The Friday Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask

Happy month-a-versary. It’s week four of this ongoing but brief media critique of the questions that didn’t get asked by the people best empowered to ask them: those with regular gigs at news orgs with the huge platforms from which to scale their arguments. Four weeks in, the real question is does this kind of critique matter? What does “matter” even mean? In any event, here are the three questions I haven’t seen answered this week — and if an academic won’t write about them, who will?

In this edition: 1) Why did the #freepress editorial movement take so long? 2) Can/should white men fix the future of the Internet? 3) Are newspapers really the source of the trust problem?

1. Why did the #freepress editorial movement take until the 2018 midterm election season when Trump has been bashing the national press since he announced his run for president?

Trump’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” attacks are not new, and they are not new to the national news media. Why has this taken so long for news media (mostly newspapers) to try to make a collective statement for their relevance, integrity, and importance to democracy? Leaving whether this is an accurate self-assessment aside, the national news media has known Trump was dangerous. Oh wait, does anyone remember the first time Trump used the phrase “fake news”? Oh wait, right after taking office, as Lucia Graves points out in the Pacific Standard. Where were the 350 united editorial voices earlier then? Why now in the news media is there a collective move against these attacks when this has been a problem many have long been concerned about?

In August 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists along with 20 other organizations, was concerned enough to launch a US Press Freedom tracker. In December 2017, Politico had a story about 15 despots who had taken the term to heart in order to flip it against press critique. The word “fake news” was engendering debate to the point where in 2017, Craig Silverman wrote an essay in Buzzfeed expressing sadness for his role in popularizing the term. In Spring 2018, Penn launched the Center for Media at Risk, bringing together top academics and journalists to talk about problems…many of which were in the US. If you had been paying attention to the various Trump scurmishes with the press in more regional media markets in the US — places where he was fighting to build new hotels, for examples — you’d see a rehersal for what we have today. Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune architect critic, got an early fake news treatment back in 2014.

While I have my critiques of the effort, it has made a difference, at least for a moment, in political discourse. The US Senate affirmed a resolution yesterday in support of the free press (why this was needed…again another question). But news industry, this effort is too little, maybe too late.

2. Can/should white men fix the future of the Internet/journalism?

The New York Times magazine feature about “The Unlikely Activists who Took on Silicon Valley and Won” is sadly, over optimistic. But it also begins with a tale of a guy called Alastair Mactaggart(I’d rate this as a ten on white man names) — and his friends — who are fighting back, and they are largely white dudes. Think about who has to fix this mess? Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg — white dudes. Who broke the internet? White dudes (mainly).

I asked Farhad Manjoo to ask Jack Dorsey if he’d ever gotten a dick pic sent to him — the sentiment being — has Jack Dorsey ever been turned on as a sexual object by the internet? Has the internet made him fear for his life, not just his stock prices? These guys simply have not ever had the experience of a woman on the Web, or a person of color, or a dissident activist fighting for democracy, and yet, these men are supposed to have a vision or a plan fix their platforms for healthy public discourse. Recode suggests only 3.4% of Twitter’s employees are black. The tiny minority of well, minorities at these tech companies, not to mention women in technical positions — it’s asking a lot to hope they’ll have the power to remind the bigwigs of their experiences. Jack Dorsey and the rest of them need to talk to people who don’t look like them to understand how to fix it.

Btw. huge props to Paul Farhi for engaging with me/Twitter in a super productive conversation about this after my ranty thread yesterday.

3. Are newspapers, digital-first pubs, and public radio really the source of the trust problem? They’re the ones most concerned with engagement.

There are so many newspapers in America and many digital-first outlets that are working tirelessly to be “engaged” journalists. I so love the picture of City Bureau’s Andrea Fay Hart posted of a workshop in Detroit.

Isn’t that what you’d want to see of a racial make-up of people talking about the future of journalism in Detroit? The real size of this engaged journalism community was impressed upon me during a #letsgather chat I participated in this past week. There are so many newspapers, digital-first outlets, and public radio and public TV stations that care. While I’m skeptical about engagement because I think ultimately it bears many of the problems we saw surface in the public journalism moment, it is not these news organizations or local newspapers that are really the source of the “trust problem” in journalism — — nor is it on their shoulders to fix it for national media outlets.

If you speak to a non-journalist or non-industry insider other than your own spouse (really, try it!)- you’ll hear that parents often don’t pay attention to news not just because of time but in the time that they would, it’s too violent to turn on in the morning. After a day of work and kids, listening to the rants from Washington is exhausting. Every airplane ride I take and tell someone what I do, their immediate dissatisfaction is about cable news and local TV, not newspapers. Don’t put this trust thing on the backs of local news, as Tim Marema of the Daily Yonder points out in a brilliant essay here on Medium.

Bonus material:

1. Google released its political ad archive yesterday. This is a big deal and a great opportunity for research and journalism. I haven’t looked at it yet- but stay tuned.
2. I took my wife to Tribune Tower yesterday. The lobby is indeed open to visitors still, and it is still inspiring as ever. The security guard bemoaned the building’s turn to condos and said to me “The Tribune moved ages ago” and I asked him to clarify what “ages ago” meant — he said two months. So when you think about newspapers being forgotten when their city presence diminishes, yes, that’s a quick thing that happens. Trib Tower, thank goodness, is so iconic that Chicago is lucky to have it, condos or not, as a reminder of newspaper and professional journalism’s power more generally.
3. In Chicago at the Art Institute, I was reminded of the global distaste for journalism. I’ve been searching to find the image online (help) of the aboriginal Australian artist’s sketches in the contemporary wing. In them, he mocks journalists for their fake compassion in reporting, only to have these efforts turn to commercialism— “Ms. Journalist reports story about talking dogs.” All I’m saying is that in the spirit of rooms filled with Jasper Johns and Cindy Shermans and Gehard Richter is a lot of anger about the news media, too. Distrust of the news media has been that way for a long time, as we know, but that I felt it in the Art Institute so strongly suggests I need even more time on vacation or that we’re noticing it too little, too late.