The Friday (Sunday*) Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask
It’s week nine 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. I got really bummed out this week about the Kavanaugh reporting, and needed to tune out from critique. I asked on Twitter whether to keep doing this: It’s free labor, free content for Medium, and isn’t scaling as much as I’d like. Turns out at least a handful of people (including some super influential ones! thanks!) are reading — so we’ll think of this as niche over reach. Onward now…
Three questions: 1) Why did the Russian interference big-picture journalism take so long? 2) Why won’t newsrooms answer the ASNE diversity survey? 3) Does the Kavanaugh reporting reveal the political bias of national press or the best version of it?
1. Why did the Russian interference in elections big-picture story take news organizations so long to write?
This week, both The Washington Post and The New York Times went live with the presumably big-picture story about the extent of Russian influence. This is two years after the 2016 election. Why did this take so long? And can anyone make sense of it from this reporting, anyway? The US government report came out in January 2018. The election happened in 2016. With 2020 on the horizon, with elections coming in November, the full story needed to be out there much earlier, and the key signs of vulnerabilities, rather than the story-wrap up, would have been the smarter story.
We have midterms in 2020 and vulnerable voting machines (as pointed out back in 2006 re: Diebold voting machines…. did these get fixed, ever? Or did these vulnerabilities then continue vulnerable to some sort of technical debt where the costs of fixing stuff are too great and lead to patchy solutions?) That’s the story that needs to be told. Please tell it.
Also, I found The NYT visualization via a timeline to be perhaps the very worst of what interactives and data visualization is supposed to be: clunky, hard to navigate, overly complex. With the some of the most talented interactive journalists in the world working at The NYT, I can see the tension between the editorial vision and the design and the code-based vision of what this interactive ended up being.
In fact, it might actually be that I can imagine these sorts of meetings because I spent a little too much time hearing about them — the mismatch between interactive potential and editorial presumptions of what information visualizations when writing my book on interactive journalism (it’s good, and readable for non-academics, promise, intro here). Maybe that didn’t happen, but the point is, interactives are supposed to make things easier to understand, not be a mess of too much that doesn’t immediately tell a story that is made more comprehensible. Sigh.
2. Why won’t newsrooms answer the newsroom diversity survey?
Wow, I was shocked to see that ASNE and Poynter and Knight point out that only 234 newsrooms out of 1700 newspaper and digital media outlets filled out this year’s diversity survey. This is shameful.
News organizations need to own up to their problems — who is not being represented in a newsroom? Who is not taking on leadership roles? How can we make newsrooms look more like the rest of their communities? I cannot tell you the number of newsrooms I’ve done research on only to walk into the Page One/homepage/evening rundown meeting only to find everyone in the most important positions in the newsroom look like me — white. This has happened in places where there are large minority populations, even majority minority ones. The issue is that adding a trickle of “diverse voices” makes it nearly impossible for these people of color to actually contribute in a way that isn’t toxic to them — speak too openly, and you get labeled, don’t speak at all, and you get silenced, and simply by the virtue of the way you look, get asked every single question every white editor has about whether they’re accounting for diversity.
Academic research also supports this dilemma (just having a woman or a minority in a power position does not substantially change coverage). Based on the commentary of smart thinkers like Tanzina Vega, we can see the difficulty of this problem but also ways to solve it! There is evidence to support how powerful breaking up white and male hierarchy can actually improve journalism: In the all-female leadership team at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the newsroom was more open and had better communication, as Tracy Everbach shows. This is exactly the kind of leadership that facilitates trust-building and honest conversations about race and power. One can look to Discourse Media in Canada, founded by Erin Millar, for evidence about how these sorts of intentionally discursive norms makes their investigative and data-driven journalism tackle problems you don’t see in mainstream Canadian news with the same depth. Diversity makes journalism better. I’ll stand by that statement. But for F’s sake, answer the damn survey and own up to your problems, newsrooms!
3. Does the Kavanaugh reporting reveal the underlying left-leaning bias of news media or the national news media just working at its very best?
Look, let’s be honest- there are a rare few journalists I’ve spoken with after years of living in DC and studying DC and NY (and British, to a lesser extent) news media that don’t quietly gripe about policies that don’t reflect a cosmopolitan-style socially liberal thinking —which I’d roughly assert is maybe ideological or maybe just city-thinking. I’d say you could define this as mostly pro-choice, pro-immigrant, a little circumspect/hesitant about evangelical Christianity, pro-Pre-K, pro-LGBT rights, pro-public transit. Even my GOP friends are sort of in this muddled middle, including those who work for arch conservatives (another moral problem, TBD). I can see the impetus to dig up every possible Kavanaugh scandal there is because Kavanaugh is an assault on these socially liberal positions. Let me offer an anecdotal example of this before moving on to the politics of the coverage itself.
I’d point to a non-DC resident, Maggie Haberman as evidence of this — take a look at her Kavanaugh tweets — it’s not the tweets she is putting out, but what she retweets that reflects a way to say what others are thinking who are more vocal about their opposition.
Then there are the Tweets with the lead-in quotes that reflect someone else saying what I think Maggie would say herself if it wouldn’t compromise the appearance of her own objectivity.
These tweets suggest that Haberman implicitly supports the idea that Kavanaugh is a threat, and that Dr. Ford’s story is important: what she chooses to tweet versus not tweet provides ample evidence of this cosmopolitan social conscience. How far does that extend to how her own values shape the questions that she is asking? How much is she aware of her own values and sympathies? These are eternal questions for those who see objectivity, as flat and a-moral, as ideal worth striving for. I see this as an eternally problematic and generally useless sidestep of the fact humans are guided by a moral compass that needs to be acknoweldged in journalism.
So, to what extent are these underlying, implicit, generally anti-Kavanaugh socially liberal mores guiding the coverage journalists are choosing to investigate in the confirmation hearings? We won’t know, but we can surmise that to some degree, they must be motivating at least some of the questions being asked (hmm, this guy is anti-choice, and seems to be too supportive of women’s sports and made a show with his daughters — anything lurking in the closet to suggest he’s anti-woman …?)…
On the other hand, I can see the argument that this is national news media operating at its very best. Political communication scholars would point out that the national news media acts as a fourth branch of government; news is itself an institution that provides another means to check government abuse, overreach and power. And we can see in this case, journalists coming up big with stories that are checking the power of Republicans. In this case, though, every scandal, some arguably very meritorious in their value-add to critique (many would suggest Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as a case in point). But in checking the power of Republicans, journalists are also, in their time and effort, aiding Democrats in their quest to undermine Kavanaugh’s appointment. I’d argue, by the way, that in over-amplification of GOP extremes that journalists also help spread the power and reputation of these right-leaning, extreme politicians, as Mike Wagner and Mike Gruszczynski show here. The eternal question looms: what is simply providing information for the public and what is aiding and abetting a particular party’s political goals? I’m just not sure, but I think instances like these suggest that there are mores guiding press coverage of politics, and perhaps we need to have an honest and open conversation about bias in journalism that isn’t shortcut by “we didn’t cover rural America well” and instead looks something like “national media live and work in diverse cities with exposure to many people not like them, and see the barriers to advancement in their own personal success wrought by structural factors like gender bias…etc.” This includes talking about overcompensating for this bias by amplifying the right, too (getting played by the ref).
Anyway, a rough week for my interest in politics and journalism. Likely yours too.
Bonus grumpiness: While Maureen Dowd of the 90s was a personal hero, I’ve found her commentary tepid at best and no, don’t follow her on Twitter.
