Tag Archives: media

Who Will Tell Us the News?

Our local public radio station is begging for donations. It has lost 40% of its corporate support in the last five years. Companies have been switching their ads to online platforms.

Our local newspaper was bought by Gannett Corporation a few years ago, which folded it into a regional paper. However, the new paper has no editorial section: no opinion pieces, no letters to the editor. It also doesn’t contain much news. Candidates in local elections are not interviewed nor their positions explained. City meetings go unreported. I can’t afford a subscription to the big metropolitan newspaper in our area, which doesn’t often dig down to the local level anyway. There is a neighborhood chat site, but if you didn’t attend the meeting people are upset about, you can’t figure out what actually happened to get them so emotional. The chatty neighbors are not reporters. They don’t tell us what, where, or when; they just vent.

Reporters Gary Massaro, left, and Judi Villa hug in the newsroom of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009. E.W. Scripps Co., owners of the News, which is Colorado’s oldest newspaper dating back to 1859, announced on Thursday that the paper will cease publication on Friday, Feb. 27. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Television broadcast news is so degraded that it doesn’t really matter which broadcast you watch. They all cover the same stories in the same way. There is little hard news, much squishy “human interest” stuff, sports, weather, and almost no international stories except for a minute or two on whichever war is foremost in the public mind.

Meanwhile, our online platforms famously target the news they show us to the prejudices they already know we have. Congress could pass some laws to make those divisive algorithms more balanced and transparent, but our elected officials aren’t anywhere close to doing so.

Nobody seems obliged to tell the American public what is going on in our communities, our country, or the world. Public radio and television stations do what they can, but their reach is limited and their resources are rapidly dwindling. Schools are afraid, and sometimes forbidden, to teach about current events, so kids never develop the habit of paying attention to them.

I dream of a public, transparent, online platform that deals in facts, not flash. Couldn’t the big platforms be taxed to support such a thing? Could other public media be reconfigured to report on social media without the algorithms sending their stories to the bottom of the pile?

Yes, there are excellent free news sources, for people who look for them. Al Jazeera and the BBC top my list. Philanthropists are funding new local papers in a few places, but not every town is lucky enough to have a millionaire willing to back reporting that might not always flatter the rich. What Americans need is a public utility. It should be in everybody’s face all the time, just like commercials.

I know hardly anything about what underlies our media landscape. I just know that increasingly, it’s a news desert. I’m sure that among my small but exceptionally intelligent readership, there are some who know a great deal more. Maybe you could dash off an email to educate me about what is legal, what is possible, and what, if any, efforts are underway to educate the rest of us.

I’m not much of a news source, but if I manage to learn anything about all this from you, dear readers, I promise to pass it along. You can email me at janecollins1@gmail.com. Thanks.

Broadcast News: November 24, 2023

The main story on NBC Nightly News concerned the first hostage release in the Israel/Gaza war. About 10 minutes into the broadcast, they ran three stories, all involving heightened mall security on Black Friday. The first story was about a pro-Palestine protest in LA that briefly blocked traffic to a mall; the second was on a bomb threat in New Jersey; the third was on the continuing upsurge of “smash and grab” robberies nationwide. But the headline banner read “Black Friday Protests”, while all three images that ran over it were of the completely unrelated robberies. Viewers were left with the impression that the anti-war protesters were wearing black like Antifa, concealing their identities with masks, smashing store windows, and grabbing the goods.

I don’t think the network deliberately conflated the protest and robbery stories. Lester Holt and his staff were merely lazy, and possibly still digesting their Thanksgiving turkey. Whatever their excuse might be, their carelessness revealed their unconscious bias. They painted with the blackest of brushes protests that were clearly motivated by moral outrage. Anyone who has attended big political demonstrations knows that there are usually a few people on the fringe who are looking for a fight, or for a distraction to cover some criminal activity. Often, the major media will cover the few bad actors and ignore thousands of peaceful demonstrators. 

In this case, a news venue used images of criminal activity that it knew had no connection with a protest to smear that protest, and by extension, all pro-Palestinian protests. Millions of people watched this piece of fake news. And it wasn’t even on Fox.

Broadcast News: April 25, 2023

It’s so weird how the major networks frame the news. A case in point is Nora O’Donnell’s CBS evening show on the day Biden announced his run for re-election.

The only issue CBS raised was Biden’s age. An interviewer on the street asked two young women for their opinion. One was white, one black – perhaps the network’s idea of balanced perspectives. Both thought Biden was too old to run. 

Trump appeared twice in this broadcast. The first time was a clip of him declaring that “you could take the five worst presidents in American history and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done.” One doubts he could name those five presidents, but never mind. What damage, what evidence? CBS does not comment or counter. Trump’s second mention was for the opening of his trial for sexual assault and defamation..

CBS followed the “worst presidents” quote with a finding from its recent opinion poll, in which they asked people “Are things in the US out of control?” and 72% answered yes. What did they mean? Mass shootings, climate change, the debt ceiling? A ridiculously vague question, no explanation of the response, and the blame for whatever problems respondents had in mind is tacitly placed on Biden. 

Later on in the same broadcast, O’Donnell ran a piece about Harry Belafonte, who died that day at the age of 96. The piece said he was an activist for social justice “during the civil rights movement,” even though he was an activist his whole long life. Clips proved he was still vibrant, articulate, passionate, and compelling in his early 90s. 

So does advanced age mean a person is unable to fulfill important public functions? According to this broadcast, the answer is yes in Biden’s case, but no in Belafonte’s. 

If the networks hadn’t given Trump $3 billion worth of free publicity during the 2016 campaign because he was so entertaining, he might never have become president, never encouraged the resurgence of white supremacy, never roused his followers to support police violence or misogyny. Maybe now things in this country would not feel so out of control. 

This broadcast also covered Texas storms with “hail bigger than ping pong balls” and more floods in Florida, and somehow failed to mention climate change. 

CBS newscasts are very similar to those of ABC and NBC. All three networks usually cover the same stories, in the same way, and often in the same order. They rarely mention other countries, unless American citizens are involved. They don’t use graphs or charts even when using them would be the most effective way to communicate what’s going on, as with COVID or climate change. And if they lean left, as common wisdom tends to suppose, they sure have a funny way of showing it.