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

It’s week eight! 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: three big questions — 1) Given what we know about social media data and trust, does it make sense to care about fake news 2) Part II of this question — does it make sense to care *this much* about fact-checking Facebook given how the platform works? 3) How big a role do DC correspondents from regional newspapers actually play? (hint *huge* but it’s not what you think).

1. Does it actually make any sense to care about fake news on Facebook (and on other platforms?)

No, actually it doesn’t. This is a legitimate question that funders and policy-makers and journalists and um, Democrats (sorry) don’t want to ask. Look, two major studies, first the Reuters Institute study, and then this week’s Pew study provides ample evidence to suggest that people already know to be suspicious of the news they find on social media — in the US, most people (57%) say the news they get on social media is largely inaccurate; and btw, only 20% of those Americans actually use social media “often” to get news. The problem is an official moral panic.

Plus, the inaccuracy numbers don’t ask about partisanship- which I imagine would have some fascinating contours if you broke it out by Rs and Ds. The Reuters study, btw, is GLOBAL and suggests that people don’t trust social media for news, largely. If that is the case, world, please stop imagining the universe of social media users as guinea pigs wildly susceptible to misinformation — we see it, we believe it. It’s downright insulting. The question I think we should be asking has more to do with opinion-leadership and status within peer groups when it comes to sharing (note, different than echochambers) and instead take a look at the memes, photos, and identity-affirming content that people share. I’m available for your funding, funders, btw.

2. Does it make sense to care this much about fact-checking on Facebook?

A DC contact of mine who I like very much and shall remain nameless wanted to get his right-leaning pub into the Facebook fact-checking network. The hurdles to doing so seem ridiculous for his pub, in part because part of doing partisan media is to slant, frame, and critique — which is going to mean putting outlandish spins on stuff in headlines and engaging with emotionality (btw, check out Karin Wahl-Jorgensen’s new book on the subject). This week, there was that guffaw over The Weekly Standard’s inclusion in the network and the judgment calls it was making. Another friend, Mark Coddington, had the unenviable position of making the call on TWS for the Poynter network. TWS knows its own vulnerabilities in this ecosystem; in fact, if you actually read The Weekly Standard’s coverage it is wonderfully self-aware and amusing about its own position in the world. All I can say: if Poynter and Facebook are going to include self-identified partisan news outlets in all of this (as they should), there needs to be a way to account for the fact that partisanship and slant does not equate to misinformation, and indeed, to use these partisan fact-checkers to actually help mainstream fact-checkers understand the difference (a fact-check of a fact-check).

But here’s the thing: I get fact-checking on the site of news outlets. This makes sense to me, if only because it really engages the score-keeping politicians (the number of references to pants on fire one can hear on a campaign trail or in a commercial ought to be another valence for assessing the fact-checking impact). What I don’t get is fact-checking on Facebook. Look, among the many crappy things about Facebook is it’s hard to know who sees what and who then sees what next. Do we even know if someone is served with a Fact-check on the platform inside their news feed that they’ll notice it? The efficacy of fact-checking is somewhat contested, and moreover, it’s disappointing to learn that most people don’t even care that they are wrong, as my colleague Ethan Porter and his co-author Tom Wood show over 55 different experiments. Seriously, at the core of Facebook is peer-to-peer sharing, self-impression management, etc. We are looking at the wrong part of Facebook if we assume it’s about information transfer (the classic critique, btw, that journalism scholar James Carey would make too — transmission v. ritual views of communication). And until we can actually get data that gives us live tests on Facebook about how these fact-checks work, cross platform, cross-interest groups, cross-age, we know nothing about whether this argument over Facebook and Poynter’s world wide fact-checking team matters.

3. How big a role to DC correspondents for regional newspapers actually play?

The news of Erica Martinson, Anchorage Daily News reporter, should have shaken you. I’m not the first to say this, but at the height of the Kavanaugh hearings, the two most important senators do not have anyone from their home state covering them.

There are two sides of this, one that has been discussed quite a bit — the importance of having a watchdog for the state. In fact, in writing my book on place, journalism, trust and the future of news, I was actually writing the regional journalism chapter and the importance of accountability to the actual voters of the state the elected official comes from cannot be overstated. This quote from Anna Douglas, former DC correspondent for McClatchy’s News and Observer, pretty much sums this perspective up.

I like to remind members of the delegation that their voters are my readers, and that the same way they are here to represent then, I feel I am here to represent those same people…

The second side of this all is the fact that regional journalists actually feed-up the media agenda of national journalists. Here’s the thing that most researchers don’t want to acknowledge; we’ve long assumed that The New York Times and maybe some of the cable TV channels set the agenda for the rest of the news media and arguably set the agenda for the public. The new test is to see whether Twitter leads or follows. Look, we need to admit that national news feeds off local news and regional journalism (eg. LA Times or Chicago Tribune or King5 Seattle TV) feeds off of more local journalism. Today, I talked to the inestimable Buffalo News DC correspondent, Jerry Zremski about how his reporting on Rep. Chris Collins may well have set in motion his likely downfall. When the NYT came to town, none of what was in their story was anything Zremski hadn’t already reported. The NYT and other national news outlets depend on the regionals to surveil the news environment for them. The LA Times needs the Pasadena Star-News to do Pasadena journalism. If we are going to talk about networks and systems, then we have to also see the trickling up from the bottom to the top of how local news influences the national news agenda. While I don’t quite buy the normative argument that local news is indeed the local record and watchdog of democratic society (and in fact, a lot of news is *not* local, as Phil Napoli and his team show), I do think there’s something to be said about the bottom-up effect that disappears when this local-regional-national circle dries up. I’ll take your funding for this, thanks!!! Thinking about a content analysis and some interviews based on case examples of this flow. — (I promised I’d stop being so angry, and I’ve mostly been of Twitter, but it’s not working, friends. Help me be a more positive person somehow?)

Bonus:

1. The Heartland is not some abyss where nothing exciting happens, as one might think of in flyover country where the land-grant college actually has a soil plot in the middle of the quad. But the past two weeks alone, the University of Illinois paid host to Obama; ProPublicaIL came to visit (thanks Logan Jaffe); the news anchor for King5, Ted Land, stopped by class; and oh wait, the C-SPAN bus is coming to campus on Monday. That’s arguably four national-level or national-reputation visits and engagements Illinois students have had. So, come visit, kay? It’s fun here. Btw, key prof move here
2. Margaret Sullivan is amazing, and she keeps generating columns that say something original about the mess of national media. She needs to be listened to by all of you all in the news media. This week, well just look at this headline (yes, I know she didn’t write it, but it gives you a sense of the scope):

And Sullivan should know: she was one of a handful of female executive editors at a major newspaper, The Buffalo News.

3. Trolls don’t seem to read The Chronicle of Higher Education. I took a risk and wrote a fairly incendiary piece designed to get academics talking about the citational politics of citing sexists and sexual harassers. My sense is that if we are building on science, it’s been replicated, and perhaps there is a reason to leave people out who would never ever think of citing you, lowly female academic. I was expecting all hell to break loose on Twitter, and it didn’t, though I’m playing the “don’t read the comments section game,” especially now since my dear friend and famously moderate-tempered Seth Lewis pushed the query over text a second ago. Seth, no way dude.