Whither - or wither - the news media? A tale of three
anecdotes.
Earlier this
week, Gizmodo published a story that said the people hired by Facebook
to manage and curate “trending topics” often ignored what was really happening
– mostly of a conservative bent – to promote stories they were more comfortable
with – mostly of a liberal bent. CBS and The
Washington Post covered the story, as did most of the mainstream and online
media. It’s an important story because of the influence and impact Facebook has
in promoting news.
According to
Gizmodo, former employees said stories like the IRS / Lois Lerner scandal were played
down, and stories like Black Lives Matter were played up. The former employees
said that these Facebook editors, mostly journalists, often ignored Facebook’s
own algorithms.
Facebook’s response was that there was no evidence this was
true, and that Facebook’s system could not be played this way. It takes a few
repeated readings to understand the responses, but what Facebook doesn’t deny
is that it actually happened.
Second, we turn
to Huff Post Green. A reporter interviewed the director of research for
U.S. Right to Know, largely funded by the Organic Consumers Association. The director is a former Reuter’s
reporter, Carey Gillam. They chat about all the things she learned about the
agricultural industry, the 17 years she covered agriculture for Reuters, how
companies would complain to her boss, and the work she’s doing for U.S. Right
to Know.
Not once does the reporter ask her if she sees
any conflict of interest in covering an industry like she did for 17 years and
then going to work for U.S. Right to Know (had she gone to work for one of the
big agricultural companies, people would have been outraged). The Huffington
Post reporter had done only limited homework about Gillam’s years with Reuters.
There’s no mention of how she managed to scoop story and after story that came
from the activist community (activists knew a friendly voice when they found
one); how she reported a pseudoscientific study as
straight science, until
she was called out by the Knight Center for the Study of Journalism at MIT; and
how six weeks later did exactly the same thing with a pig study.
And third,
there’s my own hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It’s a liberal newspaper, with a liberal editorial
stance, and that’s been generally consistent for the 37 years we’ve lived here.
In the past few years, however, editorial comments and slants have been noticeably
finding their way into the news stories and even how the news sections are
edited (the sports page appears to be generally immune to this, most of the
time).
Tony Messenger,
formerly the head of the editorial page staff, is now a regular columnist. He
reflects the newspaper’s editorial stance. From occasional comments in his
column, he must receive a fair amount of flak from readers. But a column is
opinion, and he writes his opinions.
In a recent article,
he noted what different readers had said about his columns
on the municipal courts in St. Louis County, a subject that received
extraordinary coverage after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The
subject should have received this coverage – the way the municipalities,
courts, judges, and attorneys managed their business – and particularly how
they wrote traffic tickets, often to the disadvantage of the poor (and black)
citizens – should have been brought to light. The problem has existed for
years, and should have been reported long before the Michael Brown shooting.
What Messenger
did in his column, though, was something I didn’t expect. He essentially
dismissed the critics of his column and the paper by saying they followed and
listened to only “their own narrative.”
I had to read
that a few times to make sure I was actually reading what he said. People who
disagreed with his and the paper’s stories were following only their own
narrative? What?
Does he think
the media don’t follow their own narratives? Does he think the Post-Dispatch editorial page doesn’t
follow its own narrative? Has he never googled “media narrative” to find
134,000,000 search results?
Does he not
realize that he writes with his own rather blatant narrative?
Facebook is the
single greatest transmitter of clicks to the major news media; that’s why it’s
“trending stories” is so important.
Reporters can be
just as influenced by lobbying organizations claiming to watch out for the
public interest as they can be by big business, big labor, and big government.
And columnists
write within the framework of their own narrative and the larger narrative of
the news medium they work for. And they shouldn’t dismiss criticism as “readers’
narratives.”
These stories
are examples of a larger media problem – why there is an issue of trust and
mistrust with the media. We can no longer trust what we read in online or
traditional media as news when so much evidence points toward narratives and
agendas.
Top
and middle
photographs by Kai Stochiwiak, and bottom
photograph by Ron Mzr, all via Public Domain
Pictures. Used with permission.
