Every day another critic speaks against the media. Left this, right that, bias, bias, bias. The forum comment section usually includes one person or another asking why something was covered, as if all their resources should be devoted to one type of story. For the most part, I think the scope of the Forum coverage is very good. They hit a lot of types of stories in a week, and if you don’t like one, there are 30 others that day that might interest you. The point of coverage isn’t to get you to read every single story in the paper, but to read the ones you might be interested in.
On a national scale, The Daily Show has built a reputation on pointing out the faults in mainstream media coverage of stories. And most of the time, the critics are correct. The coverage of our nation’s news does not meet the basic tenets of journalistic integrity, and there certainly is more partisan bias to be found in national media. But is this a top down problem? Tackling the behemoths of the journalistic problems of Fox, New York Times, Newsweek, etc. is a gargantuan task, and one that hasn’t made any real headway since Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire factored into the decision to cancel the show. From personal experience, as a reporter and minor editor at a daily newspaper with a circulation under 10,000, I wonder if the media problem wouldn’t be better handled from the bottom up.
This article will not be journalistic. I have few sources other than myself to back anything up and reading through it I know it's pretty jumpy. I will start with a story. This didn’t happen to me, but was related to me by the photographer of the newspaper I worked at for two years. This happened after I left.
The photographer had gone on assignment to get a photo of a llama playing with schoolchildren. He took several dozen photos, and eventually ran with his best shot, one of the owner trying to get it back on the trailer to drive away from the school. The owner came in later that day and requested a meeting with the editor. The owner complained that the photo they ran misrepresented llamas since they aren’t ordinarily stubborn. He demanded a correction.
They ran one. Of sorts. They ran another photo of the event the next day, with a caption clearly stating that llamas are not ordinarily stubborn creatures.
Upon hearing about this event, I wondered if shooting pictures of a house on fire is misrepresenting that house since it isn’t ordinarily on fire.
I think this anecdote is representative of small town newspapers. They bend, they fold, they do everything they can to please their readers and small number of advertisers. It’s a different kind of bias – not politically based, but bias in favor of small town values. They don’t have the financial ability to print negative stories on the local hospital or the local school. They don’t have the resources to do stories on the effects of no health care, or poverty, or pollution levels of the local plants. Why? Businesses and local government want everybody to think that the town is the perfect place to live. Even a hint of negative story on the local hospital once brought a team of lawyers and a 50 percent slash in their newspaper advertising revenue.
Why didn’t I do stories on these issues, you ask? Because of another nice little problem – downsizing. Small papers like the one I worked for have been bought by larger papers, who slash at newsrooms and don’t pay reporters enough to care. My publisher had a private plane and a tank of a SUV. I made more money selling shoes on the weekend. Really.
Pay matters. During the two years I was there, I saw the newsroom of seven drop to six and go through about 10 staff changes, including an editor and three photographers. If no one is around for longer than one year, context flies out the window. The same features and stories are written every year.
With three reporters covering the news daily, we were expected to turn in 15 stories a week, and quality wasn’t a concern. As long as the stories had bylines, all was okay. I could cover a Republican rally during the governor’s race and only have to type out quotes from Republicans about why Republicans are awesome. I could call the local county health office to get quotes about the dangers of SARS, West Nile Virus, and biological terrorist attack plans. My editor didn’t want me to take the time to ask if there was really any threat. He wanted a local version of a national trend, no matter how overhyped it was.
Certainly there were negative stories, but they always involved either arrested criminals, meth labs, or people who didn’t live there.
What can we do about this? Everything. Every time your local newspaper prints nothing but positive fluff pieces to continue the image that the town is wonderful, write in. Every time a story with one source is written, write in. Every time the paper focuses on local preparedness for bird flu, ask what’s being done to help the homeless guy in town (which is dickish in many ways, but sometimes valid if the article in question is manufactured fear). I found out as a reporter that the town’s resources for homelessness included a one-way bus ticket to a larger city. I never wrote a story about it.
One of the few stories I did do right, I think, was about a man waiting for a lung transplant. He wanted people to know about his disease. He died four months later. I did a follow up story. Newspapers often like to write about successful transplants. Rarely do they write articles about the ones who die waiting.
I grew up hating my hometown paper. The articles were all written in a folksy manner, like something you might find in a church bulletin. The one writer would end most stories about events with bold encouragement for the community to come out and support this cause, these students, etc. Not as a quote, but as the writer’s opinion. I understand the impulse, it’s easy to fill space if you can throw in your own thoughts and no one seems to mind. So while I am at the same time for and against critics of newspapers, I do appreciate the struggle most journalists face when trying to produce copy to feed the beast.
Call me a coward for leaving, but I could feel my soul being drained away by the small town paper I worked for. I had the journalism beaten out of me for a long time. Like teachers and politicians, journalists have the misfortune to have a job that everyone thinks they can do better, and they don’t have a problem telling you so. I am a hypocrite in this sense, since I'm bitching about it myself, and I admit that. I’m amazed at people who can continue to be journalists, especially in the age of instant anonymous criticism that can weigh one down in cynicism. I salute those who still report every day.
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