Beltway v. Heartland: Trust, Misrepresentation, and National Media Ignored When it Matters
Note: I’m pasting in a very rough draft of a chapter introduction to my new book on place, trust, and journalism (forthcoming, one day, sooner rather than later, I hope). I reflect upon the recent Politico story on Johnstown and then briefly, because I have to pause for now, on why it’s easy for Alabamans to ignore the Roy Moore stuff).
After a turbulent first year of the Trump administration, Politico went back to profile Trump voters in Johnstown, PA, to see if the President’s mishaps had changed their votes. The story detailed a part of Pennsylvania emblematic of the decaying rust belt small towns — a heroin and opioid epidemic in full swing, miners portrayed as delusional for thinking that someone could bring back mining and manufacturing, and misinformed voters told at church that President Obama was the anti-Christ.[1] Moreover, these voters were also both subtly and directly portrayed as racist, with journalist Michael Kruse noting:
Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst — “obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL Players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players)…. And they love him for this,
A source in the story, an elderly white man, used the N-word to describe NFL players. Here was a journalist from the beltway, telling this story of hate, despair, and delusion in rust belt America. Kruse was in fact, working for one of the most beltway publications — Politico is devoted to politics and covers little else. He had come from Washington, a center of power, wealth, world class museums, and top restaurants — and by virtue of working at Politico, he had a megaphone behind him to push the story across the Web as well as an audience of Washington insiders.
But there was a big problem with the story. You wouldn’t know this from reading it, but Hillary Clinton actually won by a sliver — 1 percent — in the area. And contrary to this national narrative pushed by Politico and other news outlets, wealthy suburbs in the area were more Trumptown than Johnstown. Outside of Pittsburgh, Adams Township, also home to good restaurants and country clubs, Trump won by 39 percent.
Perhaps once a long time ago, in the pre-digital era before anyone anywhere could have access to what was written from Washington unless they subscribed to a news outlet or saw it on television, Pittsburgh area residents might never have even see the story they were in. The story would remain a news item for people (elites) in Washington to consider.
But these stories today now can be spread across the globe. To think local people aren’t paying attention to what gets written about them by national outlets in an age of social media is simply wrong, as the Pittsburgh City Paper response pointed out when commenting about the Politico’s story’s spread across the region.
Pittsburgh City Paper’s Ryan Deto reflected on the misrepresentation of Johnstown, attacked national media for stereotyping a place without bothering to take a closer look. His lead was a direct rejoinder to the story. “Politico published a story many in the Pittsburgh region have seen too many times… like many dispatches from the Rust Belt by national publications, the story painted Johnstown as a no-hope town, overrun by drugs and blight, and still in love with Trump.”[2]
Johnstown, though would have many amenities that would appeal to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of a big city dweller. Deto went on to chronicle the progressives in Johnstown, who formed a local chapter of the “Indivisibles,” a group against racism. He also noted that Johnstown has a popular museum (the Flood museum), a children’s museum, an outdoor music venue, and that Johnstown is revitalizing its waterfront. Not to mention it’s home local symphony, an artist community, and hosting of a national triple-A baseball tournament each year.
How could this Politico portrayal be so off? What are the consequences of story after story that marginalizes and stereotypes communities in America, written by big national media who know little about the place they’re visiting? As many regional DC correspondents explained to me in the course of my interviews, national reporters come to town with a narrative or a story already in their mind, and that’s what they are there to do. Regional journalists know these places, and when they come home to report on the presidential campaign trail, tell stories that underscore the intimate knowledge of the concerns of these communities.
This beltway versus heartland divide is one of the most blatant examples of how national media sets itself up not to be trusted. If trust comes from believing that someone else will do the best to represent your interests, the national media largely failed her. If another source of trust is the willingness to let others provide knowledge that you do not have because you believe that they share your values and can represent what you have not seen in a way that you would at the very least respect the approach, then national media failed Johnstown, too. Failing to tell the stories of people unlike them is not the issue that seeds distrust; these stories are getting told, and national news outlets have renewed their commitments to covering these stories in the face of dwindling resources for local media. It’s not whether the national news outlets care about the heartland, it’s that when national news tries to tell these stories, it is done so in a disparaging way, with a sense of superiority that is easy for local residents to ignore.
In a 2017 taping of PBS’s Kalb Report, broadcast from the National Press Club,[3] Washington Post editor Marty Baron and New York Times editor Dean Baquet pointed out their increased responsibility to pick up the work covering places where local journalism has been decimated. They also defended their work but also promised to do better. Baron noted
“more than half of the congressional delegation has no journalists in Washington and there are only one or two people covering the state legislature and they are expected to do investigative work. It’s too hard to do it all. There are too many things being uncovered all over and that means a lack of accountability and degradation of civil society at the state and local level.
Baron argued that his staff represented diverse perspectives with people from all over, such as veterans, southerners, people who did not grow up speaking English as a first language, and touted his own Florida background. A few weeks later, the Post caught flack for demeaning Minnesota’s museums. The first story headline posted online said “’Stranger Things 2’ is a $400,000 windfall for a small museum in Minnesota.” An amended correction to the headline eliminated the word “small” and added a note: “An earlier version incorrectly called the museum ‘small.’ Readers described it otherwise.”[4]
This issue of national journalists missing the local angle and nuance is not new to the digital era. National journalists are often accused of not telling the story of local communities they’ve “parachuted in” — slang for the term of flying in to somewhere just to get a big story. Foreign correspondents are also often accused of reporting on the disasters, wars, and corruption that Western audiences expect to see rather about places far away, rather than telling stories about top notch malls in Nigeria, open source communities in Kenya, or about Brazil as more than just home to corruption and soccer. This problem illustrates a longstanding issue about place and representations of place that I address here: that journalists have the power to imagine places for people, but when they screw up this representation, reader trust is undermined. This longstanding problem with out-of-town journalists deserves particular attention at present for precisely the reasons Baron and Baquet acknowledge: national outlets, with their still ample resources, are in a better position in some cases to tell the stories of local communities than those communities can tell for themselves. And in an era of new forms of storytelling, a compelling infographic with 360 views and interactive drop downs and mouse or touch-responsive maps is out of bounds for most local outlets to do with a quick turnaround.
With trust on the fritz in journalism, and with national outlets having the kind of web traffic, search optimization, and social media followers, they are more likely to be heard across the din of social media than local outlets. With decimated local news outlets, too, the stories are harder for local news to tell. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which decimated Puerto Rico and left the majority of island without electricity for months, Puerto Rico’s largest media company laid off 59 journalists at its two newspapers.[5] Not only was this journalism providing much needed information to the island’s residents about how to recover from the storm, but it was also telling a story from a local perspective. A similar problem emerged after Hurricane Katrina, when the Times-Picayune, after winning a Pulitzer for public service journalism, saw its reporting staff cut by X. These stories are less able to be told by the places where they happen. So when national journalism comes in and misrepresents a locality, people in these communities target their anger at these outlets, and rightfully so. But national journalists can do the kind of bread and butter public service reporting that will help people in small communities hold their officials accountable — maybe avoiding that degradation of civil society Baron diagnoses.
But when this distrust of national media festers over time, when the national media really is needed or has a story people need to know about, they lose their influence and their right to be listened too. Add to the mix of distrust the kind of civil society fragmentation that partisanship and polarization augment. And then, national media, who has too many times, claimed to have specialized knowledge about something they did not, and this time round, when it really matters, boy who cried wolf gets eaten by the wolf. This was the case when an Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was exposed by a Washington Post journalist for engaging in sexual misconduct with minors.
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/08/donald-trump-johnstown-pennsylvania-supporters-215800
[2] https://www.pghcitypaper.com/Blogh/archives/2017/11/10/johnstown-progressives-are-sick-of-national-media-painting-them-solely-as-trump-country
[3] Oct 16 2017, “The Kalb Report: Guardians of the Fourth Estate”
[4] https://twitter.com/webster/status/930216826344296448
[5] https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/puerto-rico-newspaper-layoffs-hurricane-maria.php
