For about two years, I’ve been debating whether I should become a journalist. I took some introductory classes at my university, which has a well respected journalism school. I worked for the student newspaper twice at different times, first making videos and then writing for the City-State desk (it’s a big plus to have a diverse skill set, you know. It’ll give you a leg up in a competitive field).
The student paper pushed its volunteer writers with hard deadlines, strict sourcing requirements, late nights which occasionally became early mornings in the office — all in the name of responsible journalism. The workplace tone was a friendly professionalism undercut by the high-pitched whine of stress, like a fluorescent lightbulb that’s just a little too loud. Writers and editors barely out of high school hurried in and out, trying desperately to balance their career prospects with a full class load and the vaunted, brutal liberation of college life. My most vivid memory isn’t of the office, however, but of a back-room conversation I had with my editor at the time and the editor-in-chief of the paper, who shall both remain unnamed.
While digging through police reports for an article about a completely uncharacteristic string of shootings in our peaceful, innocent little town, something jumped out at me from the data. In the city down the street (which valiantly retains a separate administration in the face of our metastasizing college town), incident reports and arrests were concentrated so heavily in the southern patrol area that they often outnumbered the other three areas combined. On a hunch, I dug around for a demographic map of the town and, wouldn’t you know it, most of the town’s minority population lived in the same section. The cross-section was almost perfect. I dug around a little further and discovered more discrepancies along racial lines in both town’s police reports.
So I started pushing for a longer, more in-depth assignment about these disparities. I, the grizzled, cynical beat reporter, finally had my opportunity to expose the dirty truth hiding behind the middle-class facade of progressiveness and tolerance. At some point between interviewing the police chief for the shooting article — it went poorly, mostly due to the fact that the police press correspondent gave me incorrect and conflicting information on their records, but also thanks to my profound inexperience in interviewing people in important public positions — my editors decided to check in and have a little chat. They had, unfortunately, found my personal Twitter.
This may surprise you, but I am not particularly fond of cops. I don’t remember exactly what I said or what officer-involved savagery it was in response to, but needless to say my very professional, very objective editors were not pleased. You see, I had used my personal Twitter account to communicate with potential sources on an article about a cop-backed party ban (which, predictably, was DOA in the city council). If those Internet sleuths had the inclination, they could have theoretically pieced together who I was and connected my personal opinions posted online to my well-researched article on publicly available information. And we just can’t have your objections to systematic, racially motivated state sanctioned murder taint our reputation as an objective, fact-based news outlet, now can we. Also, completely unrelated, but if you piss off the police chief with any more stupid questions, he might stop texting us when someone gets run over by a drunk driver. So watch it.
Yes, dear reader, there is a point to this. In a Mother’s Day phone call (don’t judge me, we live six hours apart) I had mentioned my waning enthusiasm for journalism as an avenue of change. All the meticulous research and explosive exposés in the world can’t change the mind of a population that doesn’t give a single fuck about anything I want to write about, was the gist of my complaint. She responded today, perhaps trying, as any responsible mother would, to keep me on track for a good, respectable, well-paid life, with an NPR article (an acronym that, as I obnoxiously repeat every chance I get, could just as easily stand for National Pentagon Radio) about a statement from the publisher of the New York Times, that wonderful beacon of truth in this world of lies and chaos.
“Journalism should be free of writers’ personal beliefs”, read the headline.
I, regretfully, did not hold back. Total nonsense, a complete sham, et cetera, et cetera — I didn’t give her the chance to respond to my searing, incisive criticism. To me, this article exposed the contradiction at the heart of American journalism, where newspapers (even given the most extreme sociological benefit of the doubt) serve two conflicting purposes.
First, they serve as a public forum in our very un-Athenian democracy. Since it is impossible for every U.S. citizen (or even a statistically significant number of us) to fit into a single building to discuss the finer points of law, politics, and foreign policy as they did in the original democracies, the people can instead tune in to the national debates held by proxy through opinion pieces and interviews across the aisle in our nation’s leading publications. In order to compensate for editorial bias, reporters are encouraged to always listen to both (or more) sides and never to take either. Responsible journalism, therefore, means faithfully relaying the perspectives of all of the major players, to serve as a conduit for the opinions of the influential individuals and classes to their tens, collectively hundreds of millions of readers.
Second, they serve (albeit informally) as the fourth branch of government. They are a crucial check on governmental overreach and abuse, corruption, and corporate misconduct, a sort of independent detective agency aimed at the most powerful members of society. The reason the news is not officially an arm of the state is to protect the position of editors and reporters like Seymour Hersh or Woodward and Bernstein, who managed to bring some very embarrassing facts about our public servants to their supposed masters’ attention, facts which the parties in question usually fervently deny. Thus, responsible journalism is telling the truth about the behavior of those influential people and the government no matter what they say.
The paradox isn’t hard to spot. The problem today is that, thanks to digitization and the ensuing near total loss of ad income (thank Google for that one), newspapers now rely mainly on subscriptions and rich investors (WaPo is owned by Jeff Bezos) for revenue, and the table scraps of ad money they do get is based on clicks. And clicks are easiest to get when the headline makes you angry.
What that means for the business model of the average newspaper is simple: controversy sells. From what I can tell, in the 20th century, at least the second half, the dual roles of journalism were given more or less equal sway. It’s not that they were categorically more reliable then, but it made sense for even the most radical journalists to put aside their personal political agendas and just report the facts, or the statements of the people involved. Publications got enough readers — and enough money — from the secondary services they provided (think obituaries, classifieds, ads, comics etc.) that they could afford to pay full-time reporters (cheaper rent also helped) to hang out at city council meetings and dig around for clues in creative ways. The Chicago Sun Times could afford to buy a whole fucking bar to ferret out the most difficult corruption stories. Small town papers could afford to exist.
The loss of their revenue has driven them to pursue controversy over truth. Even the New York Times has gone down that shameful route — their pathetically biased, blatantly irresponsible coverage of gender affirming healthcare for trans children has been framed as, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘fostering debate on tough topics’. In other, less pretentious words: they want it to be an argument. Despite the overwhelming evidence that medically assisted transitioning, sometimes including hormone blockers and surgery, is hugely beneficial to trans children, they hemmed and hawed and found every possible angle to bring this mind-numbingly straightforward concept under ‘reasonable’ scrutiny. Whether you support it (like I do), oppose it (like the aspiring genocidaires do), or don’t really care (like the vast majority of Americans do), their goal was to make you so mad that you had to read it. It doesn’t matter that the lives of an already extremely marginalized community are put at risk by this anger (or maybe that’s part of the point too, who knows), because it brings in the bacon.
By focusing on the first aspect of journalism (transmitting opinions and elite debates) and losing the second (deep investigative reports), journalism has lost its potential, at least in my eyes, for causing positive social change. The biggest newspapers in the country have lowered themselves to little more than mouthpieces for anyone who can pay, and often self-interested controversy-generating machines. Hersh himself has moved to Substack because nobody wants to publish his bombshell, world-shaking story that the United States committed an act of war against a nuclear Russia. How the absolute fuck am I supposed to make an impact even close to what he did when even the journalistic legend who broke My Lai, the secret war in Cambodia, and Abu Ghraib can’t get his stories out?
But my mom didn’t know that. She just wanted to talk to me about my life, and try to explain what the news meant to her. She’s been so busy raising me to be able to think about this that I can’t really blame her for not being perfectly up to date on what’s been happening to one of the socio-political building blocks of our society. The moral of the story, I guess, is don’t get so caught up in being right that you forget to be kind to the people you love.
Irony Poison 