The Friday Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask…
Here’s my second 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.
Big questions this week: data journalism, news media becoming the story in covering Trump, and whether historic tweets are fair game for journalism.
- What are the possible negative outcomes of data journalism being incorporated into Google Search?
Journalists still believe that an empirical reality is indeed a convincing one — on its own — and data journalism, with its portended ties to social science methods and the scientific method — is the ultimate vision of journalism as “scientific” — a quantitative journalism that speaks truth in facts that can be reduced to seemingly objective numbers. I’ve long been interested in data journalism as a form of knowledge, and pre-election 2016, I believed that data journalism might not only change journalism, but the world as a whole (and wrote about it as such in Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code).
But data journalism, I came to believe, had been a critical downfall of the election journalists have not taken a hard look (you can’t keep blaming Facebook and fake news/misinformation!). Election data journalism is the horse race on steroids. And we know, from watching the career arc of Nate Silver, that this horse race data journalism sells and sells big. The combination of polling, simple choropleth maps (red state/blue state, various hard to see shades of these), calculators, pressure gauges (FFS!) etc. render the world as easily visualized, and for the less data/map/numerate literate among us, often misunderstood. But there are assumptions build into the data, as good journalists know, and riding these assumptions out as truth or verifiable reality without the layer of complexity made clear does us all a disservice. I worry about the rise of clickbait data journalism, and I worry that Google Search will fuel more of it, and if not more of it, more consumption of it.
2. Is it time to step out of the Trump vs. Media story? Does anyone other than journalists and intense partisans care about how journalists feel right now?
Don’t become the story. This is an ethical viewpoint expressed even by the Society of Professional Journalists. Usually this warning is about journalists experiencing the same kind of trauma or watching natural disaster unfold and trying to balance humanity versus their reporting. The question I think the news media needs to ask itself is whether ordinary people want to keep hearing sanctimonious conversations about the importance of the free press. Brian Stelter wrote in his newsletter that “every patriotic American” knows that the press is not the enemy of the people. I think there are a lot of self-defining patriots who might disagree — on the right more so than the left, but don’t bet on it, bud.
I believe strongly in free speech and am very proud/lucky to be American, so it pains me to say this: news media, you gotta realize, most Americans don’t trust you. They don’t believe you’re doing a good job. Why should they listen to your frustration and your outrage about how the Trump Administration is making it hard to do your job when they fundamentally don’t think you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place?
The other side of this is economics. Les Moonves told investors, roughly, he’s delivering ROI, so really, asking any big questions about his deep problems or press performance more generally, in the end, doesn’t matter. Trump rallies make great TV. Live hearings, once the domain of C-Span, are now CNN “breaking news fodder.” For those already tuned in, there is nothing better for the big national news media than this story about the news media — and the press as “enemy of the people” sets up a compelling drama with a question of what’s going to come next (not to mention great storylines for Right wing counterpoints/mockery). It’s all part of the must-see TV phenomena of the best TV president since JFK (in terms of media strategy).
3. Are old tweets fair game for journalism stories or are they cheap stories that are easy to do?
This week, we’ve seen the continuation of surfacing old terrible tweets from athletes and journalists. Let’s take athletes first, for which I say, it’s a cheap (and unsurprising) story to surface old tweets. We’re all up on Trea Turner for his idiotic teenage tweets, but no one wants to mention that the Nats actually have Daniel Murphy, who came to the team as a real, declared, grown-up homophobe (though, maybe he’s now reformed?). When it comes to sports journalism, these stories about jocks being jerks surprise no one who went to an American high school, ever (or even anyone who’s ever watched a movie about American high school). What did you expect to find on their Twitter, especially pre-big time Twitter? And again with the sanctimony, sports journalists, your subfield of journalism literally keeps female reporters on the sideline. When a black/POC, female play-caller gets to rule Monday night football and women’s voices doing play-by-plays is normal rather than a gender success story (Aly Wagner), and maybe when women’s cycling’s races can get some coverage on a cable station one can get without a super-premier sports package, then maybe this name-calling and finger-pointing will have some heft to it?
As for journalists, this is a tough one. Public officials, the answer is obvious — anything in the record is totally fair game, social media included. It is refreshing to see Sarah Jeong get support from The New York Times for old tweets, but this set up an obvious comparison between her and Quinn Norton, fueling the flames of “reverse racism” etc. For me, Sarah Jeong was just trying to be an exceptional but nonetheless fairly ordinary tech journalist, while Norton has never said or tried to be anything other than provocative, which she fully admits. That is such a shade of gray, but ultimately it comes down to: how are journalists supposed to engage with people who are totally shitty and abusive to them? The mantra now is “engaged journalism” but realistically, lots of those people journalists are supposed to engage with just suck, and there is no good playbook for how to deal with people calling for you to die on a toxic social media platform. Perhaps The New York Times needs to add reverse trolling guidelines to its social media ethics (which btw, were not public until Oct. 2017).
This is rough and not edited and intended to push buttons. The quick three approach and roundup is an idea stolen from Matt Carroll at Northeastern University, whose “3 things to read” is essential each week. Hopefully I can keep my grumpy up and going each Friday for y’all.
This week, I’m particularly proud to point out a piece I wrote in The Washington Post on “playing the ref” — check it out!
