The Friday Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask
Here’s my third week 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. This week, I’m going a little bit more controversial and writing about some subjects I generally declare off limits for public writing (as self-censorship, nothing else). But if an academic won’t write about them, who will? This entry moves from the more banal to the more spicy.
This week: Maybe @jack is right about Alex Jones; just how much should we be celebrating the end of Sinclair/Tribune’s merger; and just how wrong are we about whether local news is really worth saving. Bonus edition: A swipe at academic research (from me!)
- Alex Jones is done on social media platforms and even Spotify. But not Twitter. Is Jack Dorsey is the only one making the right move?
There has been much blowback that Jack Dorsey has kept Alex Jones on Twitter. He’s explained it as free speech, I argue that his rationale came from implicit pressure from Republicans and the creeping effect of “playing to the ref” I talk about this column in The Post. But I actually think he’s made the right move (no pun intended)— I’d rather hatred be where I can see it, rather than in the far corners of the internet, festering quietly until some explosion of rage happens. I think a little bit about how unless you spend time actually studying 4-chan or 8-chan or Gab, you don’t really know what’s on them and what’s being said. I think Twitter and social media, more generally, is profoundly broken (I got misinformation from LinkedIn this week!) but in its brokenness, it is a brokenness we can see. It hurts to see it, and it hurts us that it is a place we can be attacked by anonymous accounts who may or may not even be real. But I much rather know what’s happening.
Part two of this is that we are also facilitating the conspiracy theory that partisans have that platforms are against them. Yes, if you are Alex Jones and an Alex Jones fan, they are. I would encourage anyone who is talking or writing about Alex Jones to spend some time watching his show. There is the caricature you have seen and then there is the product, and aside from the essential oils stuff, it is a slickly produced show that definitely has an aura of legitimacy that is hard to note as discernibly different from Glen Beck’s programming (which I would argue is partisan news)- except the stretch from reality is just far more divorced from Jones. But if that’s your world as an audience member, you don’t see it — and the great platform conspiracy grows. Again, I would rather see it than not know where it is happening.
2. Is the Sinclair-Tribune deal falling apart really a good thing if it means that Murdoch has won?
Many of the media policy wonks and lefty academics I know are celebrating that Sinclair didn’t manage to take over Tribune TV. This worries me so, so, much — actually if you look deeper at what happened, you have two versions of the Republican Party duking out — Sinclair, which is a far more palatable and old school version of the party and Murdoch’s empire, which fuels the kind of deep partisanship that aligns with Trumpism rather than conservativism. Sinclair lost to Murdoch, and again, the demon you know is better than the Mephistopheles whose cunning thus far has been difficult to outwit. This is an argument my friend Heidi Tworek, a UBC history prof, and I have been making for a while, but it’s a bit too subtle for a quickie clickbait op-ed pitch.
I am overwriting a bit with the devil metaphor. At some point, mainstream journalists have to stomach the fact that their work is reflective of a view, and that the view from nowhere isn’t desirable nor is it possible, but that view doesn’t always mean the reporting is aberrant. How can we encourage responsible partisan journalism that acknowledges that people have moral perspectives and beyond that, people are seeking moral/ethical guidance from their news, too? That’s the big question. But think hard: Trump won this round in the media wars.
3. Is local news worth saving? Some of it is truly just not local at all.
Dr. Phil Napoli at Duke and his team brought their methods and research from New Jersey to 100 communities across America. Napoli’s work in Jersey provided the foundation for Free Press to build a successful civic movement for public funding for local news. The team found something very important: the rich get good news, and the poor get no news. But what about outside a densely populated region? What about other “news deserts”?
Napoli had to actually coin the term “zero story communities” to refer to communities that had no local news about a particular type of information need. Far too many (on some counts) had no local news about civic issues. He writes in CJR:
We found, for instance, that of the 100 randomly chosen communities across the US that we analyzed, a full 20 of them received no local news stories in the seven days that we analyzed. Twelve communities received no original stories during this time period; and eight received no stories.
I don’t want to break anything but is it possible that some places simply don’t need the kind of local news they are getting because it is not local. Not all news that is local is normatively good, nor good for democracy. It’s like local farmers markets- not all the produce is worth buying, and it’s ok to move on.
Bonus questions/notes.
1) WTF. I got fake news on LinkedIn this week that mentioned Poynter’s Kelly McBride, minutes after having a conversation about her on Twitter. Makes me wonder if this was a coincidence or if I actually have some weird mobile tracking happening on my phone & if we need to think more about this.
2) AEJMC, a major journalism research academic association, had its convention in DC. Great professional panels came together thanks to the proximity to newsmakers, but on display was also some pretty awful research (in addition to great research, but less of that, and most of those folks with superior work are participating in other conferences like ICA). I am sorry to say it but some of the work was embarrassing and I would never want journalists to see that this is the state of academic research on their field. The association talks a lot about building partnerships with journalists, but the quality of the work has to be there. In no circumstance should the finding “we need to be online” ever be uttered as a research contribution, for example.
Sending this one in from the road in rural Michigan on the way to Traverse City. All errors are my own & this is intended to be provocative rather than a final word.
