Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?
February 2, 2021 6:38 AM   Subscribe

What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters — "It’s impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate." Dan Froomkin imagines what needs to change in political coverage.
posted by gladly (24 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
There's lots of good here, but Froomkin gets to the crux of the problem here:
Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.
He's right to point out that much of the media has, to borrow an analogy Froomkin used earlier, lobotomized itself by allowing itself to get worked by bad-faith accusations of bias. The problem confronting them is that one party has abandoned reality almost completely (one might argue, because it has no solutions that work or are popular). Yet the media abandoned its previous model of objective journalism for a phony "balanced" approach, in which credible voices are paired with abject nonsense, with hardly a clue as to which is actually correct, and verifiable facts are softened by attributing them as opinions, often using the construction "critics say."

The problem facing the media is that to report Republican actions accurately itself sounds biased. Thus instead of "Mitch McConnell personally refuses to consider popular legislation" you get vague handwaving toward "partisan discord" or "Congressional gridlock." The media must do a better, and braver, job.
posted by Gelatin at 7:03 AM on February 2, 2021 [37 favorites]


Good luck putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but I don't think the centre is ever going to hold again in a cultural landscape where tens of millions of people in the U.S. would not believe whatever they regard as the "mainstream media" if it reported that the sun is expected to rise tomorrow, and anyone can put up a website or a podcast or whatever saying that the sun itself is part of a George Soros plot to, I dunno, kickstart photosynthesis in humans and turn everyone into plants.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:09 AM on February 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


The vast majority of news media is a for-profit enterprise. Ultimately, whoever writes the checks also writes the news. And a disturbingly high percentage of for-profit news media is owned by ultra-right billionaires very interested in preserving the status quo.

The changes Froomkin suggests are almost impossible to implement in a for-profit model where everything must serve the wishes of the owner class.

This isn't to say that objective journalism is impossible, but in a for-profit context, I am extremely^extremely dubious about any such claims. Places like Mother Jones or Canadaland could certainly approach it, though.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:47 AM on February 2, 2021 [11 favorites]


The changes Froomkin suggests are almost impossible to implement in a for-profit model where everything must serve the wishes of the owner class.

A reality he acknowledges in the last line of the piece.
posted by Gelatin at 7:52 AM on February 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial.

I go back and forth, but keep returning to this idea: the first part of this sentence is much more important than the second.

And you don't get to be the party of "reality-denial" without a robust infrastructure for denying reality--which is a bipartisan affair, today's tech/news/entertainment synergy.

Democrats, especially the wealthy moderate ones, must begrudgingly admit that most of their strongest grievances against Republicans are some kind of projection -- try to find "fact-based" reporting around Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Try to find somebody say the name "Booz Allen Hamilton" on MSNBC. Etc.

For all WaPo and NYT say over and over how Trump embolden white supremacists (which he did), there's little-to-no soul-searching about how the Media Matters/Politics&Prose/khaki-lanyard division in DC is also a kind of white supremacy. And when regular Republican citizens *notice* this, it makes them feel like Dems are two-faced, elitist cronies. In way too many cases, they're RIGHT.

I agree with other commenters--this will not change until there is some way to change the business model. The "center" holding is bad for America now, no looking back.
posted by justinethanmathews at 8:25 AM on February 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


It’s impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate.
This is the crux of the issue. The "core mission" of journalism is not "creating an informed electorate," it's "making profits for the owners." As long as the owners are content with creating a disinformed electorate, that's what journalism will do.

Yes I did RTFA, not just the pull quote. The comments there are a hoot, or maybe they're an incredibly depressing reminder of what Froomkin's imaginary new leaders are confronted with.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:24 AM on February 2, 2021 [6 favorites]


Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth.

The problem is that reality has a notoriously liberal bias.

As well, we have a public who in many cases apparently literally do not grasp the distinction between news articles and op-ed pieces. I’d say in the last ten years I have read three thousand comments on editorials that begin, “I thought newspapers were supposed to be balanced!!!” Late last year, I saw a breakthrough moment when a commenter accused an editorial cartoon of trying to push an agenda. Best for him to stick to Family Circus, maybe.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:29 AM on February 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


Well, I want process stories and people building reputations for telling the story truthfully and well, a reputation that they hold on to as their legacy. I want to pay money for time invested explaining the processes of our complicated world around us so that there can be a middle ground for us to inhabit when we notice how much in common each human being shares (or how little in common by the gulf of our inequal and inequitable societies).
posted by k3ninho at 9:49 AM on February 2, 2021


I like the idea of "government reporter" instead of political reporter. Froomkin's previous piece touched on this too, pointing out most reporting of substance come not out of covering the president, but from reporters doing meaningful beats--environment, health, economics, etc. (Would that there were still a union beat.) He suggests replacing most of the DC corps with those people, especially in a new administration where gossip is hopefully less important than policy.

Also, from this current piece:
But publishing what anonymous sources say is essentially vouching for their credibility, because readers have no way of judging it on their own. It also means the sources can avoid accountability of any kind for what they said, including if they lied.
Reporters aren't accountable because they just report what people say, and sources aren't accountable because they are anonymous.

* * *
On the side discussion that looks to be hijacking this thread: I wish "elite" reporting was hitting the limits imposed on it by the corporate masters, but it's got a long way to go before it gets there.
posted by mark k at 9:55 AM on February 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


It does not escape my notice that, unlike most democracies, America lacks a publicly-funded broadcaster that is not burdened by a profit motivation, and can thus pursue topics inconvenient to the monied class. (Who then take advantage of the media climate to accuse the public broadcaster of bias, so they effectively hamstring themselves. I didn't claim it was a foolproof approach.)

PBS and NPR do not count; they have to take corporate sponsorship, and their reporting does seem to be at least in part influenced by that sponsorship.
posted by Merus at 9:56 AM on February 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


Ultimately, whoever writes the checks also writes the news.
--
America lacks a publicly-funded broadcaster that is not burdened by a profit motivation, and can thus pursue topics inconvenient to the monied class.
[...]
PBS and NPR do not count; they have to take corporate sponsorship, and their reporting does seem to be at least in part influenced by that sponsorship.


I'm not sure I want the US government writing the checks to reporters all by themselves, because the US government occasionally gets taken over by people like Donald Trump. Look at what Trump and Michael Pack did to Voice of America.

PBS and NPR are largely funded by Viewers Like You and Listeners to Your Local Public Radio Station. I think that non-profit crowd funded approach is actually the best model, and Mother Jones and ProPublica also make it work really well. So what I'm saying is, let's all go donate some money to the very good non-profit journalism outfits we DO have.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:09 AM on February 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


I hope most of us are familiar with ProPublica by now, but if not: they are an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.

ProPublica, by themselves, cannot be the single silver-bullet answer to this massive problem, but I think they're an important model, and I think it's really important to acknowledge the great work they're doing - often in partnership with award-winning local journalists across the country - and to recognize that, even though they're just one organization, they have made a difference, from DOJ investigations to getting a teen girl released from prison, through their reporting:
Our investigative journalism does more than expose wrongdoing and injustice; we intend for it to spark real-world change.
So one question I would ask is: how do we get more great journlism like ProPublica's, and how do we build their readership so their work reaches more people?
posted by kristi at 10:33 AM on February 2, 2021 [15 favorites]


Democrats, especially the wealthy moderate ones, must begrudgingly admit that most of their strongest grievances against Republicans are some kind of projection -- try to find "fact-based" reporting around Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

Wow. No, I don't think so. Moderate Dems aren't violent antidemocratic authoritarians. And while both mainstream Democrats and hardcore Bernie supporters have their biases and preconceptions, I see much more of a Trumper-style reality distortion field operating among the latter, particularly when it comes to conspiratorial explanations for unfavorable election outcomes.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:54 AM on February 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


Okay THIS time when we re-litigate the primaries we're going to figure it out
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:00 AM on February 2, 2021 [18 favorites]


The vast majority of news media is a for-profit enterprise. Ultimately, whoever writes the checks also writes the news.

I'm told that the vast right-wing conspiracy isn't actually directly profitable, that News Corp often loses money with many properties, even the likes of Limbaugh were never a profit center.

And whatever the shortcomings of attempted real journalism are -- even for profit -- it seems clear to me that the primary problem with the country is that the right-wing propaganda machine isn't journalism, it's a massive psy-ops effort firmly targeted at popular manipulation of the levers of political power.

There *may* be a profit motive at some level, but if so it's several steps removed from the usual "receive dollars for doing something." I think it's more likely that we're just seeing what some people with a lot of money to shape the world want the world to be and are willing to spend on it.
posted by wildblueyonder at 11:03 AM on February 2, 2021 [17 favorites]


It's amazing that this discussion can take place without anyone mentioning advertising. Really, you think your company's core mission is to create an informed electorate? Okay. Can Americans not even imagine what a public broadcaster is?
posted by oulipian at 11:07 AM on February 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


Artifice, while I want to agree, at least in spirit, there are too many people around the world whose personal experiences with our "moderate Dem" leadership say otherwise. Who's more "violent, anti-democratic or authoritarian" than Israel, should you be Palestinian?

Now, that's an easy example, but there are many others. I'm choosing this one because it's the one our "papers of record" keep squarely in their moderate-left blind spots.

The real-life manifestation of policy != media representation. Trumpers are gross in public, and should rightly be noted as having dragged a certain kind of public performance of politics down further than we thought it could go. But the extent to which this extends to material change is more complex, mostly because it's really hard for the moderate left to discuss itself without appearing insufficiently anti-Trump.
posted by justinethanmathews at 11:09 AM on February 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Can Americans not even imagine what a public broadcaster is?

No! Because what's labeled "public broadcasting" in this country isn't (much at all anymore) funded by the government. Instead, since the 1980s, it's been forced to make up most of their funding with "corporate underwriting" in addition to what's donated by Viewers Like You.
posted by Rash at 11:37 AM on February 2, 2021 [10 favorites]


It's amazing that this discussion can take place without anyone mentioning advertising. Really, you think your company's core mission is to create an informed electorate? Okay. Can Americans not even imagine what a public broadcaster is?

Nobody thinks the company's core mission is to create an informed electorate, but there is an idea that there should be a firewall between editorial decisions and advertisement. In other words, the newspaper or TV show has ads in it, but the editors are independent. Of course, like everything else, capitalism eventually erodes this too, not least because it's got its tendrils in everything. It's extremely difficult for Americans to conceive of anything without thinking about the money. The first question that gets asked about anything is "how much will it cost?"

That's not to say that a handful of not-for-profit journalism outfits exist, but for every ProPublica or even NPR (see we can conceive of public broadcasting!) there are dozens of publications getting warped further and further every day by the effects of that erosion of editorial independence, if not just the background radiation of the polarization of politics and daily life.
posted by axiom at 11:39 AM on February 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


As an example of what is wrong with journalism, you have this story from the New York Times by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Headline: "It doesn’t exactly comport with his “regular Joe from Scranton” persona, but beyond the politics of it, the bike could present cybersecurity risks."

Not only is Biden not a real American because he uses a Peloton bike, he's a security risk just like Clinton.

And then on Twitter, Stolberg crows about her bullshit story:
"After a year of Covid deaths, racial unrest, a crushing recession and a right-wing mob attacking my favorite building in America, it's nice to write a fun story."

Yeah, it's all just fun and games and entertainment to these despicable people. That's how you get 400 stories about Clinton's emails.
posted by JackFlash at 11:54 AM on February 2, 2021 [14 favorites]


PBS and NPR are largely funded by Viewers Like You and Listeners to Your Local Public Radio Station.

And who among them asked for hours and hours of junk science and junk economics infomercials from frauds who all get to endlessly hawk their own junk products to the gullible ? Christ, I would pay for dead air just to never flip the channels and end up seeing Suze Orman, Daniel Amen, Deepak Chopra and their ilk again.
posted by y2karl at 11:56 AM on February 2, 2021


i was a freelance city hall/politics reporter for alt-weeklies in the early 2000s in LA. i always found that there was little interest in what i wanted to write about- legislation and public policy- and overwhelming emphasis on the horse race and political scandals.

since then, the US has seen the rise of "explanatory" journalism like Vox and investigatory independent nonprofit journalism like pro publica, but still, most big dailies (and their websites) doubled down on pure politics and spectacle over policy.

the problem is not so much that good journalism doesnt exist-- it definitely does. the problem is that it's a niche product. most people dont follow politics at all, much less policy, so any political story they read (editors think) has to involve some crazy scandal or bruising election horse race.

so sure, you can try to focus your writers on public policy, and you should. but people arent going to read it or care unless you teach writers to tie a public policy story in an interesting way to readers' lives.

tl;dr: there is a market for a type of journalism that merges govt policy with human interest as a way to make policy seem interesting, which will painlessly educate the public.
posted by wibari at 11:59 AM on February 2, 2021 [12 favorites]


IMO a good first step would be to reinstate the original idea that the airwaves are a public utility, and that because of this, content of any medium must not be biased entirely in one political direction. Although this is far from a perfect solution, it at least allows the general run of listeners/readers/watchers to be exposed to more than one side of any issue. IIRC the abandonment of the public-utility concept straightforwardly led to a generation-long monopolistic blanketing of exclusively skewed right-wing radio aimed at all non-urban sectors of the nation. No wonder the likes of malevolent Jewish lasers now have gained a critical mass of credence.
posted by Droll Lord at 2:16 PM on February 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


I feel like it's worth pointing out that the advice centers around the political reporting at three prestigious newspapers. It's not about criticizing AM radio or Fox news, and even funding sources and advertisers aren't super-relevant for two of the three papers when it comes to this issue.

If anything publicly funded broadcasting and the fairness doctrine exacerbate the specific problems Froomkin is trying to address, as they drive performative "objectivity" and encourage taking bad faith actors at face value.

The specific behavior this aims to prevent is really driven by professional standard. The problem isn't that reporters or editors at these papers want you to be misinformed. It's that many sincerely believe being informed means knowing the horse race and knowing what the consultant and pundit classes are pronouncing.

The OP links to this article on Baquet, and his desire that every reporter start out with an empty notebook. It's the opposite of developing expertise.

I definitely think the NYT drives a lot of this--but that also mean it's an area where you can get top down change. It's an achievable goal. If the NYT moved it's horse race stuff, and Baker and Haberstam, to an inside page called "political gossip" and put policy reporting on its front page, people would still read the gossip, but it would change virtually overnight the expectation of what people who want to be informed are expected to know.
posted by mark k at 12:07 AM on February 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


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