recording made
by one of the journalists
(Links to an external site.)
, a soldier can be heard telling a colleague that the journalists would have a
right to file a complaint since, “unfortunately, we’re not in the zone of this
fucking state of emergency.”)
Poland’s prime minister said recently that allowing journalists to access the
border would be unhelpful
(Links to an external site.)
since it would expose them to “the influence of Belarusian and Russian fake
news.” Around the same time, a deputy foreign minister said that reporters are
being kept away from the border to protect them from migrants
(Links to an external site.)
, adding that if the press really wants to see what’s going on, “nothing is
stopping you and other journalists from going to Belarus and reporting from
there.” Belarus, of course, is one of the worst countries in the world for
journalists
(Links to an external site.)
, where the dictator Alexander Lukashenko responded to widespread protests
against his rule last year with a particularly
(Links to an external site.)
brutal
(Links to an external site.)
clampdown
(Links to an external site.)
on independent media
(Links to an external site.)
. (The clampdown hasn’t abated: just yesterday, Nasha Niva, the oldest
newspaper in Belarus, was outlawed
(Links to an external site.)
.) Indeed, Lukashenko’s war on the press was partly the impetus for the border
crisis: in May, he grounded a commercial flight in order to abduct the
journalist Roman Protasevich; the EU responded by tightening sanctions on
Lukashenko, who, in turn, has not only allowed but encouraged migrants to
assemble at the EU’s border with the country
(Links to an external site.)
, including by liberalizing access to “tourist visas” from Middle Eastern
countries
(Links to an external site.)
.
Lukashenko’s regime has recently allowed international media outlets, which
are increasingly treating the crisis as a big story, to access the Belarusian side
of the border: CNN, for example, filed a report from inside a migrantprocessing center
(Links to an external site.)
, while the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg filmed right next to the wire border fence
(Links to an external site.)
. (Rosenberg was also granted a televised interview with Lukashenko himself
(Links to an external site.)
, and took the chance to grill him on his human-rights record.) Still, the terms
of such access have seemed somewhat convenient: as NPR’s Charles Maynes
put it
(Links to an external site.)
, Belarus allowing reporters to observe the processing center and Polish border
officials firing weapons at migrants “seemed like a media event designed to
present Belarus as much more humane than the EU.” There is, as the BBC’s
Nick Beake
(Links to an external site.)
and others have reported, a narrative battle underway at the border, with
Belarusian and Polish authorities using social and traditional media to push
their respective lines. According to Beake, Belarusian troops recently filmed
themselves playing with migrant kids to show compassion, while Polish troops
filmed the Belarusian troops to show them cynically using kids for a photo op.
Russia, an ally of Belarus, has joined the
(Links to an external site.)
narrative war, too
(Links to an external site.)
.
Social media has helped reporters communicate with, and hear the stories of,
migrants who they can’t always access in person
(Links to an external site.)
. It has also been an engine of disinformation targeting migrants themselves:
as the New York Times reported this week
(Links to an external site.)
, would-be people smugglers and other malefactors have used Facebook, in
particular, to advertise non-existent ways to cross the border, often at a steep
price. (This disinformation has helped Lukashenko stoke the border crisis, the
Times notes, though there’s no evidence that his regime has played an active
role in coordinating it.) Ultimately, in the absence of reliable journalistic
access, particularly within the sealed zone in Poland, news organizations have
found it hard
(Links to an external site.)
to verify what’s actually happening at the border
(Links to an external site.)
. The stakes for finding out are high: This isn’t just a geopolitical showdown
between Eastern and Western Europe; it’s increasingly a humanitarian
emergency, too. Families have been separated. Temperatures in the border
area have plummeted to dangerous lows. A dozen migrants are thought to
have died, including a one-year-old child
(Links to an external site.)
.
According to Notes from Poland
(Links to an external site.)
, an English-language news site that covers the country, the Polish
constitution dictates that the state of emergency at the border, which is due to
expire next week, cannot be extended further. Government officials have been
working on replacement measures
(Links to an external site.)
; the interior minister has said that these will restore media access to the
border, though journalists there will have to abide by tight rules and
coordinate closely with border guards. Whatever happens next, it seems
unrealistic to expect the Polish authorities—or those in Belarus, for that
matter—to willingly relinquish narrative control. Until now, that’s been so
extensive that even local residents haven’t been able to fully see what’s
happening right under their noses. “Two hundred people broke into the
country three kilometers from our village and we have no idea what’s going
on,” Tom Diserens, a scientist who lives close to the border, told Notes from
Poland two weeks ago. “We need journalists on the border.”
Below, more on press freedom around the
world:
● Belarus: NRT, a broadcaster based in Iraqi Kurdistan, has claimed
that one of its reporters, Zhyan Ali, was arrested at the airport in
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, as she tried to enter the country on
Monday
● (Links to an external site.)
● , and that her equipment was confiscated. Ali was attempting to
travel to the Polish border, where many Kurds are among the
migrants trying to cross into the EU. NRT has been covering the
crisis remotely.
● Somalia: On Saturday, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled—the director of
a government-owned radio station in Somalia who was a prominent
critic of al-Shabab, an Islamist militant group, and was known for
his interviews with suspected members of the group—was killed in a
suicide bombing in Mogadishu, the capital. Al-Shabab claimed
responsibility for the attack, and said that it had long been
“hunting” Guled for “crimes against Islam.”
● (Links to an external site.)
●
● Argentina: On Monday night, a gang of nine people, who wore
hoods to conceal their identities, lobbed molotov cocktails at the
offices of Clarín, a major newspaper based in Buenos Aires. No one
was injured, but the paper’s owners described the incident as
“worrying,” and said that it appeared to constitute “a violent
expression of intolerance against a communications media outlet.”
The Buenos Aires Times has more
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● India: For Coda Story, Aakash Hassan reports that publications in
Kashmir, where the Indian authorities have clamped down on press
freedom since removing the region’s autonomous status in 2019,
are increasingly erasing old articles critical of the Indian
government
● (Links to an external site.)
● . The work of local reporters in Kashmir “forms a vital record of
wide-ranging human rights violations linked to the Indian armed
forces,” Hassan writes, “one that many believe the government is
attempting to expunge.”
● China: Recently, Peng Shuai disappeared from public view in the
country after accusing a former government official of sexual
assault, sparking an international outcry. (She since appeared at a
tournament in Beijing and has reportedly been in contact with
international Olympic officials
● (Links to an external site.)
● .) The Chinese government has scrubbed references to Peng from
the country’s media, including by blocking international networks’
coverage of her. Yesterday, CNN showed its viewers in the US what
that censorship looks like
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● Canada: On Monday, a court in Canada released the journalists
Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano from detention, three days
after arresting them while they covered a protest against a pipeline
on Indigenous land—though contempt charges against the pair have
not yet been dropped. Their arrests “followed two recent court
decisions that upheld the rights of journalists to work unimpeded at
protests,” the Times notes
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
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(Links to an external site.)
Other notable stories:
● Allies of President Biden told Michael M. Grynbaum, of the Times,
that he should be talking to the media more
● (Links to an external site.)
● . Nine months into his tenure, Biden has done roughly a dozen oneon-ones with major print and TV outlets—compared with Trump’s
more than fifty and Obama’s more than a hundred by the same
point—and hasn’t sat for any interview with the the Times, the Post,
the Journal, USA Today, Reuters, or the AP, Grynbaum reports.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, countered that Biden
takes informal questions from reporters more frequently than his
predecessors, and that his administration is meeting voters “where
they are in 2021,” not least on social media.
● The Times sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom
of Information Act to obtain more than two thousand pages of
records that shine a light on the final days of Jeffrey Epstein
● (Links to an external site.)
● , who killed himself in jail in 2019. The records show that officials
“made mistake after mistake leading up to Mr. Epstein’s death” but
“offer no support to the explosion of conspiracy theories that Mr.
Epstein’s death was not a suicide,” the Times reports. The document
trove constitutes “the most intimate and detailed look yet at Mr.
Epstein’s final days, and offers something often missing from public
accounts: his voice.”
● On December 2, as part of a collaborative workshop, Scalawag will
launch “The Press in Prison,”
● (Links to an external site.)
● a guidebook intended to “help journalists integrate reporting from
prison into their regular reporting cycles.” In an introductory essay,
Scalawag’s editors write that the population of incarcerated people
is large enough to make “prison” the fifth-largest city in the country:
“In journalism’s heyday,” they write, “it would call for at least two
major daily newspapers, competing local television stations, and a
public radio headquarters.”
● Last month, Apple told the Securities and Exchange Commission
that it doesn’t use nondisclosure agreements to stop staffers from
talking publicly about harassment and discrimination. Cher
Scarlett, a former Apple engineer and workplace organizer who was
asked to sign an NDA by the company, subsequently filed a
whistleblower complaint with the SEC; now she has spoken out
publicly about the practice, to Insider’s Matt Drange
● (Links to an external site.)
● .
● Last week, Axios reported that many electronic air filters that
schools installed as a COVID precaution are doing “more harm than
good,” and noted allegations that one provider, Global Plasma
Solutions, made misleading efficacy claims. Axios has now retracted
the story
● (Links to an external site.)
● ; the site acknowledged that it did not request comment from GPS
prior to publication, and “wrongly relied” on a source who advises a
GPS competitor.
● The Post’s Erik Wemple called out CNN for failing to reckon with its
credulous past coverage of the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia
● (Links to an external site.)
● ; the network, Wemple writes, “appears content to allow its sunny,
erstwhile commentary about the Steele dossier to sit alongside its
grim, new commentary about the Steele dossier,” without offering
any mea culpa. (ICYMI, Wemple recently discussed dossier
coverage on our podcast,The Kicker
● (Links to an external site.)
● .)
● In an op-ed for the New York Times
● (Links to an external site.)
● , Alan Leveritt, the publisher of the Arkansas Times, explains why
his paper filed a lawsuit challenging a state law that bars public
bodies from doing business with contractors until they pledge not to
boycott Israel: “We don’t take political positions in return for
advertising,” Leveritt writes. An appeals court backed the paper, but
recently reheard the case, which could now end up at the Supreme
Court.
● Recently, Caroline Nokes, a Conservative Party lawmaker in the UK,
alleged that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, once
touched her inappropriately. After hearing Nokes speak out, Ailbhe
Rea, a journalist at the New Statesman, decided to share her own
story of being touched by Stanley Johnson. Like Nokes, “I gain
nothing from” speaking out, Rea writes
● (Links to an external site.)
● , but “this is Stanley Johnson’s problem, not mine or Nokes’s.”
● And the Salt Lake Tribune and AccuWeather will update the maps
of Utah that they use to reflect how climate change and allocation
issues have altered the boundaries of the state’s Great Salt Lake
● (Links to an external site.)
● . State maps typically show the lake as “a familiar blue footprint
spreading across northwest Utah,” the Tribune writes. In reality, it
is now “a puddle of its former self, rimmed by vast reaches of
exposed lake bed.
On Omicron, uncertainty, vaccine equity,
and the media
By Jon Allsop
Late last week, the world started to hear about a new coronavirus variant that
had already started to worry scientists
(Links to an external site.)
: B.1.1.529, which was first detected in southern Africa earlier this month. On
Friday, the World Health Organization noted
(Links to an external site.)
the variant’s very high number of mutations, declared it to be “of concern,”
and christened it “Omicron,” in line with the Greek-alphabet naming
convention for variants
(Links to an external site.)
that the WHO adopted earlier this year (yes, they skipped Nu and Xi
(Links to an external site.)
); meanwhile, various countries imposed travel restrictions on southern
Africa, even though we don’t yet know for sure where the variant originated.
Indeed, there’s very little that we do know for sure about Omicron at this
point: it may be much more transmissible even than the Delta variant, but
then again it may not; it may cause milder illness than other variants, but then
again it may not; it may render our existing vaccines less effective, but we
don’t know by how much. Kai Kupferschmidt, of Science magazine, likened
the picture
(Links to an external site.)
to a jigsaw puzzle whose every new piece changes the puzzler’s perspective.
(“It’s a picture of the sky. No, wait the sea. Oh, a ship.”) The writer Charlie
Warzel noted on Twitter
(Links to an external site.)
that we’ve entered a “super weird moment where we know a thing is
happening but we don’t know what.”
Despite the massive uncertainty, the world’s media instantly swelled with
content: “What we know about the Omicron variant”
(Links to an external site.)
; “The Omicron Variant: We Still Know Almost Nothing”
(Links to an external site.)
; “Opinion | The Omicron Variant Is Creating a Lot of Anxiety,”
(Links to an external site.)
and so on and so on. Over the weekend, a debate took shape, among experts
and journalists, as to whether all the coverage was too much. David Dowdy, an
epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, accused fellow scientists
(Links to an external site.)
of shamefully overselling fears about Omicron despite the paucity of hard
data on the variant; Erin Biba, a freelance science journalist, tweeted that
(Links to an external site.)
it is “completely and utterly exhausting” when “doomsday headlines and
uninformed reporters create mass hysteria before we even have any details or
information.” Yesterday, Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, took
up the question on his show
(Links to an external site.)
. “Right now, from where I sit, we don’t know if Omicron should be the lead
story or not,” he said, before putting that question to Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a
CNN analyst and medicine professor at George Washington University. “I
think it should not be the lead story right now because it’s a story that is based
entirely on speculation,” Reiner replied. When Stelter pointed out that
Omicron fears caused the Dow to tank on Friday, Reiner replied, “right—
because the speculation was all bad.”
It’s not hard to imagine what media critics will say about the early Omicron
coverage in a few weeks if the variant turns out not to be as bad as some
experts fear. Equally, however, it’s not hard to imagine what media critics
would have said if major outlets had initially ignored or downplayed Omicron
and it turns out to be really bad. There is no good way out of this bind without
knowing what’s going to happen next—and the story here is that we don’t
know what’s going to happen next. This challenge extends beyond the press;
officials from the Biden administration told the Washington Post’s Dan
Diamond
(Links to an external site.)
that they, too, have been weighing the risks of being seen to cry wolf against
the risks of failing to prepare the public for a reasonably foreseeable blow and,
ultimately, protecting people. Nor will the variant politely stop spreading to
give us two weeks to wait for more data. Ultimately, Omicron is a particularly
acute example of pandemic-era challenges for journalism that I’ve covered
often in this newsletter: what we can see so far isn’t what’s actually happening,
and we may never get perfect visibility.
Swathes of the press are very bad at processing and respecting uncertainty,
but that’s more a reflection of the incentives that news leaders choose to
privilege than an inevitability; as Kupferschmidt put it
(Links to an external site.)
, watching scientists race to find out more about Omicron is actually “a
fascinating process to see play out as a science journalist. In some ways this is
science at its purest because there is less of a framework that every bit of
information is being slotted into.” The more useful question here, perhaps, is
not whether Omicron should be the top story of the day, but how we ought to
be thinking about it, given that it is. It’s possible to be clear about uncertainty
rather than tripping over it, and I saw a good amount of coverage in major
outlets that did center what we don’t know about Omicron (within the limits of
the incentives described above). I saw some good coverage, too, that
interrogated the effectiveness of the travel bans imposed by Western
countries, which were undoubtedly newsworthy for those affected by them.
As is always the case when a story gets a lot of coverage, however, not all of it
was so sharp. Headlines
(Links to an external site.)
said that the US will “bar travelers” from southern Africa, without always
noting as prominently that the ban won’t apply to US citizens or permanent
residents. Nor was the parade of breathless stories and push notifications
every time a new country discovered an Omicron case particularly helpful.
Having a sense of global spread, of course, is important—but in the absence of
universal surveillance testing, the cases we catch fail to tell the whole story,
and can even be misleading in the absence of clear caveats. (Just because
Canada has reported Omicron cases and the US hasn’t yet doesn’t mean that
the US doesn’t have any.) Many of the problems with the Omicron coverage—
as was the case with the Delta coverage that came before it
(Links to an external site.)
—seemed to me to flow from the widespread media urge, which is particularly
prevalent in the US, to frame the world as a collection of discrete nations, and
to use a given outlet’s home nation and its interests as a prism through which
to see all the others. (If you don’t believe me, check out the Post’s top print
headline
(Links to an external site.)
on Saturday.) Nations are organizing the response to Omicron, and we
should, of course, cover that. But it isn’t an excuse for insular thinking.
The problems with this dynamic can be seen in one particularly important
COVID story, that of global vaccine equity. We’ve been told for over a year
now—including by many good journalists
(Links to an external site.)
—that rich countries hoarding vaccines at poorer countries’ expense (and news
organizations uncritically framing vaccine supplies as a zero-sum global war
(Links to an external site.)
) is not only a moral problem, but one of self-interest: the more the virus
spreads globally, the more opportunities it has to mutate into a particularly
troublesome new variant. (The problem extends beyond supply to vaccine
infrastructure: after a long wait, for example, the nation of South Africa has
obtained lots of shots but is struggling to get them into arms fast enough
(Links to an external site.)
.) This story has been covered by many journalists, sometimes very
prominently. But it has never driven a US news cycle as frenzied and focused
as that sparked by the discovery of Omicron. Something new happening is a
more reliable driver of mass-media interest than the unrealized risk of it
happening, or something that should be happening continuing to not happen.
Editors’ decisions as to what constitutes the day’s top story are very often
reactive. Viewed through the prism of persistently low vaccination rates in the
Global South, and all the corresponding warnings around new variants, the
volume of Omicron coverage maybe looks more reactive than premature.
Again, we don’t know that Omicron originated in the Global South—only that
it was discovered and is spreading there. But global vaccine equity is crucial
context here, at the very least. Some Omicron coverage prominently included
it; yesterday, for instance, the Post reported
(Links to an external site.)
on how Moderna’s protection of its intellectual property is hindering efforts to
produce Africa’s first COVID vaccine. Even now, though, such focus is far from
ubiquitous. This isn’t just shortsighted but ironic, given all the handwringing
about uncertainty here—whatever Omicron’s origins, it’s abundantly clear that
we need to vaccinate the entire world at a high level. For its “We Know Almost
Nothing About the Omicron Variant” piece, The Atlantic spoke with the
virologist Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, who said that, in light of global vaccine
inequity, something that looks like the Omicron variant “was predictable.”
Knowing almost nothing is not knowing nothing.
Below, more on the pandemic:
● “The Midterm Election Variant!”: Politicians on the right have
already started to use Omicron as grist for their conspiracy mill:
yesterday, for instance, Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Republican
Congressman from Texas (and former White House physician, of all
jobs), referred to the “MEV—the Midterm Election Variant!” which
Democrats have supposedly invented in order to “CHEAT” in an
election
● (Links to an external site.)
● . On his show, Stelter noted to Reiner that while “scientists are
trying to figure out what’s going on with the future of COVID, in this
kind of fantasy right-wing battleground, you still have… these rightwing figures who are saying do not comply, do not comply with the
vaccine mandates.”
● “Trolling”: For the New York Times, Dan Levin reports on vocal
anti-vaxxers who died of COVID and whose social-media profiles
subsequently became magnets for vicious commentary
● (Links to an external site.)
● . “Losses fill a host of websites that claim to be educational, but are
fueled by schadenfreude at the deaths of the unvaccinated whose
social media posts included Trump memes and conservative
conspiracy theories,” Levin writes. “In a hyperpartisan culture
plagued by ‘alternative facts’ and debates over the most basic
scientific realities of the pandemic, many among the vaccinated are
eager to brandish such accounts as the final, indubitable proof that
the Covid deniers and those who are anti-vaccine are dangerously
misguided. Tapping into the outrage are Reddit forums where there
are entries focused on ‘suicide by Covid’ and ‘awards’ granted to
those who died.”
● “Too far”: Peter Jukes, the editor of Byline Times, in the UK, said
that he planned to write to the BBC in protest
● (Links to an external site.)
● after an actor who appears in a medical drama on the network
challenged him on Twitter to “please confirm the data by which you
believe that wearing a mask in any way stops the spread of a
respiratory virus.” Jukes responded, “This is a step too far BBC,”
adding, “I don’t pay my license fee for fictional doctors to challenge
sound medical advice.” (The license fee funds the BBC.)
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(Links to an external site.)
Other notable stories:
● For the Times, Marc Tracy dug into the specifics of a tax credit for
local news that House Democrats recently passed as part of Biden’s
broader agenda
● (Links to an external site.)
● . (The package still has to pass the Senate.) Tracy estimates that the
Storm Lake Times, a tiny paper in Iowa, could get two hundred
thousand dollars in year one, while the benefits for big local-news
chains like Gannett could run into the tens of millions of dollars
should the policy pass.
● The board of Lee Enterprises, a local-news chain, agreed to adopt a
shareholder-rights, or “poison pill,” plan in a bid to stall the costslashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s attempt at a hostile
takeover
● (Links to an external site.)
● , the Journal’s Benjamin Mullin reports. The agreement will allow
Lee’s other shareholders to buy discounted shares should Alden
succeed in acquiring more than ten percent of Lee’s stock while the
company weighs Alden’s bid.
● On Wednesday, Kevin Nishita—a security guard assigned to protect
a reporter for KRON, a TV station in the Bay Area, while they
reported at a burglarized store in Oakland—was shot as a group of
men tried to steal the reporter’s equipment. On Saturday, Nishita
died of his injuries
● (Links to an external site.)
● . Stanley Roberts, a former KRON journalist, noted that attempted
robberies of news crews have become a “systemic problem.”
● Mark Esper, who served as defense secretary under Trump, is suing
the department he once led after officials there moved to block
sections of Esper’s memoir as part of a pre-publication review
intended to weed out classified details
● (Links to an external site.)
● , Maggie Haberman reports for the Times. Esper says that he
cooperated with the process in good faith but balked at proposed
tweaks to his language, including around information that is already
public.
● Yesterday, The New Yorker published a story by Ian Urbina
● (Links to an external site.)
● detailing how the European Union has created a brutal shadow
detention system for migrants on Libyan soil. Urbina reveals that in
the course of his reporting, he and his team were arrested and
detained at a secret jail in Tripoli, where interrogators accused them
of spying before deporting them; Urbina said that his arrest left him
with two broken ribs and kidney damage.
● In other press-freedom news, Qatar detained two Norwegian
journalists who were reporting on migrant-labor issues tied to
Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 soccer World Cup
● (Links to an external site.)
● . Elsewhere, Apple reportedly warned two dozen journalists in El
Salvador of “possible spying” by their government
● (Links to an external site.)
● . And protesters in the French overseas region of Martinique fired
live ammunition at journalists
● (Links to an external site.)
● amid unrest over COVID protocols and inequality.
● The government of Italy said that it has evacuated Sharbat Gulla
● (Links to an external site.)
● —who became famous, in 1984, as the “Afghan girl” photographed
by Steve McCurry for the cover of National Geographic—from
Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover of the country in the
summer. The photo symbolized “the vicissitudes and conflict of the
chapter in history that Afghanistan and its people were going
through at the time,” Italy’s prime minister said.
● For The Observer, Francisco Garcia, a UK-based writer, recounts
how his estranged family in Spain found him just as he was
finishing work on a book about missing people
● (Links to an external site.)
● . “During all of the time spent considering how and why people slip
into disappearance, I’d rarely given serious thought to the idea that
I might be missing myself,” Garcia recalls. “But that’s exactly what I
had been, from my Spanish family’s perspective.”
● And the BBC has reportedly dropped the term “Megxit,”
● (Links to an external site.)
● a portmanteau referring to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s exit
from the British royal family
● (Links to an external site.)
● , from a documentary about Harry and his brother William’s
relationship with the press; Harry had recently called the term
“misogynistic.” After the first episode of the documentary aired last
week, royal representatives accused the BBC of airing “overblown
and unfounded clai…