Winter 2019: The Perception Issue

Winter 2019

The Perception Issue

How they see us What the press looks like from the outside—and what we misread about ourselves Nicholson Baker • John Paul Brammer • Camille Bromley • Amber A’Lee Frost Steven Greenhouse • Keith Hernandez • Patrisse Cullors • Lyz Lenz Alexandria Neason • Michael Schudson • Matthew Shaer • Lauren Smiley

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EDITORIAL

DEAN, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL

Editor in Chief and Publisher Kyle Pope

Steve Coll

Managing Editor Betsy Morais

Chairman: Stephen Adler Emily Bell, Rebecca Blumenstein, Nathan S. Collier, Sheila Coronel, Howard W. French, Wade Greene, Laura Handman, Mark Hoffman, Isaac Lee, Jessica Lessin, Steven Lipin, Terry McDonell, John Micklethwait, Matt Murray, Victor Navasky, Craig Newmark, Lydia Polgreen, Alice Rogoff, Randall Rothenberg, Michael Schudson, Dave Scially

Digital Editor Nausicaa Renner Digital Media Editor Justin Ray Associate Editor Brendan Fitzgerald Staff Writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow Alexandria Neason Chief Digital Writer Mathew Ingram

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MAJOR FUNDERS

Major funders for CJR and CJR.org include non-faculty members of the Board of Overseers and the Maria Moors Cabot Fund, craigslist Charitable Fund, Ford Foundation, The Saul and Janice Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues, Puffin Foundation, Rockefeller Family & Associates, and R. Ted Weschler.

This issue of CJR is supported by the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism Fund at The New York Community Trust.

Delacorte Fellows Amanda Darrach Andrew McCormick Zainab Sultan Tow Editor Sam Thielman Contributing Editors Camille Bromley Michelle Legro Gabriel Snyder Ravi Somaiya Copy Editor Mike Laws BUSINESS

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Vol. LVIII, No. 1

WINTER 2019

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Table of Contents

EDITOR’S NOTE

8 Getting Over Ourselves

By Kyle Pope

“If they’ve told the truth before, they could slip in a lie without you noticing.”

Field Notes

12 The Advice Column Renaissance

By John Paul Brammer 15 Why the Left Can’t Stand

The New York Times

By Amber A’Lee Frost

—from Students of Truth on page 74

MATRIX

40 On Screen: Journalism in Hollywood

ANNOTATED HISTORY

56 The Story of Flint With Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

18 My Life, on Screen

By Sadia Latifi

POLL

20 Color Correction

By Melvin Backman

23 Switching Sides

By Ross Barkan

ON THE COVER Illustration by Edmon de Haro

68 How Does Journalism Happen?

VISUAL ESSAY

88 ‘Is it Journalism?’

By Nicole Craine DATA

106 Life in a News Desert

By Amanda Darrach, Andrew

McCormick, and Zainab Sultan 120 End Note

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My Side of the Story How journalists are off target in their coverage of everything from social justice to sports

29 Keith Hernandez  44 Patrisse Cullors 55 Sarah Coefield ILLUSTRATOR

Serge Bloch

65 Jessica Salfia  78 Hoda Katebi 105 Qasim Rashid 115 Lisa Rosenbaum

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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Features

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The Fall, Rise, and Fall of Media Trust There are worse things than being widely disliked

By Michael Schudson

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“No shit, Sherlock. Let’s get on with it.”

Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, the activist slain in Charlottesville, talks to CJR about being a sudden subject of media attention

By Camille Bromley

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My Brain on Cable News Tuning into TV’s battle to the death

By Nicholson Baker

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Through the Working Class

Five union members from across the Rust Belt reflect on eroding faith in the media

By Steven Greenhouse

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The Master of Spin

Michael Sitrick will fuck with your moral compass

By Lyz Lenz

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Students of Truth

At a private school in East Hampton, the best media literacy program money can buy

By Alexandria Neason

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As You Like It

A partisan site in Alabama exploits trust in local news

By Lauren Smiley

110

The Man Who Saw Himself John Biewen’s podcast on race and masculinity

By Matthew Shaer

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Contributors We asked six artists to create images that consider how the press is perceived.

Their work can be viewed throughout the issue.

Lincoln Agnew is an illustrator living in Vancouver, Canada.

Serge Bloch is a French illustrator who now splits his time between New York and Paris.

Edmon de Haro is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Barcelona, Spain.

Vivienne Flesher is an artist and illustrator. Her next exhibit opens in San Francisco in June.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Melvin Backman is a writer based in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Garage, Vogue, GQ, and Spook.

Nicholson Baker’s sixteenth book is Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids.

Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist from New York City.

His work has appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. In 2018, he published his debut novel, Demolition Night, and ran for state senate.

Dadu Shin grew up in Boston and now lives and works as an illustrator in Brooklyn.

John Paul Brammer is a writer and advice columnist from Oklahoma currently living in New York. He is the managing editor at The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ youth, and the author of “¡Hola Papi!,” an advice column that runs weekly at Out magazine.

Camille Bromley lives in Brooklyn.

Nicole Craine is a freelance photojournalist based in New York and Atlanta. Her work has covered the Southern US and stories in Nepal, Jamaica, and the Middle East.

Amber A’Lee Frost is a freelance writer, columnist for the Baffler, and co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast.

She lives in Brooklyn.

Ellen Weinstein is an illustrator and author whose books include Recipes for Good Luck and Yayoi Kusama: from Here to Infinity.

Steven Greenhouse was a reporter for The New York Times for 31 years. He is the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor forthcoming in August.

Sadia Latifi is a writer based in San Francisco. She leads writing and content strategy for Airbnb Experiences.

A long time ago, she was a reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh.

Lyz Lenz is a writer based in Iowa. Her writing has appeared in Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and The Washington Post.

Alexandria Neason is CJR’s senior staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow. Previously, she was a reporter at The Village Voice and covered education for the Teacher Project, a partnership between Columbia Journalism School and Slate. A team she worked on won the 2016 Education Writers Association award for news features.

Michael Schudson is a sociologist and historian of the news media and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. His latest book is The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975.

Matthew Shaer is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

Lauren Smiley is a San Francisco-based journalist.

For a Wired feature, she won a 2018 National Press Club award, and she is now the investigative reporter on a serial true crime podcast with Glamour and HowStuffWorks called Broken Harts.

TK CREDIT

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Getting Over Ourselves AUTHOR

Kyle Pope ILLUSTRATOR

Ellen Weinstein

I

n late January, over the course of a week, a lousy journalism job market became truly awful. About 1,000 journalists learned they were being laid off, at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett, marking a grim record for an industry that has traded in bad news for a decade. By habit, reporters turned to Twitter, mourning for friends who had been cut, venting about their bosses, and desperately beginning a search for work.

It was at that point that the jeers began. A chorus of online trolls began mocking the misfortune of laid-off reporters, saying, basically, that they had it coming. That escalated into increasingly vicious and personal attacks, racist and anti-Semitic, including a meme calling for reporters to be killed. Finally and inevitably, President Trump joined the fray, predicting more bad news for the press—and, he said, rightly so.

Journalism’s response was largely to lock arms and turn inward.

People blamed the Twitter trolling on a far-right cabal. They filtered the backlash through partisan politics. A few editors hit back at Trump

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for going after journalists, who have the same medical bills and rent payments and student loan debt as everyone else. They knew he wouldn’t listen.

This sort of back-and-forth has become routine over these past two long years. Since that first wave in January, others followed in February, doubling the number of lost jobs.

Attacked by the “other side,” reporters recede among their own kind, seeking solidarity (it’s a reason newsroom unionization is growing).

On social media and in conversations over beers, the bunker is fortified, as journalists begin to dismiss, and tune out, people who dislike them. Then they continue on as they were, filing hot takes at a rapid pace, chasing the next scoop (always following Trump’s lead), and loudly broadcasting their stories in frantic hyperbole. More and more, everyone accepts a world that is cleft in two—us and them, facts versus fantasy, the enlightened few against an angry mob.

This can’t be good. Journalism, after all, is supposed to be about the airing of ideas, about empathy, about listening to what other people think, even, and especially, if they’re not like you. That’s where the best stories live.

But because of our natural instinct to huddle together and protect our pack, we fail to do what we desperately must: step away and start reporting on people in realms outside our own. What’s essential to storytelling isn’t any of us in the press—it almost never is—it’s the subjects. In better understanding who they are (they happen to be our readers), we can, perhaps, begin the necessary process of rebuilding journalism.

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e’ve all at one time or another said to a friend, usually someone not in journalism, “Oh, you have a life!”

It’s a bit of an insult, but just as much a point of fascination: you have a way of being that takes place outside of this. For those trapped in the news churn, there is an intense—often oddly superior—feeling of remove from “other people.” The ones with lives. But writing about people as they live their lives is a luxury journalists can’t afford to miss. If you can’t get past news pegs, how can you perceive anyone as they really are?

We have to be willing to try something new. Journalism’s next great project has to

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be not looking in the mirror (which we’ve become quite good at over the past two years, first obsessing over every flaw and blemish, then staring in awe at our own self-importance) but honestly assessing how others see us, and how we can see them better.

That’s going to be painful. A big swath of the public doesn’t like us or trust us, polls show; many Americans even question the value of the press as an institution. Faith in journalists has never been high, but we’ve reached a dangerous new drop in the relationship. We know some reasons: the financial crisis of 2008 occasioned profound misgivings about institutional power, and media organizations were swept up in that discontent. Journalism, in the general public’s view, had grown both self-absorbed and uncritical of the establishment. The economy recovered but trust in media did not.

The press was seen as part of the power structure—part of the problem—and indeed it was. Starting in the 1980s, as profit margins for newspapers and magazines soared, journalism grew increasingly corporatized.

Media companies catered more to advertisers than to readers; subscription numbers were secondary to success. The stories we told reflected that shift in approach.

It was a detour from which we never returned—and one that bypassed the vital work being done by writers like Studs Terkel and Joseph Mitchell and Raymond Carver, who we largely ignored as models for professional practice. Today you can go back and marvel at their work, be it fiction or journalism: I’ve personally been on a Carver tear, and am now convinced that I’ve learned more about fear and alienation in 2019 America from his short stories—dating to the 1980s—than I have from any number of more recent features in The New York Times or The Washington Post.

Consider this brief moment from Carver’s short story “Want to See Something?,” first published in 1981: I went back to the front of the house and down the sidewalk. I stopped for a minute with my hand on our gate and looked around the still neighborhood. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. . . .it came to me then

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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We have to be willing to try something new. Journalism’s next great project has to be not looking in the mirror but honestly assessing how others see us, and how we can see them better.

that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I’d have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.

Perhaps this has always been the case, that journalism has had its nose too close to the glass to get at bigger truths. You need art, or fiction or movies, to do that.

But the scale of the story we are living through today demands a higher level of journalistic thinking. And we are nowhere near where we should be.

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ournalists, of course, are just people.

They are beset as never before—by a failing business model, by a public that doesn’t want them, by a political climate that calls into question how they see the world, and by a national leader who has declared them, literally, “the enemy.” Yet one of the ironies of life under Trump is that, as his attacks on the media have become the mainstay of his withering presidency, the fortunes of the press outlets most critical of him have vastly improved. Paid readership of the Post and the Times is growing impressively, as is viewership of MSNBC and CNN. You would think that this represents journalism binding to its audience.

That has not happened. For one thing, even as readers have become the crucial source of media companies’ revenue, newsrooms

haven’t been covering their communities much differently. This is now an existential problem. At the very moment that readers are rallying behind the Times, for instance, its management made the decision to kill the role of public editor—the readers’ ombudsman—and replace it with an online commenting system that simply does not work. The paper’s marketing campaign, “The Truth,” is something pulled out of the vault from the days when newspapers were the voice of god, watching and ruling from on high.

Journalists have long thought that we have unique access to a greater truth, and, if others can’t see or won’t accept it, we soldier on, smugly content in the knowledge that right is on our side. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if that attitude doesn’t change, journalism as we know it may not survive. We desperately need our readers; there isn’t a viable business model that doesn’t count subscription or membership revenue as a central plank.

But it would be a mistake, and shortsighted, to frame the need to repair the relationship between the press and the general public as mainly a business problem. It is that, but journalism is also an enterprise in civic duty. If we are unwilling to engage with people about how they see us, we fail to perceive the world as it is, and we’re unable to do our jobs.

The surreal circus of the past two years has thrown up a smoke screen of fear and antagonism, convincing some of us that we need to batten down the hatches and wait it out. The outside world is a Trump rally, and members of the press are cordoned off, muttering about the losers out there lobbing insults at us.

That is not a path to securing our business, our profession, or our pride in our work. We’ll do so only by becoming immersed in the world, not staying apart from it; by imagining alternative ways to develop a picture of a community; by seeking to understand and, painful though it might be, adjusting our perspective. cjr

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Field Notes FROM THE OUTSIDE

TRUST

The Advice Column Renaissance

By John Paul Brammer

ILLUSTRATOR

Sara Wong

I

ORIGINALLY INTENDED my column—“¡Hola Papi!,” a couch surfer that now appears in Out magazine—as a spoof on advice columns. (I pitched it to editors as “Latinx Dear Abby, but huffing poppers.”) It would be for a diverse, queer audience, on the trials of dating and the challenges that arise in navigating friendships. Then letters started coming in. People were earnestly asking me for help— people who, for reasons I didn’t understand, decided they trusted me.

Charlotte de Anda, who struggles to balance her mixed identity (white and Mexican), asked me to weigh in. “I don’t always feel connected to the greater Mexican or Latinx community,” she wrote. “Does it ever get easier?” I replied—saying that it does, and that she should never let anyone invalidate her—and she thanked me via direct message on Twitter. Later, I reached out and asked why she’d brought her question to me.

“I think people trust advice columns generally for the same reason they trust horoscopes,” de Anda said. “They’re specific enough to be relatable, but broad enough to apply to most people. They’re a voice of comfort.”

Over time, like all journalists, I have had to earn credibility—a burden that may apply especially to advice columnists, since we assume the role of moral arbiter. So it ought to be bad news that a lack of faith in journalism has become pervasive.

According to a recent Knight Foundation and Gallup poll (if

FIELD NOTES

you buy into that sort of thing!), 69 percent of Americans say that, over the past decade, their confidence in the news media has dropped.

And yet, in the midst of this growing discontent, advice columns are flourishing. Conditions are so favorable that advice columns are springing up to assume a breathtaking diversity of forms: There are workplace-specific series like “Ask a Manager,” a blog by Alison Green, and “Work Friend,” by Choire Sicha of The New York Times. “Dear Sugar,” started by Cheryl Strayed for The Rumpus, carries on today as a podcast, focusing on vexing subjects such as adulthood and grief. Roxane Gay oversees “Ask Roxane” for the Times, where she doles out emotional guidance to relationship tips. And then there’s my own.

This advice renaissance might seem paradoxical: Why hasn’t distrust in the media as a whole negatively affected advice columns, where you would think that trust is paramount? Maybe it’s because, following the election of Donald Trump to the White House, readers have landed on a truth that many within the profession refuse to grapple with: objective, neutral journalism

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doesn’t really exist; media is inherently biased.

The rise of advice columnists, we might conclude, is consistent with a growing desire among the public for members of the media to express moral clarity.

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dvice columns date back to the 1690s, with a proto–advice column appearing in The Athenian Mercury, a British periodical. Readers would send in questions like “Is it proper for women to be learned?” There were inquiries both philosophical (“What’s love?”) and scientific: “What is the cause of the winds, and whence do they come, and whither do they go?”

Columnists were anonymous, which allowed them to speak their minds. “The pre-Victorian agony aunts and uncles could be surprisingly liberal and outspoken,” Lucy Mangan wrote in The Guardian in 2009, referring to these early founts of practical wisdom. “Others campaigned for better rights for deserted wives and other mistreated women.” Jessica Weisberg, the author of Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed (2018), says that advice

Why hasn’t distrust in the media as a whole negatively affected advice columns, where you would think that trust is paramount?

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columns have changed profoundly since then.

“What you see is a transition from wanting advice from someone who is scholarly and an expert in their field like the Athenian Society, a community of intellect, to wanting advice from more of a friend or a peer figure who resembles you,” she tells me. “I think it has to do with a general shift in society toward distrusting elites.”

That sensibility is embodied by one of my favorite contemporary advice columns, The Outline’s “Ask a Fuck-Up,” by Brandy Jensen.

(It has a great name. “I preferred to be up front about the fact that I make a whole lot of mistakes,” Jensen says.) When I ask for her thoughts on the popularity of advice columns at this precarious time for media, she tells me they are performing an important function: in a confused society, where decorum has become all but obsolete and it’s not uncommon to find nasty insults coming from the verified Twitter accounts of elected officials, columnists tell us how we ought to live. “Typically, an advice column will say, ‘This behavior is just and good, and that behavior is unjust and unacceptable,’ ” Jensen explains. “A lot of writers in the broader media landscape are either unwilling or unable to say that sort of thing due to some outdated notion of objectivity.” Readers are also granted license to act, Jensen says. “You can read an article about how to deal with your racist uncle on Slate, but it won’t be satisfying unless you’re given permission to be like, ‘No, fuck him.’ ” That’s a freedom I feel while writing “¡Hola Papi!” In my career as a journalist—previously, I worked as a reporter for NBC News—I have had to interview and take seriously people who would like to legislate me out of existence.

Representatives from Focus on the Family, an anti-LGBTQ hate group, come to mind. But now, as an advice columnist, I am at liberty to tell certain people to go to hell, to assert my sense of right and wrong. In letters to Papi, people ask: “My boyfriend’s parents are homophobic, do I have to pretend to like them?” or “My aunt voted for Donald Trump. Should I cut her off, or should I try to change her mind?” They want an authority figure to affirm their worldview and authorize them to live in accordance with it.

That stance has transformed my relationship with readers. When I was reporting and writing op-eds, we had a rapport, sure. But an advice columnist is your friend. An advice columnist is someone you get coffee with, tell your secrets

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to, and get feedback from. It’s an intimacy you don’t get from other writing, as I’ve heard from readers like de Anda. As opposed to individual pieces sent out into the void, an advice column is a space that welcomes readers in.

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or a columnist, being inviting can sometimes create dilemmas. An email I received last year from Uganda, which ended up being a matter of life and death, brought me to the limit of my moral certitude.

At the time, I’d been running “¡Hola Papi!” for around six months with Into, a digital magazine that was published by Grindr. (Yes, the gay hookup app.) I remember where I was when I read the letter: Café Grumpy, a cozy coffee shop in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, where I sought refuge from the February cold. I kicked snow off my boots and sat down to read from Papi’s mailbox. Because the column was distributed by Grindr, most of the messages I received hit on familiar subjects: cheating boyfriends, anxiety over dating, maybe a colorful “hookup gone wrong” incident thrown in.

This one began as most did, with boy problems. “Hola Papi!” it read. “There’s a man I really like, and I think he might be dropping hints that he likes me too.” Then I reached the end. “By the way, being gay is illegal in my country. I could be attacked or killed if I come on too strong or if I’m mistaken about this guy. What do I do?”

I ultimately did not answer. A responsible advice columnist is aware of the limitations of the medium and acts accordingly (even if the resulting piece would have garnered a lot of clicks). This advice seeker did not need counsel from an openly gay media professional living in Brooklyn on how to approach a man in a country where homosexuality is outlawed. Whatever advice I gave would be inextricably linked to a privileged Western experience of gayness. What if, because of me, he came out, and doing so put him in danger?

In contemplating my capacity to do harm to this person, I wasn’t so different from reporters and writers across the media. Whether or not we subscribe to the notion that we can be unbiased, we owe it to our audiences to be genuine and write with some humility. It’s more pronounced in advice columns, but every journalist should consider the cultural and political context their work is entering when it’s published. That’s my advice, anyway. cjr

As an advice columnist, I am at liberty to tell certain people to go to hell, to assert my sense of right and wrong.

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SOCI ALISTS

Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times

By Amber A’Lee Frost

SA R A WO N G

E

VERY MORNING that I’m not hungover, I wake up around 8am, because that is when my two cats start howling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, and walk barefoot and unwashed (mug in hand) through my apartment building’s common hallway to the front door, where I pick up my New York Times and my Financial Times.

I then walk back to my apartment, look at the front page of the New York Times for approximately five to eight seconds, and throw the whole thing in the garbage with contempt. I drink my coffee and proceed to read the entirety of the Financial Times, excluding the particularly dense bits of the Companies & Markets section. If it’s the weekend edition, I even read most of House & Home, whose editors seem to have an incredibly generous definition of “real estate,” making room for topics like homelessness and wildlife conservation. I take care to read the kidding-not-kidding op-eds from wealthy people demanding that children be banned from restaurants and art museums.

As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.

Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the

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surface of material politics and/or economics.

When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique).

Conversely, the New York Times is the flagship publication for liberal triumphalism; it holds the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”— the notion that all serious ideological conflict crashed to a halt with the suspension of the Cold War, with very little at stake in future political disputes beyond regional trade accords and finetuning of currency regimes.

Recently, however, Fukuyamism has taken a serious blow. The past presidential election was a shock to nearly everyone whose job it was to predict its outcome, and both the Bernie and Trump upsets prove that we have not, as Fukuyama predicted, reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” The idea of the “End of History” lost credibility with anyone paying attention to skyrocketing wealth inequality and political unrest, and it’s pretty clear that the world remains a raging battle between the haves and have-nots. Karl Marx knew it, your average Detroit autoworker certainly knows it, and Edward Luce of FT knows it. Even Fukuyama himself acknowledges the instability of the American liberal political trajectory, proclaiming, “Socialism ought to come back.” David Brooks, on the other hand. . .

Adding insult to injury, the Gray Lady is suddenly the object of constant scorn from the nation’s highest office. Having spent eight years in the comfortable favor of Barack Obama, a position so secure that they faced zero consequences for such glaring moral and journalistic failings as the endorsement of the Iraq War, the “Failing New York Times” and its fellows now thrash in fury at their sudden irrelevance to these crude new political elites. The Times is unable to conceive of a world in which it was so very wrong, and unable to cope with a political administration that speaks of it with utter contempt. Not only has it lost the king’s ear, it is finding itself entirely incapable of appealing to the peasants; the cynical and transparent hit pieces on Bernie Sanders betray the paper’s general contempt for mass politics.

Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of

shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?

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here are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald.

Looking further back, the decline of newspaper publishing as an industry has left much of “flyover country” nearly totally ignored by the coastal elites (yes, it’s a fair descriptor) for years now. Smaller papers have far smaller budgets for travel and long-term investigative reporting, and many local papers have been gutted or scrapped for parts entirely. Local coverage has its own weaknesses, of course, and national news is essential to avoid the parochial politics of a highly provincial federalist United States, but if we still had good local papers, might the Times have seen more of the misery and disaffection that paved the way for Donald Trump?

Might serious local coverage of the immiserating results of NAFTA and welfare reform—both enacted by Bill Clinton—have made it obvious that Hillary would be less than inspiring for the majority of working-class Americans?

The slight increase in news employment at “digital native” outlets (about 6,000 jobs between 2008 and 2017) has not only failed to replace the lost jobs at news desks, it has also produced less substantive writing. With the rise of internet “content,” major news outlets have now expanded their op-ed and opinion sections into a stupefying ne plus ultra of BuzzFeed-style clickbait. The result is a vast pool of pseudopolitical content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.

(Not only is the Times bloated with opinion pieces

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and op-eds, you will notice they are positioned very prominently, at the very top of the website.

Meanwhile, FT sticks them at the bottom.)

Just for example, last spring I noticed not one but two pieces in the Times dedicated to a Twitter tempest in a teapot about whether it was “cultural appropriation” for a white Utah high school student to wear a cheongsam, a dress of Chinese origin, to prom. This is not journalism, cultural commentary, or even, really, a trend piece—it’s an attempt to appear relevant. (But I suppose if you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students.) In an effort to survive the internet age, the Times has stooped to tracking tweets, chasing the sound and fury of never-ending online spectacles that rarely mean anything to anyone, save for an online microculture dedicated to “the discourse.”

Some fluff could almost be confused for reportage, such as the bizarre amount of space the paper of record devoted to Alan Dershowitz’s alleged travails as a social pariah on Martha’s Vineyard for his support of Trump, but if I wanted gossip I’d read the society pages. The paper’s collective decision to dedicate space—even in the infinite arena of Web content—and resources to such utterly meaningless and unnewsworthy trivialities indicates an editorial commitment not to journalism, but to educated-middle-class dinner party talking points.

The greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself. In the absence of labor desks at local papers and a vibrant trade union movement to fund working-class publications, the labor beat goes largely unreported, or merely reported within the confines of an egregiously bourgeois myopia. Take #MeToo, a “movement” to combat the scourge of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. The media obsessively focused on wealthy movie stars and high-profile women in (you guessed it) the media. If readers had zero knowledge of the US and they picked up the Times, they might assume these rich, famous women are the most vulnerable women in the world, and not, as it is, the exact opposite. (FT is no Studs Terkel, but as a paper of capitalism its editors at least keep the focus on policy and women at work, without trying to pass endless lurid celebrity gossip off as feminist journalism.)

A strong labor press would have expanded the conversation about #MeToo to include

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If you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students.

women who pick tomatoes, work assembly lines, wait tables, and clean hotel rooms. A strong labor press would have politicized the problem with serious policy and labor law demands.

“Progressive” publications are no substitute for a labor Left, either. At this point The Nation appears to be largely a brochure for the magazine’s woke travel agency (that’s a real business).

Unmoored from any working-class institution, they skew liberal, and of course suffer from the same funding woes as any other publication.

And so the media landscape is dominated by the liberal publications and their clickbait #resistance outrage, their Fukuyama worldview still preserved in jiggling aspic. It’s a difficult spell to break, especially when the ideologues are doubling down in a manic panic.

In the 1976 Sidney Lumet classic Network, Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) is an anchorman turned “mad prophet of the airwaves” after he is fired for low ratings and suffering a psychotic break. Mounting a popular resistance of its own, his sensationalist TV show captivates a disaffected viewership, who are “mad as hell, and not gonna take this anymore.”

After Beale demands on air that the president of the United States stop a deal to sell the network’s conglomerate to an even larger Saudi conglomerate, the chairman of the American conglomerate (played by Ned Beatty) calls him into a meeting and roars: You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.

Petrodollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.

It’s a perfect scene: the ruthless capitalist bellowing the reality of the world to a hysterical showbiz crusader who heretofore imagined himself a virtuous evangelist, never once considering his own insignificance in the face of market forces. And when it comes to journalism, committed capitalists are always better materialists than the liberals. And that’s why I read FT. Sure, they’re rooting for the other team, but at least they know the game. cjr

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CJR

DO CU MENTARI ES

My Life, on Screen

I

AM NOT A FANGIRL. I may have camped out in Central Park once to see the Backstreet Boys perform for Good Morning America. I may have started my own BSB email newsletter and fan site in the sixth grade. I may have spent $3,000 on a BSB cruise and written about it publicly. And I’m a lot of things—the black sheep of my family, a decently successful professional who struggles with adult relationships, a cultural and political Muslim who fasts one day out of thirty, a friend who is great in person but terrible at staying in touch, a media junkie who is always talking about the podcast I want to start but never starting it. But fangirl? Nope. Not my tribe.

So when, in 2013, I was contacted by Jessica Leski, an Australian filmmaker who wanted to talk to me for a possible documentary about boyband fangirls, I balked. For one thing, I had never been interviewed before. (I’ve always preferred to poke at other people’s business or to control my narrative with my own writing.) More to the point: Even if I was cool with being interviewed, did I really want it to be for this? That week also just so happened to be my first at a fancy new tech job in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure I wanted to out myself to my colleagues. Then Leski asked if I

would be interested in flying down to Los Angeles for a night—all expenses paid. Sure, I thought. I decided it would be fun and harmless, a few hours in sunny LA talking to a stranger with a camera.

The conversation would probably go nowhere.

In a previous life, I had been a reporter for a regional newspaper in North Carolina. So when I sat down with Leski, I thought I knew what I was doing. As an interviewer, I’d known how to share just enough about myself to get sources to feel comfortable and share even more about themselves with me. Give to get. Now that I was a source, I told myself to stay dispassionate. Don’t say anything that might be edited later to make you sound stupid. You’re on camera, so wear Spanx.

But no one had ever asked about the BSB part of my life before. I’d loved them since I was 11, and I’d never really talked to anyone about it.

Aside from the one essay I’d written about the cruise, I had kept my fandom to myself and rarely looked at it up close.

In the interview, I unraveled. When Leski asked how being a fan helped me through hard times, I could think only of a major depressive episode I’d had in college, during which I attempted suicide. In the moment, on the spot,

SA R A WO N G

By Sadia Latifi

FIELD NOTES

I made the connection that the Backstreet Boys had often served as an antidote to the down moments of my life. “The Backstreet Boys are like mac and cheese,” I told her. “They’re my comfort food.” (What happened to not saying anything stupid?)

We also talked trivia, including the fact that Nick Carter—once my favorite among the Boys— is an Aquarius from Tampa who loves being by the water. Offhandedly, I shared a childhood fantasy: Nick teaching me how to swim.

At the end of the conversation, Leski told me to put on a pair of headphones and listen to my favorite two BSB songs: one that was upbeat, and one ballad. Then she walked out of the room, leaving the camera to record. “Oh, no,” I thought. I knew this was a ploy to get me to express emotion. I did as instructed, but I refused to lose myself on camera. I did not shed a tear. At least, not at first.

D

uring the third year of filming I realized I was a subject. Jessica, as I now called her, visited me while I was at my parents’ house during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. She somehow got my family on camera to offer their takes on my fandom.

She filmed me visiting my high school. She had already filmed me at my job, with my friends, in my San Francisco studio. It seemed like a lot of footage for a movie in which I was just one of many participants.

I started to ask questions of Jessica. How many fangirls would be in the film? (Four or five.) Are you interviewing psychologists or boyband members?

(No.) Where would this be shown? (Not sure.)

My mom was concerned. I was nearing 30 and had agreed to let her set me up for an arranged marriage, since my own efforts were so clearly failing. The mother of a prospect had called her and asked about my Backstreet Boys obsession.

The family had Googled me and found my BSB cruise article. My mom didn’t know what to say.

They never contacted us again. My mom said to me: “Are you sure this movie is a good idea?

Do you trust the director? What if they’re going to make fun of you? What if a guy finds this?” I asked Jessica and Rita Walsh, the producer, not to include my last name, saying I wanted to preserve the sanctity of my search results. (They obliged.)

At the same time, I kept sharing. On each filming trip, a few days at a time, Jess, as I now called her, would tell me about her life, including the unexpected love she’d found for One

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Direction at the age of 31, which is what started her on the project. We weren’t friends, exactly, but I liked her. She asked me questions that no one had ever asked. She asked me things that forced me to look at myself.

Given the nature of the music (95 percent love songs), it was nearly impossible not to talk about my own love life. I told Jess about my bad dates, my unhealthy patterns with unavailable men, my growing loneliness. “Are there any Backstreet Boys lyrics that resonate with you as an adult?” she asked. “Hmm,” I thought. Then I quoted one: “I don’t care who you are / Where you’re from / What you did / As long as you love me.”

As I get older, I just want to love and be loved. I care less and less about people’s pasts. I’ve been hearing “As Long as You Love Me” for more than 20 years, I told Jess, and somehow I’m just now hearing it differently. (What happened to not saying anything stupid?)

This movie couldn’t possibly come out after I turned 30, could it? Jess and Rita saw me getting anxious. They tried to reassure me, telling me how all the footage made me sound thoughtful.

After each shoot, we’d lose touch for months and months; the team would run out of funding and I’d forget about the project. Then they’d appear again, pumping me up, marveling at what they’d seen in the editing bay—how their team struggled to cut all my clever sound bites.

If there’s trust, there’s more vulnerability, and that will always make for a better story. I knew that. And I trusted Jess. In 2017, after four years, she filmed me for a final time. I had just started taking swim lessons, and she wanted to watch.

I

Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival in April 2018, five years after I was first interviewed. I was one of four subjects. I attended, along with two of the other fangirls, for a walk down the red carpet. Before we stepped out, Jess and Rita sat us down to give us a pep talk.

They acknowledged that it would be weird to see ourselves on the big screen, that we might not always like what we were going to see, and that it might be difficult to watch our story arc’s “low” moment. As they spoke, my heart sank. What were they talking about? I had the same job and life the whole time we filmed—what was my low?

Was this a warning for me? Or for all of us?

When the lights went down in the (inexplicably) packed theater, I saw myself. Heard myself.

I saw things I’d forgotten I had said.

In an early scene was an animated illustration of my fantasy swim lessons with Nick Carter.

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My chubby face; my weird, Invisalignaddled speech patterns. My accidental cleavage when I bent over to open a box of memorabilia that included a 300-piece BSB jigsaw puzzle. “My mom will not be happy,” I thought.

I saw things I’d forgotten I had said. In an early scene was an animated illustration of my fantasy swim lessons with Nick Carter.

In another scene, I discussed my low, my collegiate suicide attempt.

But here’s the thing: I loved it. I loved hearing the other women’s stories. The movie was clearly about way more than just boybands. Also nice: people in the audience laughed at my jokes!

Later, I brought family and friends to see the film when it played in New York. One said, “This movie filled in some gaps of my understanding of you.” I realized that was true for me, too. Jess was able to see things I couldn’t see about myself. Like how the Backstreet Boys represent unattainable fantasy—and how, in my twenties, that related to a pattern of falling for unattainable men. I’d never made that connection before.

In the weeks that followed, I read reviews. There’s nothing quite like reading about yourself in a review of a movie that’s 25 percent about you. You know the writer is reviewing the film, but it feels like they’re actually reviewing you. When a reviewer said that my story resonated, it felt as though she was saying that she liked me.

When a reviewer barely mentioned me, I wondered why he didn’t like me more. One reviewer argued that the filmmakers were making fun of fangirls. I wondered if that could be true. Had I been used?

There’s a lot of suspicion aimed at journalists these days. Despite having once been a reporter, I’ve sometimes found my esteem for the industry flagging. When I became a subject, the documentary reduced the complexity of my life to a single narrative, yes. But I believe that Jess had no idea what story she was going to tell when she started filming. She went in with an open mind, asked thoughtful questions, built trust, edited and re-edited. In the end, I’m glad to have had a part of my life captured. The movie is a true portrait of me. It’s just not all of me. cjr

CJR

STOCK PHOTOGR APHY

Color Correction

By Melvin Backman

A

FEW YEARS AGO, Jenifer Daniels, who worked in public relations, was at her computer confronting the same dilemma faced by many a harried editor: she needed a picture and couldn’t find one. So she turned to the stock-photo agencies—Shutterstock, Adobe, Getty. Daniels lived in Detroit, which is about 80 percent Black, and her clients were predominantly in the public sector, so she needed images of Black people working in an office. But on the stock-photography sites she visited, she couldn’t find them.

Unlike news or documentary photography, stock photos are under no obligation to portray a specific reality; instead, they need only conjure a plausible reality. They are not images that say Here is the thing we are talking about, but rather When we talk about this thing, we conjure this image and we think you do, too. Too often, however, Black and brown people are left out of the picture: in 2014, around the same time Daniels was having trouble with her image search, Athena Papadopoulou, a graduate student in Sweden, pulled a few hundred photos at random from Getty and observed that a majority of the shots centered white subjects or positioned them as the source of authority. “The Caucasian model holds the center of the picture,” Papadopoulou concluded in a report, “while there seems to be a well-calculated balance regarding the ethnicity of the models surrounding them.”

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SA R A WO N G

Too often, Black and brown people are left out of the picture.

Take the art that Slate ran with a November column about a young man envious of his genius brother. It’s a photo illustration composed of two white stock-image faces in a standoff. Are there pictures of brown people eyeing each other tensely? As surely as there are brown people in real life eyeing each other tensely. But it’s not as easy to find them, which means that, here, for the column’s readers, tension over genius is placed in the province of white people. A nitpick, sure, but it’s a dynamic reinforced across news outlets, time and again.

A long-term project of white supremacy has been the divorcing of nonwhiteness from images of success—even of normalcy. (The doll experiments highlighted during Brown v. Board of Education, in which Black children assigned more positive attributes to white dolls than to Black ones, taught us that much.) The images of supposed inferiority that white supremacy pushes are produced through actually inferior housing, education, and employment outcomes, to name a few, which in turn are produced by racially hostile policies or neglect, its own kind of hostility. The natural inclination, then, is to focus on the pictures themselves as a means of reverse-engineering all that bigoted machinery.

To picture Black people and other people of color in normal situations is to do just that.

As far as the journalism industry is concerned, there are, of course, larger questions to attend to: Are stories diverse enough to require diverse illustration? Are diverse writers putting them together? Are diverse editors assigning them? These are all different fights, each one worthy in its own particular way. But if they must all be fought, and if displaying a plausible reality where Black people work in offices stimulates progress on the other fronts, then it remains a vital part of the larger struggle.

S

tock photography has been around for about as long as photography has: during the Civil War, Mathew Brady and Timothy H. O’Sullivan, two New York photographers, began stockpiling images of battle to sell to newspapers and the general public. A few decades later, H. Armstrong Roberts, a screenwriter, founded what might have been the first stock-photo agency—as a side gig, he staged posed pictures to illustrate whatever his clients fancied. The industry grew. In the 1990s, Getty Images and Bill Gates’s Corbis trawled the world for new stock databases and photo archives, rolling them up into giant collections. When Getty went public, in 1996, it reported annual revenues of $85 million. In 2008, the last year before it again went private, it reported revenues of $858 million.

But despite the size and breadth of the major stock-photo agencies, there were certain omissions. Chi Modu, a former photography director for The Source, launched a stock-photography

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business, Diverse Images, after he left the magazine, in 1998. Speaking to the historian Jeff Chang for Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (2006), he explained that he was trying to broaden stock photography’s racial lens, which meant “not just African-Americans, but Asian people, Latin people, all sorts of people who are underserved.” It’s fitting that Modu came from a magazine focused on rap, since hip-hop was just then achieving hegemony, and the diverse images it spawned were proliferating as never before. Likewise, Rick Leckrone founded Blend Images in 2005 with the intention to make stock photography more inclusive.

“Where homogeneity once prevailed, diversity is now becoming the norm,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Logically, it follows that advertising must reflect these contemporary cultural realities of society to be effective.” Those efforts aside, paleness persisted.

The years that followed brought the rise of online publishing, and art proved crucial to standing out on social media. Few digital outlets (or solo bloggers) could afford to commission photography; the demand for stock images shot up. In the early 2010s, journalists began to notice the oddities that lurked in the stock catalogs they mined for illustrations. Things could get weird: for every Woman Laughing with Salad, there was a Baboon Throwing Laptop off Table.

The New York Times once described the profitability of a given stock photo as akin to that of a penny stock (a lottery ticket, essentially). Stock photography, seeking to anticipate any need, suggested that anything might be out there, no matter how bizarre or silly. The same impulse that leads to Wait, really? could also lead to someone’s Yes, finally.

Daniels, still unable to locate the pictures she sought, began carving out room in project budgets to hire photographers for one-offs. She was also aware that others shared her frustration. In 2015, she and a partner, James Stewart Jr., launched Colorstock, a stock-photo clearinghouse that would specialize in images of people of color. She threw herself into learning about the industry, the rights regimes, the market. Her best-selling photo, she remembers, was one of her daughter.

A

s Colorstock grew, however, Daniels realized that she had staked out an untenable position. From below, she noticed that scammers (“internet hustlers,”

CJR

Stock photography, seeking to anticipate any need, suggested that anything might be out there, no matter how bizarre or silly.

she calls them) were mimicking her photos and undercutting her on price. From above, she saw that larger stock-photography agencies were keeping tabs on her. (For a sense of what she was up against, consider that Shutterstock, an industry giant worth $1.3 billion, told investors on an October earnings call that it has 550,000 contributors.) These bigger players expressed interest in her project, reaching out to suggest that Daniels upload her photos to their platforms. “They came to us with requests for us to put our catalog on their site,” she recalls.

“Not a licensing deal. Not a partnership. Not even a job.” Daniels learned that other companies specializing in diverse photos were being approached in a similar way.

Boutique firms like Colorstock are born of a lack within the larger players. But if those larger players take notice of the critique and diversify their offerings, they leave less room for the smaller shops to flourish. And although a bigger outlet might be able to pay for a constellation of photo services, a smaller publication might have trouble shouldering more than one or two subscriptions, which makes it harder to support a specialized agency. Last spring, sensing that there was no more room for her, Daniels pulled the plug. “I realized I had built a business that was not defendable,” she says.

Other services lined up to take its place: Mocha Stock and Diversity Photos both launched in 2017. In August 2018, Joshua Kissi and Karen Okonkwo launched TONL, another site trading in diverse imagery. “It’s refreshing to use it for things that aren’t necessarily tied to Blackness, like drinking coffee,” Wilbert Cooper, a Black editor at Vice, who commissioned a piece praising the database, tells me. Kissi and Okonkwo raised the money for TONL themselves, and don’t mind having partners, including Adobe, which also works with Mocha and Diversity Photos. Fiona Gardner, an Adobe spokesperson, wrote to me, “As we evolve and grow the Adobe Stock collection, the need for diverse, inclusive, representative stock has become an ever more explicit and crucial part of what we do.”

Stock photography creates plausible realities—and that’s all it can do. You can now find a picture of a Black person in an office a little bit more easily, though. That’s something. cjr

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P O LITI CS

Switching Sides

By Ross Barkan

SA R A WO N G

I

RAN FOR OFFICE in 2018 to win—to become a state senator and represent my district in a quiet pocket of Brooklyn. I did not run to make myself a better journalist or glean new insights into the craft I had practiced for most of my working life.

But a funny thing happened after I lost in the Democratic primary and decided to return to my old life in journalism: After taking stock of my campaign missteps—why we lost and how we even got this far in the first place—I began to think more about how my two selves, the politician and the journalist, blended, and what each had to teach the other.

I was a journalist long before I had any interest in running for office. For an informative two years (2014-2015), I was a City Hall reporter at The New York Observer (owned at the time by Jared Kushner), chronicling Mayor Bill de Blasio’s early tenure. Later, I wrote for The Village Voice, CJR, and others. Like any self-satisfied young person, I assumed these experiences had taught me most of what I needed to know about reporting.

In a sense, a candidate performs the partial work of a journalist. True, you aren’t outside,

gathering quotes for a story, and you aren’t holding power to account in the same way. You are, ultimately, selling yourself. But you are also talking to people.

If you’re doing it right, you are talking to thousands of people. Tens of thousands. You meet them when you knock on their doors. You meet them when you enter the subway, every weekday.

You meet them outside supermarkets, festivals, schools, and wherever crowds congregate.

And if you want their vote, you have to ask questions. What is most important to you?

What’s on your mind? How can I fix it?

You find that expected narratives don’t always conveniently line up with reality. The woman in the “She Persisted” T-shirt answers the door in a neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. NRA stickers show up in liberal enclaves. On one block, everyone cares about pedestrian safety, then on the next block people think cars around here drive just fine.

As a candidate, you gather information like a foreign reporter, embedding somewhere and not leaving for months at a time. Journalism at its best pulls back the layers between the reporter and the people, and gets at the truth as best it can. What is

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a layer? The public relations field, which increasingly curates news for overworked, underpaid reporters who often cannot spend hours or days pursuing stories of greater substance.

If you are a journalist writing on politics, as I am (once again), another layer is the political operative class and the pundits who purport to tell you what masses of people think. Many of the people who work in these fields are quite good, and I’m not here to disparage their contribution.

I’m here to state the obvious: If you are a journalist assigned to cover a political race of any kind, get on your feet, get out of the office, and stay out.

I’m one of the guilty. I’ve covered races for City Hall, the governor’s mansion, Congress, and the White House—and I’ve been lazy. I’ve sat in an office, typed up a few hot takes from operatives and pundits, and called it a day. From time to time, I spoke to real live human beings who had no connection to the political apparatus. But it wasn’t often enough.

Looking back on my time as a City Hall reporter, I see the danger of cloistering yourself.

It is easy to forget that the policies implemented by the mayor and the issues fought about on the campaign trail have a direct impact on the lives of millions of people.

This is how groupthink and conventional wisdom are created and reinforced. Editors, even more removed from the neighborhoods their publications are responsible for, select stories and ask reporters to find the quotes needed to confirm narratives already in the making. The conventional “man on the street” interview tends to be little more than journalistic performance art, a demonstration to the reader that the news organization has listened, in some minor way, to the community. The sample size is absurdly small and entirely unscientific.

What is the solution in this moment of journalistic precariousness, when many Americans assume that reporters make most of their reporting up? How do we avoid the pitfalls of lazy political reporting—especially now, when newsrooms have less money and fewer resources?

No single reporter, of course, has the time to speak with hundreds, let alone thousands, of ordinary people. There is little opportunity to wander the streets for weeks at a time. Doorknocking four hours a night is sensible for a candidate; less so for a time-stretched journalist.

Reporting on politics and policy must be a bottom-up endeavor. We learned in 2016 that

CJR

Beware the middlemen.

Beware of any individual who believes they can speak for thousands.

They can’t.

relying on prognosticators, operatives, party leaders, and other people who were supposed to be experts to tell us what was happening across America was a tremendous mistake. It was mostly those journalists embedded in the towns, suburbs, and small cities that would swing into Donald Trump’s column who understood best what was going on.

The practice of conceiving of a narrative or story direction long before actual people are interviewed must be reevaluated or ended altogether.

In too many news stories, particularly those concerning politics, the people themselves are an afterthought, no more than fodder for quotes grabbed quickly to fill preconceived gaps. Editors must stop dispatching reporters into the street to lead interviewees in ways that simply confirm a narrative cooked up long ago.

The best reporting jumps past the intermediaries. Beware the middlemen. Beware of any individual who believes they can speak for thousands. They can’t.

Reporters, despite the economic pressures raining down upon them, must be given more leeway to wander the streets, talk to people, and—above all else—leave the newsroom. Filing micro-dispatches on every latest twitch of the news cycle is not only enabling shallower reporting that doesn’t hold power to account; it has also proved not to be economically viable, especially as Google and Facebook swallow up online ad revenue.

What will this kind of journalism look like? It might be slower. It might not catch every ripple on Twitter. It might not capitalize on the latest outrage issuing from Trump’s mouth that will drive a few million hate-readers for the afternoon.

It might not endear itself to gatekeepers—the people who believe politics is a game for insiders played between two competing sides, optics and angles and strategy taking precedence over how policy is created to help or hurt people.

What it will do is remove the barriers between journalists and people, and tell us far more about what is happening in our communities. Our profession can’t afford another misfire like 2016. To be viable and relevant, we must immerse ourselves in the simple places we cover.

There’s no other way. cjr

TK CREDIT

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MICHAEL SCHUDSON

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There are worse things than being widely disliked BACKSTORY

The Fall, Rise, and Fall of Media Trust

AUTHOR

Michael Schudson ILLUSTRATOR

Vivienne Flesher

I

s too much made of the mistrust of journalists?

It is the alarm of our moment, and one gets the sense that the pitch of anti-press sentiment is now the most fevered it’s been since the founding of the republic. In fact, presidents from George Washington on, including Thomas Jefferson (whose statue stands outside the Columbia Journalism School, where I work), judged newspapers to be full of lies. Editors didn’t have much regard for their own kind, sometimes challenging one another to duels. And there is a history of popular violence against the media, notably against abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War and against Black journalists and institutions at various points thereafter— a matter not of distrust but of hate and fear.

Polling allowed us to measure public confidence in the press and compare it to that in other institutions. Over the decades for which such data has been available, we have seen that people tend to think of journalism in a more favorable light than, say, the White House or Congress, but as less trustworthy than medicine, education, the military, organized religion, or major corporations. In the 1970s, faith in all these institutions began to decline. That may have been a necessary corrective to a sense of complacency that had been creeping in—among the public and the news media—that

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CJR

“The media” as a general term for what we now call “the mainstream media” was strategically promoted by the Nixon White House.

allowed perhaps too much trust: we accepted President Eisenhower’s lies about the U-2 spy plane, President Kennedy’s lies about the “missile gap,” President Johnson’s lies about the war in Vietnam, President Nixon’s lies about Watergate. It took the cultural revolution of the 1960s to bring down that overgenerous level of deference to America’s bastions of power. The result was what Daniel Kreiss, a media scholar, has called a level of “civic skepticism” appropriate to a democratic society.

As for “the media” specifically, before television network news established a settled place in America’s living rooms (in the midto-late 1960s) with its cautious, measured, oh-so-sober and soporific tone, there really was no such thing as “the media.” There were several large metro dailies in essentially all sizable US cities, and they were known to have political commitments one way or another on the editorial page. But “the media” as a general term for what we now call “the mainstream media” wasn’t in common use.

Its full entrance into the American vocabulary was strategically promoted by the Nixon White House. To refer to journalists as “the press” ceded them an emotional upper hand, an aura of rectitude and First Amendment

privilege. That advantage—unacceptable to Nixon, whose aides sensed that reporters held a bias against him—could be removed by calling journalists “the media.” William Safire, who was a speechwriter for Nixon, describes in his memoir, Before the Fall (1975), how the administration pushed the term “the media.” In the White House, he recalls, “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, allencompassing connotation, and the press hated it.” Nixon judged journalists to be his opponents, Safire remembers, and declared to his staff that “the press is the enemy” a dozen times in Safire’s presence.

Even if we can agree that trust in government and trust in the media were too high before Nixon, it might still be that trust today has sunk too low. Has a healthy skepticism become a civically disabling cynicism? That is what Donald Trump feeds on: engendering such distrust in the media that around 40 percent of Americans seem to accept almost everything he says, even in the face of incontrovertible reporting to the contrary, as a kind of thumb in the eye of the so-called coastal elites.

The problem here transcends the Trump presidency: the old days of ritually objective

KEVIN WHIPPLE

MICHAEL SCHUDSON

news reporting (he said/she said) are not gone but have been reduced in importance from the 1970s on, as mainstream outlets have increasingly emphasized analysis in news coverage—not quite so much “who, what, when, where” as “why.” There has been a profound cultural shift in journalism during this period. The limitations of straitjacketed objectivity came to be understood and journalism began to embrace the necessity of interpretation, as both quantitative studies and journalists’ recollections attest.

Most recently, Beth Knobel’s The Watchdog Still Barks (2018) shows a continued growth in investigative and other forms of enterprise reporting from 1991 to 2011. In the face of the severe economic problems afflicting daily newspapers, leading metro dailies have continued, whenever possible, to pursue aggressive, analytical journalism. This places great responsibility on readers to discern for themselves the difference between what can be trusted as factual and what represents the reporter’s judgment—a judgment that, however conscientious, goes beyond documented facts.

News organizations should have to explain themselves—to communicate the difference between the news department

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MY S ID E OF THE STORY

Keith Hernandez Athlete

In my playing days, writing about baseball could be a lifelong career.

Journalists who wrote about me had covered Ted Williams and Willie Mays. They had seen these men play, then watched the game evolve.

Their judgments were shaped by a breadth of experience.

Today, sportswriters have become more transient. The beat is a revolving door, and the pace of turnover affects understanding of the game. Too many writers are too busy sending off tweets during a game. That’s part of the job description in today’s changing world— print is out, social media is in. Still, on the rare occasion I read the sports pages now, I don’t learn much about last night’s game.

An exception: Jared Diamond wrote a great piece for The Wall Street Journal about the aggressive new approach the Boston Red Sox have to swinging. The change, Diamond wrote, came from Alex Cora, a former Sox player and current manager, someone who uses data as well as his instincts. “Isn’t it amazing,” I tweeted, “that analytical data may bring the basics of this great game back to what it was?”

Journalists also need to take the long view, so they can help show where the game will go next.

Keith Hernandez is a former first baseman who played most of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets. Since 2000, he has been an analyst on Mets telecasts. He lives in New York and Florida.

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CJR

On trusting (and mistrusting) the press The media’s credibility problem certainly didn’t start with Donald Trump.

It’s as much a part of the history of the press as ink and paper.

—Amanda Darrach

1775

The Sons of Liberty burn down the office of the New-York Gazetteer, run by a loyalist named James Rivington who, according to legend, melts his plates to make bullets for the cause. After the Revolutionary War, Rivington was widely reputed to have been a spy for George Washington.

1798

President John Adams signs the Sedition Act after newspaper editors call him “querulous. . . crippled, toothless” (Benjamin Franklin Bache) and a “scold” (James Callender). The law makes it illegal to “write, print, utter, or publish. . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings” against the executive branch.

and the editorial page (more than a quarter of Americans do not understand the distinction); to show how they gather their news; to clarify why they sometimes cannot divulge their sources; to explain why it matters that nearly all scientific authorities believe that the most important element in global warming is what humans contribute to it.

It may also be time for journalists to acknowledge that they write from a set of values, not simply from a disinterested effort at truth. This will not be easy, since journalists

1861

Newspapers get the winner of the Battle of Bull Run wrong after reporters, overconfident in the Union’s position, leave the battlefield before rebel reinforcements turn the tide. Yet the error does not dampen the public’s appetite for coverage from the front lines of the Civil War.

1892

A mob burns down the office of the Free Speech, run by Ida B. Wells, after she publishes an editorial exposing lynchings as mob violence.

Wells never returned to Memphis, but her work built trust among readers in the Black press, which proliferated throughout the country.

have spent decades denying that their personal values have anything to do with their news reporting. And yet most do adhere, quite passionately, to professional values, just as doctors take seriously the Hippocratic oath. Journalists in the mainstream media almost all feel strongly that (1) they should seek truth; (2) they should hold government publicly accountable; and (3) government officials, elected and appointed, are public servants and should not be in government to line their own pockets. My guess is that those

1917

British newspapers carry false reports of German “corpse factories” turning dead soldiers into industrial lubricants and candles. The fact that British intelligence spread a hoax has since been cited by historians as a reason Americans were reluctant to believe early stories of the atrocities committed by Nazis in World War II.

MICHAEL SCHUDSON

1940

Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio broadcasts from London rooftops during the Blitz make him a celebrity in America. His reporting is credited for building public support for the US entering the war.

1972

Some military leaders blame TV coverage of the Vietnam War by journalists like Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor, for breaking America’s will to fight. General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the American forces in Vietnam, laments that live TV “provided the press a means of indirectly involving the American public with the war on an almost hourly basis.”

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1981

Two days after Janet Cooke wins the Pulitzer Prize for her Washington Post feature “Jimmy’s World,” about an 8-year-old heroin addict, she admits she fabricated the story. In a letter returning the prize and resigning, Cooke writes, “I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth.”

values would resonate with readers, if only they were articulated.

Like many other journalists, Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, has worried about the low level of trust Americans have in the news media. In talking to news consumers about this, she found people more mild-mannered and nuanced than the polls seemed to indicate.

Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, told her that for many people, “there’s ‘the media’ (bad) and

1993

The American Spectator starts the “Arkansas Project” with financing from Richard Mellon Scaife, a conservative billionaire, with a mission to damage President Bill Clinton by unearthing unethical or criminal activity from his time as governor. The campaign heralds a rise in adversarial journalism devoted to scandal.

2017

BuzzFeed News publishes a dossier of intelligence collected by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, on the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia.

Other publications declined to publish the dossier after failing to substantiate information it contained. On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd tells BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, “You just published fake news.”

there’s ‘my media’ (fairly good).” Likewise, he noted, people have little faith in Congress but think their own local representatives are okay.

Most people, though, are busy living their lives—that is, they’re not thinking about the media intensely, even if they feel, in Rosenstiel’s words, “a general unease or frustration.”

Sullivan suggests that journalism could regain some trust by focusing on topics that affect ordinary people’s lives and by “stamping out” a snarky attitude that implicitly

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brags, “I’m smarter than my audience.” In the end she sings a familiar refrain: “More transparency.”

I

f one advocates more transparency on the part of the press because it makes for more informative and comprehensive journalism, fine—a greater degree of “showing one’s work” could make journalism more instructive. But I don’t think it will bolster trust.

It was not media action that reduced trust. What happened recently (I think) is that many people could see that an elite few were getting very, very rich while they themselves were falling behind. Government was producing neither the inspiration nor the concrete policies to make anyone more trusting. And politics were getting more sharply polarized. Democrats are much more likely to be “consistently liberal” and Republicans “consistently conservative” on matters like taxation, government spending, regulation, and environmental protection than they were 50 years ago, when trust in the media ran higher.

B LO O M B E RG

ON POINT Donald Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on November 2, 2018.

CJR

MICHAEL SCHUDSON

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It may be time for journalists to acknowledge that they write from a set of values, not simply from a disinterested effort at truth. This will not be easy.

Would it help if news organizations were more transparent about how they produce the news? Maybe, a tiny bit. What would really help is a reduction, by way of policy, in economic inequality and in inequality of social recognition and dignity. With that, I’d hope, would come a reduction in political polarization, with concomitantly reduced incentives for politicians to seek applause for extreme statements, including disparagement of political opponents.

Perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that journalism’s self-defined mission of “holding government accountable” is hurting trust. In the past 40 years, “accountability journalism” has come to assert itself as a defining feature of mainstream newsrooms. The news is much less deferential than it once was to institutions and people in power.

That may be good, but it also means that a lot of people are going to distrust the media, particularly when their favorite politicians or the parties they identify with are critically appraised or openly confronted by journalistic investigation, information, or opinion. It will not matter how many “meet the reporters” events news organizations sponsor or how much they itemize where every bit of information in a news story came from. What people don’t like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes. It’s just more comforting and, let’s face it, more human to blame the messenger than to take critical reports seriously.

“The media” is more responsible, more accurate, more informed by sophisticated analysis (rather than partisan reflex) than it has ever been before. But political opinion has grown more polarized. And that is reinforced by the press: as the once-reliable business model of news gathering disintegrates, polarized politics becomes, sadly, a delicious topic for highly competitive outlets to report on. It is more tempting, for instance, to cover a government shutdown in play-by-play sports

style as a conflict between Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi than to explain what a government shutdown actually involves. Our best news outlets attempt to do the latter, but the big “government shutdown” news of the day tends to cover conflicts in Washington. What a government shutdown means for federal employees, for income tax refunds, for food inspections, for the number of Transportation Security Administration workers at airports, for access to national parks—this requires reporting on far more than what Congress and the White House can agree on and how long that takes. It requires finding the story wherever around the country federal workers are furloughed, not just Washington.

Can journalism curb its passion for playby-play news? I don’t see that happening; on the contrary, matters only get worse with the 24-hour news cycle. Can journalism break its commitment to holding politicians accountable and treating them with skepticism? I hope not—even if that might increase trust.

Some things are more important than how people respond to pollsters asking about trust. One of those things is responsible, accountability-centered journalism. cjr

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CJR

SOURCE RELATIONSHIPS

“No shit, Sherlock.

Let’s get on with it.”

Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, the activist slain in Charlottesville, talks to Camille Bromley about being a sudden subject of media attention.

CAMILLE BROMLEY

O

n August 12, 2017, Susan Bro’s daughter was killed. Heather Heyer, 32, was part of a group of activists peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a young neo-Nazi intentionally drove into the crowd, killing her and injuring dozens of others. The event reverberated across the country, alerting many to the extent of white nationalism’s presence and the state-sanctioned violence in its name.

President Trump was widely condemned for failing to denounce the rally’s organizers.

In the days after, Bro, 62, a former government secretary and schoolteacher, became the subject of intense press attention, which she faced head-on. Bro has since taken up her daughter’s activism work, giving interviews and makeing public appearances. She is careful to redirect focus from Heyer’s death to what she considers to be the more important matter at hand the nation’s continuing legacy of racial violence and injustice.

In televised interviews, Bro appears tireless and clear-eyed, her voice resolute. When I spoke to her, in early January, I found her true to form. She was on her first day back to work after a month-long break to attend the homicide trial of James Alex Fields Jr., the driver of the car. (He was convicted of first-degree murder, along with nine other charges, and a jury recommended a sentence of life plus 419 years in prison.) Bro spoke to me via video chat from the office of her nonprofit, the Heather Heyer Foundation, which aims to provide $10,000 in scholarships this year to students dedicated to progressive social change. The walls of the room, which were painted in soft shades of rose and robin’segg blue, displayed painted portraits of Heyer alongside awards for Bro and the foundation.

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CJR What was it like for you being the subject of intense news coverage on the day of Heather’s death, in a traumatic moment? What was your experience of being approached by the press?

SUSAN BRO It started at seven o’clock the next morning. They knocked on my door at home. I live in a single-wide trailer in the middle of nowhere and they descended en masse on that little trailer park. The neighbors tolerated it, thankfully, but it was quite overwhelming. We had friends who had to stand at the door.

We always have a curtain hanging on our back door because we’ve had problems with the electricity bill being high, and that actually acted well as a stage curtain to keep people separated until it was their turn.

CJR How many journalists were approaching you at once?

SB It was constant, between press and politicians, and family and friends calling. But mostly press and politicians. More press than politicians. They were calling my family, my friends. My phone was engulfed.

Someone was always on door duty

36

to handle the press. It would end at nine o’clock at night. Even when my best friend, Cathy and I had to go to Fredericksburg to find clothing for me to wear to the funeral, and for Heather’s stepdad to wear, the phone rang constantly.

CJR What kinds of things were journalists saying?

SB Everybody was asking the same thing. What happened. Who was your daughter. What can you tell us about what happened. What happened.

What happened. How did she die.

How did I find out. Yadda yadda. I must have told that story five million times by now. But I tried to be cooperative because I really felt like this was the only time that people would be coming at me. So I would tell it, tell it truthfully, and make sure that the story didn’t spin off into some wild thing. I thought I would grit my teeth, get through it, and after the funeral everybody would go away. It was a lot of just putting one foot in front of the other.

CJR Did you view talking to reporters as exhausting but necessary or was it unpleasant?

CJR

SB I’ve been a teacher for a lot of years so I’m used to repeating stuff. It felt like I was in rote mode. You ask a question, here’s my standard answer.

It was to be endured knowing it was short term. I felt like people were just trying to do their job. The main thing for me was to keep the message accurate. Heather was not Antifa, she was not being violent. The police assured me she was with a peaceful group.

CJR Which journalists earned your trust most completely or most quickly?

out to dinner, had breakfast with us while we watched the morning interview on TV. We talked over hair tips and things. I still stay in touch with the journalist from NBC. He’ll ask me about news questions. The ABC journalist, I text her from time to time to say, “How’s it going? How’s your mom?” The journalist from CNN and I talk occasionally happy birthday, how’s it going. Some people I would consider at least a little bit of a friend, knowing that they also would gladly get a news story if they could.

SB Ellie Silverman from The Washington Post.

CJR What about the content of the news stories?

CJR

And what did she do?

SB Honestly, she reminded me of one of my bridesmaids. Which is ironic, because I haven’t seen that woman in probably forty years. She was very respectful in her questions.

A man from NBC came and talked to me very respectfully for a long time. Some people are kind of impatient, tell me this tell me that, but if they took the time to get to know me that was a little better. Someone from ABC spent a bit of time getting to know me—took me and a friend

SB I think people did a decent job. I don’t think anyone did a hack job on the story. This is the problem that I have I will love what the journalists do, and we will talk in depth about politics, life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the editor immediately chops it down to her daughter died, she’s doing this foundation, and, gee, she misses her daughter. No shit, Sherlock. Let’s get on with it. Why am I doing this? The focus has been on Heather to the exclusion of the issues. Nationally and internationally that still seems

CAMILLE BROMLEY

37

to happen. August 12, 2017, as I told reporters, is but a part of a whole picture, actually a pretty small part.

While it was a wake-up call for a lot of Americans, the racial issues that Heather was there to support have gone on for centuries, and are still largely unchanged. In some ways they’re worse than they were a year and a half ago.

CJR Who else should journalists be talking to?

JASO N L A P PA

SB Other activists. Other victims.

The huge focus was on Heather.

Now, admittedly, some of the other victims didn’t want to come forward—refused even to testify in court—because they don’t want the attention. But, go, give them a chance. The world acted like Heather was the only victim. And she was—by far—not. There were over 40 people who were physically injured that day, and there were far more who I think had PTSD from having been there.

CJR Yes, the press has a tendency to make martyrs of victims because it’s a story with an easy hero.

SB

Right, and at first I didn’t catch

THE SOURCE Susan Bro in her office, where she runs the Heather Heyer Foundation

38

that so I wasn’t pushing that aside as much as I needed to. I was still reeling, honestly, for the first six months. I’ve tried to change that narrative somewhat since then. It’s not that Heather wasn’t a martyr, but that’s not the real point. There’s no value in just having a martyr. You’ve got to look at why they were there and what they were doing. What happened with the Guardian and the Daily Beast is that the reporter and I spent a great deal of time talking over the fuller picture, the rounded picture, but the editor was really not interested in that. They’re looking for what they think the public wants to hear, trying to find that quick and easy story, the easily digested story, and that doesn’t serve anyone well.

In the year and a half since Heather’s death—up through the end of 2018, which brought the trial of James Fields—has press coverage evolved? Have reporters heard you?

Have they responded to what you are telling them?

CJR

SB Not entirely. It depends on where they’re from. I did one interview for Swedish media that was trying to inform readers of the dangers of white nationalism and white supremacy. It didn’t work. The white supremacists were still elected.

Japan has visited me on three separate occasions. They tried to give a well-rounded picture in the sense of also talking to white supremacists.

Some activists say that they will refuse to talk to anyone who also gives airtime to white supremacists.

I thought it was a good thing [to hear from them].

I did want to share with you the experience of another person besides myself. A woman I met at the AntiDefamation League’s Kay Family Awards this past November was the founder of the Trail of Dreams March [one of four undocumented students who walked from Miami

CJR

to Washington, DC, advocating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program]. She was the only woman. Everywhere the marchers went reporters would ask the guys the tough questions, the political questions, the statistical questions, and the only thing they ever asked her was, “How does it feel to be the only woman on the march?” These were always male reporters. When they got to Atlanta, a female reporter asked her that question, and she told me that she just blew up. The guys from that point on made sure that she was with them when they were being interviewed, and they would redirect questions to her. We’re still battling stereotypes here.

CJR Do you feel like you’re perceived more as a mother than as an activist?

SB Yes, definitely. I’m an activist because I’m a mother. Journalists somewhat incredulously ask, “Were you an activist before?” The answer is yes and no. I was a government employee, so my activism was subterfuge. Before I was a government secretary I was a schoolteacher. So again, you’re not allowed to be political. But I was very much an activist.

I’ve been a feminist since first grade.

So, yes, I have always been an activist, I will continue to be an activist. I have just now been given a platform because my daughter was killed.

CJR Has the press helped your activism work, or does it hinder it?

SB It actually has helped. That’s another reason I continue to allow interviews. It’s given me a larger platform.

CJR What do you think the press can do better?

SB It’s the editors I have issues with.

The press asks the right questions, the press gives me the opportunity to

say what I want. What comes out is not always the same thing.

CJR Do you think the problem is that editors are coming in with a preconceived idea of what the story is?

SB Very much. It’s almost, like, why bother having them ask the question because you already know what you want to say. People also make assumptions about me based on look. They assume, as reporters did that day, that because I live in a trailer, because I’m short, fat, whitehaired, I’m probably uneducated, I’m probably vindictive. Honestly I think one reason they kept coming back was that I was not at all what they expected.

CJR During the James Fields trial, some of the headlines about you were to the effect of, “Susan Bro has a message for Donald Trump.”

I wonder if that’s something where, when you see it, you think that that’s deliberately provocative, or if you actually did want to get that message out there.

SB No, that’s deliberately provocative. I would have gone off on them had I seen it. The local press did not do that. I’m not allowed to go off on Donald Trump. My son is in the military reserves, and that’s his commander-in-chief. I have gone off on the press before about doing that.

CJR Are you aware that there’s some footage of the Charlottesville riot and a tribute to Heather at the end of the recent Spike Lee movie, BlacKkKlansman? Did you give your permission for that?

SB Yes and no. They approached us about getting some childhood pictures of Heather. In exchange for a donation to the foundation we allowed them access to three or four pictures. Spike called me at home and

CAMILLE BROMLEY

39

“They assume. . . that because I’m short, fat, white-haired, I’m probably uneducated, I’m probably vindictive.

Honestly I think they kept coming back because I was not at all what they expected.”

asked if he could use footage of the car. I asked, “For what purpose?” He said, “To show that the Klan is still active.” I said, “I guess.” I assumed he would also ask everyone else involved. He did not. He did go buy rights to the footage from the photographer, but local activists took it as I sold that footage without their permission, and I had nothing to do with that.

CJR Do you think the story that is out there about Heather and yourself has done right by you?

SB

I have no idea what’s out there.

CJR

Why don’t you read it?

SB I’m too busy. People say, I saw you on CNN. Oh really? When was it? It was such and such time. Well I was at work. Or I was at dinner. I have

become a public commodity and less of a person to a lot of the press. At first everyone would send a link. Then that went by the wayside. People don’t send me links anymore. Word probably got out too that I will get pretty pissed if you get it wrong. So they’re probably, like, we don’t want to tell her.

CJR Is there anything else you want to tell me?

SB They really overplay the stories so much that everyone’s eyerolling, particularly on the local level. When I’m out in public I don’t catch it so much. People stop and hug me and say, “We’ve been keeping up.” I live in a small, small town, not in Charlottesville, and even the pizza delivery guy said that newspaper sales really picked up during the trial.

Because he’s also the newspaper

guy. But you can play a story so often that people become deaf to it. That’s a concern to me. Heather would be absolutely livid that people were still focusing on her. She was not attention-seeking. I am not attention-seeking, despite what some people would insist. They think, because I allow the press access, I am seeking it. But there is a difference.

I will allow my name to be associated with projects that I believe in.

I haven’t made a dime off of any of the projects that I’ve done. I’m not allowing it to be used for every real estate event. (“Like my crafts page!”; “Buy my Avon!”; “Don’t you want to sell jewelry for me?”) No, I’m not doing all that crap. My name has some clout, but only for activism.

That door is now open and I’m going to keep a toe in that door. I don’t want the attention. But I don’t want the platform to go away, either. cjr

On Screen

TKTK

In Hollywood, journalists are brave, sexy, and often drunk.

Graphing the depictions we love—and love to hate.

The Killing Fields (1984)

REALISTIC

No movie betters captures life as a war correspondent. Sam Waterston (pre-Law & Order) plays Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times correspondent covering the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The heart, and poignancy, of the movie lies in Schanberg’s relationship with his translator and fixer, Dith Pran, played

by Haing S. Ngor. We see each man as a representative of his respective country at war.—Kyle Pope

All the President’s Men (1976)

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)

The Post (2017)

Deadline, U.S.A. (1952) Under Fire (1983)

State of Play (2009)

HEROES

Spotlight (2015)

The Newsroom (2012–2014)

Superman (1978)

Newsies (1992)

His Girl Friday (1940) Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), is a star reporter and ex-wife of Walter Burns (Cary Grant), her newspaper’s managing editor. When she plans to run off with a new guy (to be a girl Friday of housewifery) Burns schemes to lure her back—with journalism.

What girl could resist a great scoop?

—Betsy Morais

Roman Holiday (1953)

Lions for Lambs (2007)

The Pelican Brief (1993) This film has it all: conspiracy theories, lies told to get documents, anonymity. Come for a surprisingly detailed, if convenient, depiction of reporting. Stay for the moments that prove Hollywood can get it right. Kind of. —Alexandria Neason UNREALISTIC

Frost/Nixon (2008)

The Wire (Season Five) (2008) Zodiac (2007) Ace in the Hole (1951)

Almost Famous (2000)

Broadcast News (1987)

Citizenfour (2014)

The Paper (1994) Many of the journalists in this movie are unlikeable: they drink too much, they’re paranoid, they obsess over petty grievances with the managing editor. But it’s obvious that they care deeply about their work. Real-world reporters can relate, and feel inspired.

—Mathew Ingram

Syriana (2 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Citizen Kane (1 Ides of March (2011)

It Happened One Night (1934)

Venom (2018) Venom is not a good movie. But it is a fun movie. Its hero, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), is a reporter at an outlet that is, er, legally distinct from Vice, and he has an alien friend, Venom.

This flick shows something known to real reporters but rarely dramatized: Eddie burns one of his sources—his girlfriend—completely by accident.

(She dumps him.) —Sam Thielman

Spider-Man (2002)

Morning Glory (2010)

The Soloist (2009)

LEFT TO RIGHT: WARNER BROTHERS/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; MARY EVANS/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; DREAMWORKS/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; UNIVERSAL/ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; UNITED ARTISTS/ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; ANNE MARIE FOX/ HBO; LIONS GATE/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Capote (2005)

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) “It is anchorman, not anchorlady, and that is a scientific fact!” A group of TV newsmen in the 1970s struggles with the addition of Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), a woman. She is subject to all manner of harassment and humiliation, but she does, in the optimistic mode of Hollywood, come out on top. —Andrew McCormick

The Simpso (1989–pres

Kent Brockman’s d as Springfield’s m newsman is riddle hyperbole, and in “Let’s check the d the killer storm be like a shotgun full (It’s zero.) With Br tendencies of loc their logical conc Fitzgerald

How to Lose a Gu 10 Days (2003)

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) Tomorrow Never Dies is a totally nonsensical fiction about a mediamogul villain, Elliot Carver, who seeks to reshape the world to his advantage by spreading lies and starting wars.

We all laughed at the movie when it came out. But then the plot sort-of started happening and now we’d quite like James Bond to figure this all out. —Ravi Somaiya

Shattered Glass (2003)

2005)

Network (1976)

Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen), a 26-year-old journalist at The New Republic, is found to be fabricating sources, quotes, and sometimes entire pieces. Based on a true story, the film shows how trust between editors and reporters can rest above everything. —Zainab Sultan

To Die For (1995)

1941) Absence of Malice (1981)

Nightcrawler (2014) SCUMBAGS

ons sent)

decades-long career most recognizable ed with speculation, nept metaphors. death count from earing down on us l of snow,” he says. rockman, the worst cal TV news reach clusions. —Brendan

Thank You for Smoking (2005)

uy in

Never Been Kissed (1999)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Sharp Objects (2018) Journalist Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is persistently drunk. She ignores leads, lies to her editor, and sleeps with a primary source. She may be another depiction of a female reporter trading sex for professional gain, but at least Sharp Objects is also gothic and weird, sad and hypnotic.

—Amanda Darrach

House of Cards (2013–2018)

NICHOLSON BAKER

41

Tuning into TV’s battle to the death

TELEVISION

My Brain on Cable News

AUTHOR

Nicholson Baker ILLUSTRATOR

Lincoln Agnew

I

owe a lot to cable news. When I saw the coverage of the Gulf War on CNN in 1991 it changed my whole understanding of everything. Peter Arnett was on the roof of the Al Rasheed Hotel, describing what it looked like when American bombs exploded in Baghdad. Sometimes we’d be shown footage of precision bombs from the bomb’s-eye view. We, the viewing public of the United States, were the bomb. The whole thing was wrong and horrible. Horrible, obviously, because it killed human beings—soldiers on a highway of death and civilians in their beds in a country we didn’t understand—and horrible also because, as we discovered later, it created a specific kind of rage, a fiercely focused, retributive rage.

Things that blow up from the air make groups of people really mad.

The rage of the bombed lasts for years and years.

I learned about war from CNN and I became a pacifist. I also stopped watching cable news altogether, because it made me crazy.

Until now, when a nice editor asked me to write about CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Well, OK, I thought, let me give it a go. The year 1991 was a long time ago. Maybe everything’s different.

There was a problem, which was that my wife and I didn’t actually

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have a TV. We’d given ours to my motherin-law, who lives in a retirement home. She watches PBS: Amanpour & Company, Paul Simon singing “The Sound of Silence,” and British comedy shows with loud laugh tracks.

Sometimes the staff at the retirement home turns it to Fox News, but we turn it back. My wife and I still watch TV, of course, but we watch TV on a laptop, using Netflix. Is there anything better than watching reruns of Friends on Netflix? I don’t think so.

So I had to buy a TV, which I did, for $150—a beautiful 24-incher. The cable guy came a week or so later and hooked us up. He had a few things to say about the news shows.

He didn’t like Donald Trump, he said, but he didn’t like the way CNN and MSNBC were using anything and everything to bring him down, either.

It took me a few days to work up the nerve to turn the TV on for more than a few minutes at a time. When I did, there in front of me— along with the ads for Gold Bond Lotion and Gorton’s fish sticks and the “world’s best pillow” from MyPillow.com and the Funeral Advantage program and Sheex, which are a new kind of sheet with a 30-night guarantee, and the Shark vacuum cleaner, which can vacuum up potato chips on a couch, and the Ozempic injection device, which lowers your blood sugar and is not a weight loss drug and allows you to be a happy fireman or farmer again—along with all these interesting and revealing ads (ads are themselves news, after all) was something momentous and fascinating. It was the memorial service for George Herbert Walker Bush.

The very person who had gotten us into the Gulf War was the person who was now being mourned. I watched, and was sad. Any life that ends, anywhere on the planet, leaves a ghostly trail of grief in the world.

Bush was loved by many patriotic people, and I’m sorry he’s gone, because with him goes another piece of the living past. The fact that he’d been in charge of a good deal of destructive international meddling as head of the Central Intelligence Agency—that he’d launched a military attack on Panama City to get rid of Manuel Noriega, a dictator who had been on the CIA payroll; that he’d sent warplanes into Iraq, destroying the country and setting in motion a generation of international

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turmoil—was immaterial for the moment.

Here on TV was a heavy coffin with a formerly living person in it, being slowly walked down the steps of the Capitol Building, held by men in uniform, step by step.

And CNN, normally so talkative, said nothing. There was just the flag-wrapped coffin, the uniformed men, the synchronized downward steps, and the music of the military band. The Bush family was lined up near the hearse. Wolf Blitzer, who had gotten his start by narrating the bombing of Bush’s Gulf War, was silent. Jake Tapper was silent.

Finally, Blitzer spoke. “Another very, very moving ceremony at the US Capitol honoring the 41st president of the United States. The casket is now on that presidential hearse.” He described what was to come at the National Cathedral.

Then Jake Tapper spoke. “What a sad but also odd moment this must be for President George W. Bush, one of only two men in the history of this nation to have served as president after his father served as president,” he said. “Not only is he going through what must be a heart-wrenching experience, helping to bury the man who he revered so much, he is also getting a glimpse of what his funeral will be like. Very few Americans will have the opportunity to be honored in such a way, with a state funeral such as this one. And he is seeing how he—and obviously President Obama, President Clinton, and others, not to get too macabre—but the send-off that they will all experience.”

Not to get too macabre. Those words stuck in my head. Later that morning, when all of the living former presidents—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter— were seated in the front row of the cathedral with their wives, some announcer again noted that these men were being given a foretaste of what was in store for them. This is what an American presidential funeral looks like. This is what life after death looks like.

Carter seemed sad and a little lost. Was he sad because he knew that his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski— the father of Mika Brzezinski, costar of MSNBC’s Morning Joe with her husband, Joe Scarborough—began the program of arming and indoctrinating right-wing religious fanatics in Afghanistan as a way of pushing Russia

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What works on television is moment-to-moment political scrimmaging between war hawk Democrats and war hawk Republicans.

out? Was he regretting that his administration had set in motion a giant, spreading tide of terror in the Middle East? Probably not. He has done many good things in his life as well.

I looked at Obama. In his last year in office, his administration dropped more than 26,000 bombs on six faraway countries. Was he thinking, on this day of public mourning, of how many civilians he’d killed, how many drone assassinations he’d ordered?

And Hillary Clinton—was she thinking about her own ill-fated intervention in Syria as secretary of state, her covert arming of the rebel factions, beginning in 2011, which fueled yet another war? And what about Bill Clinton and his years of harassment strikes on Iraq, his unconscionable sanctions, the aerial chaos he unleashed on Belgrade? What about George W. Bush, who took advantage of 9/11 to unleash the furies on Afghanistan and Iraq? Did any of them regret what they’d done? I doubted it. Bush wept for his father— movingly—but in that cathedral, filled with Washington’s finest, nobody was weeping for the millions of families who have suffered as a result of what America has become under their leadership: a monstrous, amoral, bipartisan, deficit-financed engine of international

provocation and precision-guided mayhem.

And then Donald and Melania Trump arrived. They found their seats at the end of the pew. Trump was a bulky presence, radiating truculence, with a mouth expression that seemed modeled not on Benito Mussolini but on Mr. Toad of The Wind in the Willows. From the presidents seated alongside him Trump had inherited air wars and semi-covert interventions all over the Middle East and Africa. He’d moved quickly to make everything worse by appointing James Mattis as his defense secretary. Marine General “Mad Dog” Mattis, as his colleagues sometimes call him, who held high military commands under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and had served on the board of General Dynamics, a defense contractor, was best known for saying, in 2005, that “it’s fun to shoot some people” and that killing enemies was “a hell of a hoot.” According to Esther Schrader and Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times, a clip of these remarks was cheered by troops in Iraq when it was played on CNN. In Iraq last year, under General Mattis’s “annihilation” plan for the Islamic State, Mosul’s Old City was blasted to ruins, and Raqqa, in Syria, suffered the same fate. Civilian death rates doubled. These fearsome urban attacks received minimal coverage on cable news, however. “Obsessed with the seemingly daily updates in the Stormy Daniels story or the impeachment potential of the Russia investigation, the American media is paying even less attention now to a topic it never focused on with much zeal,” Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post last March. Why so little coverage? Because the reality of permawar is tiresome. It doesn’t work well on cable. It becomes unmentionable, embarrassing, almost taboo. Somewhere off in the distance, American hardware is again blowing up a neighborhood and

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MY S IDE OF TH E STORY

Patrisse Cullors Activist

Patrisse Cullors is an artist, organizer, and freedom fighter. She is a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, a founder of Dignity and Power Now, and the author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018).

wailing, rocking parents are holding dead children in their arms. It’s been going on for so long, under the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and now Trump, that it simply doesn’t register. Small sites like TomDispatch and Antiwar.com try to get word out, as do larger outfits such as Reuters and The Intercept, but most people aren’t paying attention. What works on television, for a larger audience, is the moment-by-moment political scrimmaging between war hawk Democrats and war hawk Republicans, the incessant flag-flappery of support for the troops, the perpetuation of the fiction that the United States, as a political power, is a force for good in the world, when it so obviously isn’t.

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hat’s actually on cable these days is a bizarre legalistic death battle.

Cohen, Manafort, Flynn, Butina, Mueller, Giuliani, et al. We aren’t debating whether Trump has been responsible for the deaths of innocents, because everyone knows that he is—presidents and collateral damage go hand in hand. If Trump goes to prison, it will not be for child murder, but for distributing hush money to silence former mistresses and for taking bribes and for engaging in back channel machinations with Russia. Whatever it takes, I suppose, but I have to agree with my cable guy: there’s something unseemly about the means employed.

Fox News is addictive and awful: choirboys gone to seed and women’s dresses with weird portholes at the shoulders or at the cleavage. The anchors jeer smilingly at ideas that any sensible person of generous mind can see make sense. Quick clips of closedcircuit footage of humans with darker skin doing bad things are injected into the river of commentary—mug shots included—to create little mental firecracker pops of righteous

KEVIN WHIPPLE

On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The next day, a thousand miles away, a Minnesota police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, whose girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, posted video of the aftermath on Facebook so that the world could bear witness. A day after Castile’s death, protesters in Dallas hit the streets as part of a national effort to challenge police brutality and murder by law enforcement. Their call for justice was interrupted when Micah Xavier Johnson, a young Black man trained in the US Army, shot and killed several law enforcement officers.

The shooting in Dallas marked a dangerous pivot in the media’s attention. The next several news cycles erased the deaths of Sterling and Castile. Rather than interrogate Johnson’s background, show his distance from Black Lives Matter, or consider the protesters injured or traumatized by his actions, headlines and public officials demonized our movement. By July 8, Bill O’Reilly was telling his audience that Black Lives Matter “inflames rather than illuminates” and is “essentially a ‘Hate America’ group.”

Such coverage failed the families of Sterling and Castile. It failed people in America desperately grappling with how to hold police accountable for the consistent harm done to Black communities. We need the media to be a beacon of truth, not falsehood. Journalists must be able to differentiate between terrorists and human rights leaders.

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wrath among the pickup-truck crowd, along with “funny” attacks on progressive causes by rightist comedians who love steak and country music. Fox & Friends is a hot mess of clean living and white-right American selfdeception, and I can’t watch it for very long without feeling queasy. But it’s an easy mark.

CNN, with its glass-topped tables crowded with center-right commentators perched on high stools, and its appealing specials on kindly geniuses like Gilda Radner, is much better than Fox, though still at times heartbreakingly wrong. John Berman is quick on his feet, and Don Lemon’s delivery, with dramatic pauses and piercing “let’s get real” eye contact, is sometimes remarkably strong.

And then there are voices of reason soaring in from deep time: for instance, John Dean, of Watergate fame. He’s good.

MSNBC, though, has the sharpest news anchors and reporters and guest experts.

Hallie Jackson and Ari Melber seem like genuine human beings trying to think things through. Sometimes, watching MSNBC, listening to all the fine points of analytical commentary, I have been thrilled by the level of legal insight. But other times, it feels like I’m watching a pack of hungry dogs circling around some giant blundering pachyderm, tearing out hunks of flesh and splattering the screen with blood and saliva.

On the night of George H.W. Bush’s funeral, Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC was about the eulogy by Alan Simpson, a former senator. Bush never hated anyone, Simpson had said. “He knew what his mother knew and my mother always knew: Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”

This is a Chinese proverb (although Simpson didn’t give the Chinese credit), and it’s true.

Cable news, because there’s so much of it, because it’s always on the prowl for new

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outrages and trespasses, because lurid headlines are always creeping, creeping across the bottom of the screen, feeds hatred, and feeds on hatred, and thereby corrodes the American brain.

On December 19, President Trump did one small good thing: he announced that troops were leaving Syria. (Intermittent bombing and lethal droning, presumably, would continue.) Mattis promptly announced his resignation—thank goodness—releasing a letter about how important it was to be “clear eyed” about our enemies Russia and China.

Instantly, MSNBC and CNN had all sorts of national security experts on to extol Mattis’s wisdom and attack child leader Trump’s single positive presidential act. Later, after the dustup, Trump, our most devoted consumer of cable news, tweeted that the pullout was going to happen “slowly.”

It’s all a game. People seem to crave a ludicrously evil enemy, like Uncle Joe Stalin, like the Penguin on the old Batman shows.

Trump is perfect for that role. But the enemy is not Trump (or Putin, or Stalin, or the Penguin), it’s us. We’ve got to figure out a way to live less intrusively on this gorgeous, multilingual, fast-melting, parti-colored planet. We need news that helps us do that.

I’ve learned a lot from journalist-historians like Tom Engelhardt, Nick Turse, and Ann Jones, and from the hardworking people at Common Dreams, edited in my own beloved state of Maine.

Time to turn the TV off now—mute the animatronic moving mouths of the opinionators.

Cable news overpoliticizes us—at least, it overpoliticizes me. It turns me into somebody I don’t recognize: a frowny, beard-plucking, wave-whitened, despair-darkened ancient mariner. I did, however, enjoy the ad for Gorton’s fish sticks. cjr

Five union members from across the Rust Belt reflect on eroding faith in the media AUTHOR

SC OT T BA R ROW / G E T T Y

Steven Greenhouse

COVERING AMERICA

Through the Working Class

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After the 2016 election, there was a sense of panic in many newsrooms—journalists had missed a huge part of the Trump story because, ensconced on the coasts, they hadn’t been adequately covering working-class Americans’ hardships, worries, and resentments. Over the past two years, the media has worked hard to restore the working class to its rightful place in the nation’s political narrative, but these Americans still have many complaints about media coverage.

During a weeklong trip I took to one of the nation’s main industrial belts—stretching from Cleveland through Lordstown and Youngstown to Pittsburgh—I saw that truck drivers, steelworkers, and autoworkers are astute consumers, and students, of the press.

A steelworker remarked that “the American worker has been put on the back burner” by the media. Several workers said they wanted more local coverage of plant closings, the negative effects of trade, and the waves of layoffs that have hit their communities. Some said they wanted more stories on the difficulties their children face affording college and on the financial challenges of retirement—that is, if they can afford to retire. They praised the media, print and broadcast, when those outlets covered matters of great local concern, such as the opiate crisis or campaign finance scandals in their state capitals.

Some workers love Sean Hannity and Fox News; some prefer Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. Many dislike, even resent, all the shouting on cable television. And many say they no longer trust the press—and not just because Donald Trump has declared war on mainstream news organizations.

Rather, many workers wax nostalgic about Walter Cronkite and ask, “Where are the respected, unbiased voices of yesteryear?”

Blue-collar workers vigorously, even angrily

disagree about whether the media is fair to Trump. Some workers say the coverage of him is far too harsh and one-sided; others argue that tough, probing coverage of Trump is urgently needed.

The media covers blue-collar America less closely than it did several decades ago. Christopher R. Martin, author of No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, which will be published in May, tells me that as more outlets became publicly owned and traded on the stock exchange, they began pursuing a different audience to help boost profits. “Many moved from a mass audience to more of an upscale audience,” Martin says. “Many newspapers have cut back on, or entirely eliminated, the labor beat—the one beat that talked about the life of the working class.”

At many news organizations, editors are assigning more “upscale minded” stories about skiing vacations in Aspen and whether to invest in Apple and fewer pieces about factory closings in Akron and layoffs in Cincinnati. A result of this approach: the one-hour walkout by 20,000 Google workers received tremendous coverage in the national media, while a steelmaker’s lockout of 2,200 blue-collar workers, for seven painful months, garnered hardly any attention at all.

With unemployment unusually low and wages rising, blue-collar Americans are doing far better than they were during the Great Recession, but many still seem anxious. As in 2016, how working-class Americans feel about Trump and the economy could be the deciding factor in the 2020 election. Will the press hear them? Five people gave me a chance to listen.

STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Kevin Koubeck Truck Driver and Trump Fan Newbury, Ohio

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t 7:02 on a Monday evening, Kevin Koubeck received a text: get to the terminal in Kent, Ohio, just outside Akron, by 10pm to drive a truckload of freight to Carlisle, in central Pennsylvania. It would be 500 miles round-trip, and Koubeck—a burly 56-year-old with a salt-and-pepper goatee—would make the journey and arrive back in Kent by 9am Tuesday.

On the road, Koubeck begins with country and western or rock on Spotify, then switches to sports talk radio for a few hours, and some nights to a satellite radio show that gives practical tips to truckers— how to maintain their logbooks or file their taxes. At 5 most mornings, Koubeck turns to NPR’s Morning Edition. “They don’t try to tilt my opinion,” he says. He has little patience for Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t listen to him. He gets on these rants.”

When he’s back home, Koubeck—who has driven a big rig for 30 years—mainly watches Fox 8’s local news, based in Cleveland. “I just think they’re fair and evenhanded,” he says. “It’s not slanted like Fox News or CNN.” Another big plus in his eyes: “I like that all the reporters are from this area.” Koubeck grew up in Cleveland Heights—his father was a truck driver, his mother a junior high school history teacher. He now lives in a roomy, 70-year-old house, where I met him. It’s nestled in country meadows in Newbury, some 30 miles from Cleveland. It’s homey, with a fireplace, an eight-foot-tall, century-old

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church organ that his wife inherited, and an antique Flexible Flyer sled in the entryway.

Koubeck has some nostalgia for how the news used to be, when there was less partisanship and nastiness. When he was young, his parents subscribed to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press, but now he doesn’t subscribe to a newspaper. Still, he pays attention to stories close to home, like the 2018 Ohio governor’s race. His brother, a deputy sheriff in Lorain County, is concerned about Ohio’s opiate crisis—there were 4,854 drug deaths in the state in 2017—and Koubeck praises the media for covering that problem.

Keeping a close eye on who fights for workers, Koubeck usually votes Democratic, but not in 2016: “Bernie would have been my guy. He had some great ideas. He would have done a lot for college education.” (Koubeck’s son is in college, and his daughter recently finished.) After Sanders lost the primary, Koubeck was drawn to Trump partly because he was convinced that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t battle for workers or be tough on trade. “As a blue-collar Teamster who voted for Trump, I voted for change. We had Obama and the Democrats. . .but they did nothing for us.” He liked Trump’s combative talk on trade and his “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Now that Trump is in office, Koubeck criticizes the way the press covers him. “They really nitpick everything Trump does,” he says. “I don’t know why the media is so worried about Stormy Daniels. They’re more worried about what Trump did before he was president than what Bill Clinton was doing as president. It’s ridiculous.”

His wife, Sandy, chimes in: “They overemphasize things that don’t matter, about things that aren’t going to affect me. All the stories about Trump and Stormy, I don’t care to hear.”

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Stephanie Allein The Laid-Off GM Worker Lordstown, Ohio

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alk to Stephanie Allein for a minute, and it becomes abundantly clear why she doesn’t have the time or energy to worry about national or world news. The day after Thanksgiving, she learned she was losing her job—General Motors announced that it would “idle” its colossal assembly plant in Lordstown, laying off Allein along with 1,600 other workers there. Allein, 40 and thin, with long, chestnut hair and an almond-shaped face, is deeply worried about what comes next.

“It’s devastating,” she says. Allein transferred to Lordstown in 2010 after GM shuttered the assembly plant where she worked in Shreveport, Louisiana. Four years earlier, she moved her family to Shreveport from Lockport, her hometown in upstate New York, because a GMowned auto parts plant there had laid her off.

“I’d like to be able to plant my roots somewhere. I feel like a gypsy,” says Allein, whose job in Lordstown was assembling dashboards for Chevy Cruzes. Moving from Lockport to Louisiana to Lordstown wasn’t easy for her two daughters, now 19 and 21. Now she has to move again—this time to GM’s plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee—but she’s at least thankful that her daughters won’t be forced to change schools.

Allein takes a “news you can use” attitude toward the media.

“We’re all watching the local news right now because we’re all hoping to hear something good,” she said. Speaking in mid-December, she

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“They overemphasize things that don’t matter, about things that aren’t going to affect me. All the stories about Trump and Stormy, I don’t care to hear.”

voiced hope that President Trump and Ohio’s governor and US senators would somehow persuade GM to keep the Lordstown plant open—perhaps it could assemble electric vehicles. But that hasn’t yet happened, and GM is ending US production of the Chevy Cruze because of slumping sales.

“Things get so misconstrued from what we hear in the plant,” Allein says. She got upset when she heard media reports that GM workers earn $80 an hour. “We really don’t make $80, not close,” she says. “It’s more like $30, and we lost our cost-of-living adjustment. Things get switched around and stretched around in the news.

“I watch a lot of local TV to see what’s going on,” she adds, mentioning the extensive coverage of a December 9 house fire that killed five children in Youngstown. “I love channel 33”—WYTV, an ABC affiliate in Youngstown—“and I like the Vindy news”— the Youngstown Vindicator. “It seems to be pretty good. I flip through the channels—Fox, all of them.

“I’ve never been huge into politics,” she continues. “But I think since GM has been impacted greatly by politics, it’s hard not to get involved in following politics.”

Allein was working in Shreveport in 2009,

when GM filed for bankruptcy reorganization.

The Obama administration rescued it with a $49.5 billion bailout, although Allein didn’t love the media coverage at the time. “It was a little bit harsh,” she says. “They felt the government bailout cost too much. They made the workers look overpaid and underworked.

I definitely felt bad. They focused more on what we”— the workers—“did wrong, not what we did right. We worked really hard.

We’ve worked hard to help GM regain its reputation.” (After the federal government sold its 61 percent stake in GM, the rescue’s total cost to taxpayers was $11.2 billion.)

Allein likes much of the local coverage about the Lordstown plant, including the stories about how the layoffs will hurt local stores and restaurants. “I’m seeing pieces on how it is affecting more than just us, how it will affect the whole community,” she says.

“I like that they cover that there are hopes to keep the plant open.”

Many local TV station executives would feel blessed to have enthusiasts like Allein.

“Mornings I usually stick to my 33,” she says.

“They help keep me on time. I always listen while I’m getting ready to leave for work. I’m keeping track of what’s going on. They help me keep touch with the big stories.”

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JoJo Burgess

The Steelworker Who Loved Rush Limbaugh Canonsburg, Pennsylvania

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n the 1990s, long before he started working at an electrical equipment factory south of Pittsburgh, JoJo Burgess was in the Army, first at Fort Hood in Texas and then in Iraq during Desert Storm.

Back then, Burgess—now 48 and with the frame of a football player and a bushy beard—was a Rush Limbaugh fan. A lot of what Limbaugh said “made sense,” Burgess says. He lapped up the attacks on Bill Clinton and Democrats for spending too little on the military.

“I believe my survival in the military depended on being registered Republican,” says Burgess, who voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992.

“I heard Rush Limbaugh talk about his core conservative values, and we, as Republicans, this is how we felt.”

After returning from Iraq, Burgess soured on Limbaugh. “When Limbaugh started talking about inner-city Blacks and welfare recipients, I got uncomfortable,” recalls Burgess, who is Black. “I realized I was aligning myself against my own people. Everything he said was driving me crazy.” Burgess’s parents divorced when he was 4, and afterward “my mother worked the heavy highway, blacktop, she did road construction”—a pioneering job for a woman. In the winter, when road paving was suspended, she was often jobless for months.

Some winters, she turned to food stamps to feed her family.

Growing up, he read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the TribuneReview. In particular, he liked the political columns and Mike Royko,

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“When I have knowledge of something and hear a story about it, I know when they’re full of beans.”

an acerbic Chicago-based columnist. Burgess still enjoys stories about workers, labor unions, and developments in the local economy. But he doesn’t subscribe to a newspaper. “After I started to work, I got lazy, and the cost of newspapers became so much,” he says. In 1999, he began working at Pennsylvania Transformer in Canonsburg, five miles from where he grew up; he is a control apparatus assembler, helping make $1.5 million electrical transformers for power plants, which can be as large as a room.

In 2003, when the Iraq War began, “I started watching CNN seriously,” Burgess says. “My twin brother said that was the channel to watch the war.” He also watched a lot of Fox News; he liked when Sean Hannity, a conservative, and Alan Colmes, a liberal, locked horns. “CNN and Fox, I thought they told the same stories, but in different ways,” Burgess says. “Come 2008, when Obama got elected, Fox took a radical change. It was venomous. It was terrible. Hannity fell off his rocker.”

Nowadays, Burgess watches local TV news, partly because the national media often ignores blue-collar workers. “The

working class in this country is not a newsworthy story to the media—unless it’s something that jumps out at you,” he says.

“US Steel was on the brink of shutting down every plant”—when its workers threatened to strike last September—“but how much of that did you see on CNN or Fox? It was on the local news. National media didn’t cover it.” Same with the 2,200 workers locked out of Allegheny Technologies for seven months.

Burgess reads newspapers online, especially when friends or the United Steelworkers, his union, recommend stories via Facebook. Burgess often argues on Facebook with a police officer friend—they played high school football together 30 years ago in Washington, Pennsylvania, an industrial town south of Pittsburgh. “My friend says Obama is a Muslim. He says Obama was sworn in twice on the Koran.” Burgess has little patience for his friend’s more conspiratorial beliefs, saying he eats up whatever the right-wing news media tells him.

“Most of my friend’s stories come from Breitbart,” Burgess says. “He’s a Fox News guy. A lot of his stuff comes from Sean Hannity. It’s like brainwashing—that’s what it is.”

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John Boyer

‘I’m a Christian and a Gun Owner’ Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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ohn Boyer, 50, describes himself as a Christian first, a gun owner second, and a union man third. He grew up in a deeply conservative home, and “over the years I became a shadow of my parents,” he says.

Boyer typically works 60 hours a week, from 7:30am to 7:30pm Monday through Friday, making large deliveries for UPS, mostly to businesses outside of Pittsburgh.

If you order a trampoline, Boyer delivers that; if you order a few trampoline springs, regular UPS drivers deliver them. “I like my job,” he says. “I like the freedom. I’m not in a plant where someone is looking over my shoulder.”

Boyer is soft-spoken and thoughtful; his favorite pastime is fly-fishing. He likes watching something calming and enjoyable (not the news) when he gets home. While driving his UPS truck, for news he usually listens to local radio. He never listens to talk radio, finding it far too opinionated.

Boyer, who owns a few sporting guns, is convinced that the media has an antigun agenda. “When I have knowledge of something and hear a story about it,” he says, “I know when they’re full of beans.” It angers him that after a mass shooting, television or radio reports will often state that the killer used an “automatic weapon”— machine guns are prohibited by law and largely unavailable—when a semiautomatic was used. “There should be stricter standards of accuracy,” he says. “I face stricter standards as a truck driver.”

Similarly, Boyer complains that the media, when it does stories on the victims of rape or incest, skews coverage of abortion in favor of keeping it legal. He doesn’t think the media attacks Christianity, but he does see condescension toward religion. “It’s more of an indirect thing, describing people as ‘Bible-thumping, gun-toting hillbillies.’ ” Boyer, who has fond memories of watching Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, is upset by what he calls “the extremeness of the attacks, of the hate” he sees in today’s media. “You talk to somebody on the left, and they say Fox is all about hate. You talk

to somebody on the right, they’ll say CNN is all about hate. I think the media potentially is leading us to civil war. It feeds on hate. They do it for ratings. It’s not about putting out facts. It’s about who can scream the loudest.”

These opinions aren’t limited to the media under Trump. Boyer also thought the press was unfair to George W. Bush: “You had a guy with a Harvard degree and a Yale degree, and the media painted him as the dumbest son of a bitch on the planet.” In his view, the mainstream media marked out a liberal path and “that created the need for a Fox News.” “If they had stayed in the center,” Boyer says, “I don’t think there’d be a need for Fox.”

Fred Crow Jr.

Concrete Truck Driver and Media Maven Cleveland, Ohio

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oon after finishing high school, Fred Crow Jr. followed in his uncle’s footsteps and took a job driving concrete trucks. For the next 31 years, Crow, who is 57, delivered truckloads of concrete to construction sites in and around Cleveland, for office towers, apartment buildings, and shopping malls. Meanwhile, he became so well-informed—and passionate—about politics that, three years ago, his Teamsters’ local made him its political director, giving him even more time to pay attention to the media.

Crow is stocky, with a neatly trimmed beard and a serious mien; his face sometimes becomes pained as he discusses the problems America’s workers face. “I think we’ve kind of been left behind by the media,” he says. “It’s not covering how we got the shaft. All I hear from the media is how these trade deals are a good thing.”

In his view, journalists often seem part of a coastal elite. “They don’t see things through our eyeglasses very well, how working families see things,” Crow says. “I don’t think they’re doing their homework.” Journalists, he feels, have paid too little attention to how trade deals have hurt the Midwest, the safety problems workers face, and the way right-towork laws weaken unions.

On a shelf in Crow’s office stands a brightred model of the concrete truck he drove.

KEVIN WHIPPLE

STEVEN GREENHOUSE

There’s also a big protest sign reading “Stop the War on Workers” and a photo of him standing next to James P. Hoffa, the current president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

As an outspoken advocate for labor, Crow has fighting words for Fox News. “The policies they back are in large part hurting my family and other working families,” he says. Fox, Crow believes, backs politicians and policies that would hold down wages, hobble unions, and worsen health coverage for millions of Americans. “They’re basically the American version of TASS,” Crow says. He can cite chapter and verse on how Fox skews the news to help Republicans and Trump. “Before [the 2018 midterm] elections, Fox pushed a lot of fairy tales about the caravan and what immigrants are doing to this country.

“I like Morning Joe,” Crow continues. “Joe [Scarborough] is conservative, and he freely admits it. I think he gives you a balanced outlook on things, although everyone on the right says he’s fake.” As someone who fights for pro-worker legislation in Ohio’s state capitol, he reads newspapers from across the state, including the Toledo Blade and Cincinnati Enquirer. “I love the Plain Dealer,” he says. He also lavishes praise on The Columbus Dispatch for its investigation into corruption at Ohio’s largest online charter school.

Like many union activists, Crow opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and keeps close tabs on trade. Those concerns attracted him to Ed Schultz, a pro-labor television/radio host who died last July, and to Lou Dobbs. “I used to watch Lou Dobbs.

He talked about fair trade.” But Crow has soured on Dobbs, who he feels has moved far to the right on subjects other than trade. “He’s now a lunatic,” Crow says.

Trump, he says, is a liar. “If the press just reports on what Trump does,” Crow tells me, “people on his side say you’re doing it unfairly, but that’s because what he does is so negative.”

When asked about Trump’s attacks on the media as an “enemy of the people,” Crow responds angrily: “I hate that. It’s so much like Germany in the 1930s. I see many ugly parallels, and I’m of German descent.

“A free press is vital,” he says. “I think you guys do a wonderful job.” cjr

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MY S ID E OF THE STORY

Sarah Coefield Air Quality Specialist

In November, when the Camp Fire raged in Northern California, news outlets used cigarettes as a metaphor to explain the risks of breathing unhealthy air. But this comparison—derived from an equation that uses mortality data to create a cigarettes-smoked equivalent for fine particulate pollution—doesn’t work. Plug different mortality data into the equation, and you create the same equivalence. (Inhaling the Camp Fire’s thick smoke was the equivalent of being in 0.003 vehicle crashes per person per day.) Chemicals in wildfire smoke differ from those in cigarette smoke, and have different health impacts. Exposure times vary, as do affected populations; wildfires force smoke on infants, asthmatics, and others who should never be near it.

Journalists often ask folks in my position to provide statistics about the number of people affected by wildfire smoke. That can be nearly impossible to gauge. Many western communities are too small to be statistically powerful. In Missoula, where I work, there is no simple way to track the number of people going to health clinics for smokerelated concerns. Hospitals can be reluctant to provide data, and even if we’re lucky enough to get it, the numbers might not represent lived experience. Not many people end up in the emergency room. Often, they go to clinics or just suffer quietly.

Given the incomplete statistics and inaccurate metaphors, reporters should speak to wildfire smoke epidemiologists about known smoke impacts, and localize them with stories from community members.

Sarah Coefield is an air quality specialist with the Missoula CityCounty Health Department in Montana.

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CJR

ANNOTATED HISTORY

The Story of Flint On September 24, 2015, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha stood before a bank of TV cameras to deliver alarming findings from her study of the drinking water in Flint, Michigan: more than 1,700 children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. For a few years, Flint had been controlled by stateappointed emergency managers and, in April 2014, one of them had decided to change the water supply to save money.

Dr. Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician working at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center, produced the first hard data to publicly challenge government officials who insisted that the water met state quality standards. A few months later, the Obama administration declared a state of emergency in her town.

CJR asked Dr. Hanna-Attisha to revisit an article on the water from The Flint Journal, published four times per week and part of MLive.com, the largest media organization in Michigan.

—Michelle Legro

Fonger was reporting on the Flint water supply before anyone knew what was going on. When we were deciding to have the press conference, we had asked The Washington Post if it wanted an exclusive on the embargoed draft of the report, but the editors declined.

We gave Ron exclusive access to the report.

Press coverage of the water crisis has waxed and waned over the years. Local coverage was solid, but just wasn’t getting picked up.

Because of articles like this, I was telling my patients, “Yes, the water is okay.”

The Flint Journal

St ate says Flint River water meets all standards but more than twice the hardness of lake water

By Ron Fonger MAY 23, 2014

FLINT, MI — Initial testing of treated Flint River water shows it’s meeting all quality standards set by the state but is also 70 percent harder than lake water.

Michael Prysby, an engineer with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said an initial report, reflecting the first five days after the city began using the river for its water supply, shows turbidity, residual chlorine and bacteria levels meet all standards set by the state.

Prysby said Flint water users may still notice a difference in water hardness, including a different taste or smell than they are used to, and said there have been “a couple of complaints logged” with the DEQ over the use of river water.

Hard water requires more soap and synthetic detergents for home laundry and washing, and contributes to scaling in boilers and industrial equipment, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hardness is caused by compounds of calcium and magnesium, and by a variety of other metals.

The additional hardness of the water was expected by city officials, who said they didn’t think most people would notice the difference.

Bethany Hazard, who lives on the city’s west side, said she’s noticed changes in the appearance of her water since Mayor Dayne Walling turned off the flow of water supplied by Detroit on April 25.

The switch ended Flint’s use of water from Lake Huron until the new Karegnondi Water Authority pipeline is completed. The city and Genesee County are partners in that massive public works project.

“I finally started buying my drinking water,” said Hazard, who lives alone and still pays at least $90 monthly for water and sewer service.

“It’s just weird,” she said of the water coming out of her tap, which she described as murky or foamy at times and which requires her “to use tons more dish soap” to produce bubbles.

Flint Councilman Josh Freeman said he has noticed a stronger chlorine smell from the water in his home, but he’s using it and hasn’t noticed any ill effects.

“Some people are telling me it tastes different, but I haven’t been getting” flooded with complaints, Freeman said.

“We’re not drinking lake water anymore.”

MLive-The Flint Journal could not immediately reach Walling or Emergency Manager Darnell Earley for comment.

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The story didn’t become about lead until a year later, after a whistleblower leaked a memo from the Environmental Protection Agency in the summer of 2015 and the American Civil Liberties Union reported on it.

This is baloney. Nobody had done anything to predict that there would be issues with the water quality.

Later, emails were seen, through the Freedom of Information Act, from the Flint water manager, that revealed they weren’t ready, that they knew there would be problems.

There were not two sides of the story.

There were so many different pieces that covered different elements—people, pipes, austerity, democracy, race, poverty, etc.—that eventually everything was covered. Long-term stories are still needed.

The emergency manager reported directly to the governor. He didn’t have to be accountable to the people.

(Half of Michigan’s African-American population is under emergency management.) It seems like it should have been worth noting that the water crisis would never have lasted a day in an affluent white community.

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PUBLIC RELATIONS

CJR

LY Z L E N Z

AUTHOR

Lyz Lenz

ILLUSTRATOR

Esther Wu

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Michael Sitrick will be your best friend and your worst enemy. Michael Sitrick notices when you got a fact wrong in your story. He won’t yell at you, though. He’s good that way. Michael Sitrick always takes your questions and you can just call him Mike. Mike is easy to love and easier to fear. And he heads one of the most expensive PR firms in the business, with a rate reported to be $1,100 an hour.

Michael Sitrick, 71, is a public relations puppet master who has pulled the strings behind some of the biggest stories in media. He specializes in crisis PR and has made a name for himself as the man you call when you have money and step in some shit. Clients in that category have included Roy Disney during the ouster of Michael Eisner as CEO of the entertainment company; Food Lion, a grocery chain, during its fight against an ABC report about unsafe food-handling practices; Metabolife, accused of lying to the Food and Drug Administration about how ephedra can kill you; Patricia Dunn, during the Hewlett-Packard spying scandal; Lee Iacocca, during his life as Lee Iacocca; the Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese during the abuse cover-up scandal; American Apparel when it cut ties with creepy founder Dov Charney; R. Kelly, although not recently; and Harvey Weinstein.

And he has done all that without uttering what is usually considered a lie, which of course depends on your definition of a fact. And

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MISTER CLEAN-UP A former colleague says Michael Sitrick is the greatest public relations master of all time.

the little guy. The fixer. The man who ensures a fair fight. But a bully is a bully because he has power. How can a fight ever be fair when the price is $1,100 an hour?

Maybe the real moral is that Sitrick just loves a tough fight.

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itrick is the oldest of three boys, born in Davenport, Iowa, to Marcia and Herman. They moved to Chicago when he was three months old. When I speak with him, Sitrick makes a point of saying that he grew up in a one-bedroom home on the South Side. His dad, a decorated World War II vet,

J U L I A N B E R M A N / T H E N E W YO R K T I M ​E S/ R E D UX

your definition of the truth. And the definition of a lie. Which is why talking with Michael Sitrick is a confusing game. That’s why he’s good. That’s why he’s scary. And that is why he’s the perfect mirror to a media industry in crisis. Sitrick hewed the contrarian take when Slate was just a twinkle in Michael Kinsley’s eye. Sitrick was using the internet and social networks to stoke distrust in the media when Donald Trump was still hosting WrestleMania. Seeing journalism through the eyes of someone so good at manipulating it might offer us a window into understanding what’s gone so wrong. Or maybe it offers us nothing; maybe he was just spinning me, too.

Ryan Holiday, the former PR person for Tucker Max, who wrote a whole book about lying to the media, calls Sitrick the greatest public relations operator of all time. Holiday, who worked with American Apparel at the time the company hired Sitrick, compares him to the original PR master, Edward Bernays, famous for promoting cigarettes as feminist “freedom torches.” Holiday tells me, “Like Bernays, he has also had his share of controversial clients. That’s one of the pitfalls of success in that business—the better you get at it, particularly in the crisis game, the more unsavory people need your services.”

Sitrick courts the unsavory. He thrives on the fight. He is fond of telling apocryphal, though possibly at least partially true, stories about fighting bullies on the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up. In one tale, Sitrick’s younger brother David is beaten up by five kids on the way home from school. Sitrick’s father tells him, “You do what it takes to make sure this never happens again. . .He’s your brother. Fix it.”

Sitrick does. He and David go back and square off against the bullies and prevail.

There is another version of the story, one that appears in a 2006 Los Angeles magazine profile of Sitrick. In this telling, his father instructs him to let David fight a bully himself, but to go along with his brother to make sure the “fight is fair.” The story is the kind that journalists love.

The moral that Sitrick wants us to learn is that he is the champion of

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Publicists Anonymous

Five top PR executives, from five industries, tell CJR in their own words what they really think of journalists. —Andrew McCormick

Auto Industry

Mayor’s Office

Spin is not about untruth, it’s about my bias.

I view journalism as a noble profession, so I feel a responsibility to come to journalists with credibility, facts, and data. But, of course, I also come with a bias for my company. The way I work, the more information and access we provide, the better chance we have of getting more column inches or more minutes in a piece.

The more reporters are graded on clicks or dwell time, the less deep our conversations become. One reporter told us that anything he writes about the auto industry needs to have either “Tesla” or “Uber” in the headline, even if the story has nothing to do with those companies. It’s making the reporting one-dimensional.

The government certainly has its share of screwups, but if you were to read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to radio all week, you would come away with the impression that the government is really bad at what we do, and that’s not true.

This is partially our fault, but it’s also the result of this poorly incentivized culture that rewards driving outrage and interest online.

Reporters like that feeling of, “Oh, I’ve caught the government doing this bad thing and I hope everybody retweets it because this is a really sexy ‘get’ for me,” when a full telling of the story, with context, might be a lot less provocative.

Silicon Valley With social media, a lot of companies assume there’s not as much need for the press. They have a direct line to their audience and can blast out whatever they want. But I think that that’s wrongheaded, because you need to show that your company holds up to scrutiny and that your leaders are willing to face questions. Without that, you don’t have credibility.

Fast Food The V-word for journalists used to be “value.”

What’s valuable for our readers to know? What do we, as guardians, have a responsibility to put forward? The V-word today is “views.” How many people clicked on this article? How many people shared it?

A company expects bad coverage from time to time, but the focus on clicks results in a crazy over-index of stories about something bizarre that happened in one of our stores because it was easy to write up. Is this really where the focus should be?

Hollywood There’s a stigma that journalists only want to write bad things. But in entertainment, some publications’ whole livelihoods are based on a thriving TV and film industry. We know they want to write great things, so I can always pitch them on exclusive profiles with stars or executives.

Some journalists are lazy. But I work my ass off to know how this industry works. So to have a journalist call me who’s supposed to write about my company but doesn’t know the nuts and bolts of it—like the relationship between the studios and the theaters—is crazy. I had a reporter spell our CEO’s name wrong in a profile.

Print edition. Spells the name wrong, chairman of the fucking studio. What?

THE CLIENTS  Clockwise from top left: Disney executives Michael Eisner and Roy Disney at Euro Disney, October 12, 1991; recording artist R. Kelly, December 20, 2007; actor Christian Slater, July 14, 2005; media executive Harvey Weinstein, June 5, 2018; Hewlett-Packard CEO Patricia Dunn, September 28, 2006.

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G E T T Y I M AG E S

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was the general sales manager for WGN Radio. The family moved to Alabama when Sitrick was in his senior year of high school. But Midwestern grit and the grift of Chicago are what made him. He’s animated when he talks; his voice still has a little of that Chicago grind in it. He knows how to tell a good story. And the stories he tells are of fights, first his father’s, and then his own.

His father, he says, single-handedly captured 21 Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge. It sounds improbable, but Sitrick doesn’t lie, that’s one of his rules: don’t lie and always back up your claims. The story goes like this: during the battle, Herman captured the German soldiers one at a time as they came into an abandoned farmhouse seeking shelter from the cold. In 2017 he was awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction for military and civil actions. He died in January at the age of 93.

According to Sitrick, he’s no less brave. At 15, he was jumped by five kids from his parochial school, who pushed him down the stairs.

He recalls being knifed beneath a viaduct. Who knows which parts of these stories are actually true, but they’re almost too good not to print—and of course, they’re repeated in nearly every profile of him.

Hell, they make great copy. Sitrick knows what reporters love.

Another story Sitrick likes to tell is of his fight with his parents when he tried to drop out of college to become a professional musician, playing guitar and singing in a band with his brother. He was offered a recording contract when he was 18, but was told he’d have to go on tour. According to Sitrick, his mother told him, “You’ll go on tour, but it will be Vietnam!” He didn’t drop out of school.

He worked briefly as a reporter, but bailed when he found he could make more money in PR. He worked for Mayor Richard Daley’s Department of Human Services, where he insists he was not involved with any of the scandals that office generated. He went on to Selz, Seabolt & Associates, the National Can Corporation, and Wickes.

But it was media that made Sitrick. In 1985, Sitrick orchestrated a Wall Street Journal article on Wickes, a failing retail giant, describing how, after it had been devastated by the recession of the 1980s and come under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for omitting information from tax filings, it had emerged triumphant from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The story was a risk. Sitrick gave a journalist named Stephen J. Sansweet unrestricted access to the company.

In exchange, Sansweet agreed not to write about anything sensitive until Wickes was reorganized. Sansweet did not return CJR’s requests for comment, but in 2006 he told Los Angeles that he had smoothed Sitrick’s way into the world of media. “I must have made half a dozen calls on Mike’s behalf to Journal reporters and bureau chiefs around the country. I’d say. . . ‘I think you can trust him.’ ” The Journal article is typical of what has become Sitrick’s style of spin: It’s long, written by a reporter with cachet, and it preempts the story of the bankruptcy, depicting the new CEO, Sanford Sigoloff, as tough and hardworking. It’s not fluff, but it’s not negative, and, most important, Sitrick’s name doesn’t appear in the article at all.

Not long after the Wickes article, Sitrick got a call from Roy Disney and Stanley Gold. Gold ran Disney’s investment company, which was trying to acquire Polaroid. Disney was being labeled “Roy the Raider” in the press and wanted Sitrick’s help reassuring the public

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As a journalist, reading Sitrick’s ideas about PR and media is like looking at yourself in a funhouse mirror.

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that Polaroid would not be cut up and sold for parts. Sitrick took the job, and in 1989 Sitrick and Company was born.

His favorite fight was the one starring Hewlett-Packard and Patricia Dunn, whom Sitrick calls Pattie. Dunn, chairwoman of the board at HP, hired a security firm to investigate leaks at the company. That security firm hired private investigators, who impersonated members of the press in order to access phone records for HP executives suspected in the leaks. Dunn was indicted on felony charges for the illegal spying. (The case came years before Weinstein, another Sitrick client, used similar tactics to attempt to bully reporters.) Sitrick maintains that Dunn was a scapegoat, that everyone at HP knew about the spying, that it wasn’t her fault. He had her go on 60 Minutes, an op-ed with her byline was published in the Journal, and James Stewart, a business writer, produced a fairly sympathetic profile of Dunn for The New Yorker. The charges were dismissed. Pattie had been wronged. Did you know she had cancer? She was being bullied. He fought for her and won.

Or that’s the truth as Sitrick sees it. The house of cards he helped stack. The other version of the story is that Dunn was a control freak who oversaw an illegal spying operation run amok, who got off because of her failing health. Each story has the same elements— but if stacked differently, they can offer different scenarios. Which one do you want to believe? That’s how Sitrick fucks with you.

The stories Sitrick builds don’t always last.

Sitrick was hired to represent Metabolife, the multilevel marketing company that sold ephedra-based weight loss supplements. The company came under fire when the supplements were linked to thousands of heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. The founder, Michael Ellis, was charged with lying to the FDA. Sitrick fought hard against the negative public perception of Metabolife. In The Fixer (2018), written with Dennis Kneale, he talks about how he allowed Ellis to be interviewed on camera but only in a gym crowded with Metabolife employees, because he didn’t trust 20/20. (Sitrick also insisted that the interview be streamed live online.) Sitrick argues that the FDA was out to get Metabolife and to expand its turf by regulating diet pills.

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Despite the PR efforts, Ellis went to jail.

When he came out, he wrote a book that insisted on his innocence. In his own book, Sitrick writes, “Independent studies proved that his product was safe and effective when used as directed. And millions and millions of people had used the product over many, many years without incident.”

The other version: ephedra was a dangerous supplement and Ellis knew it and hid its effects. The government took action and banned ephedra. Ellis was convicted of lying to the FDA. The Sitrick story is Trumpian in its use of facts that are not facts, its theme of distrust of the media, and the character of the aggrieved who is unfairly targeted by the government.

Or as Sitrick and Kneale outline the approach in The Fixer: get the facts, act preemptively, use social media as a means to an end, and put your opponent in the wheel of pain.

The wheel of pain, it seems, involves hammering the press on the facts until the story is changed or killed. In the Food Lion case, Sitrick was brought in to represent the company as it was suing ABC for a Primetime Live special about unsanitary food-handling practices. Food Lion argued that ABC had committed fraud by sending reporters into the stores posing as Food Lion employees.

In 1997, a North Carolina court found the network guilty of trespassing and fraud.

Reporters weren’t allowed into the courtroom, so Sitrick had PR representatives in front of the courthouse every day, spinning what had happened inside to the media.

The matter at stake—as Sitrick tells it in Spin (1998), written with Allan Mayer—wasn’t “investigative journalism, it was honesty in journalism.” But the truth was, Food Lion was selling rotten meat. Food Lion won in 1997.

But in 2002, a court overturned the verdict.

W

hen I ask if he regrets his role in any of these stories (including that of Weinstein, who was later dropped as a client), Sitrick doesn’t answer.

Instead, he focuses on the injustice committed, the supposed wrong he was hired to right.

That time he was brought on to represent the Archdiocese of Los Angeles? It wasn’t the molesting priest he was defending, but the good name of the church. “You have to look at

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what the objective is,” he says. “When you’re brought in, and what you see, when you see it. For example, in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, we’re representing the church, not the priests.”

His words are offered as a defense that’s not really a defense. He gives an answer, but it’s also not an answer. He deflects from the big-picture wrong to the specifics. The method positions Sitrick as a defender not of history’s assholes, but of truth.

“We try to find out what the information is,” Sitrick tells me. “If it’s wrong, we want them to correct it, and most journalists want it corrected.”

Which seems innocuous enough. But once you pan out on his logic, you realize he’s still rehabbing the reputation of a church that harbored and excused abusers for years.

“If somebody is a bad man, or a bad woman,” Sitrick argues, “you still have an obligation, I believe. . .to give their side. At least, to withhold judgment until you hear their side.”

It’s a sentiment that seems, on the surface, objective. But it presupposes that Sitrick’s clients, the wealthy and powerful, haven’t been controlling the story from the beginning.

It’s a false equivalence of power. It’s spin.

Still, Sitrick argues that everyone deserves a good defense, even—maybe especially—if the court of public opinion has turned against them. The media can be an angry mob. Social media can be even worse. Misinformation can derail someone’s life.

In this, Sitrick isn’t entirely wrong. The question is his method, and who is entitled to this good and costly defense.

I ask Sitrick if there is someone so bad he won’t defend them.

“The American Nazi Party, of course not,” he says.

“What about Richard Spencer?”

“I don’t want to talk about specifics,” he tells me. “But if you are talking about Harvey Weinstein—.” He launches into a story about getting the call to represent Weinstein on the day his own mother died. He focuses on that story. It’s detailed. I get the name of the restaurant he was at with his father when the nurse called with the news. What he said to the nurse. As for Weinstein, I get one sentence. Sitrick agreed to represent him and a few months later dropped him. Why? “It’s a

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MY S ID E OF THE STORY

Jessica Salfia Teacher

Education coverage, which often focuses on feel-good stories, can also downplay or simplify the challenges teachers face. News outlets covered the 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike in triumphant terms, for instance, but as one teacher told The Nation, “wages and health benefits”—two demands made by the strikers—“were almost a distraction.” Other victories—concerning matters such as charter schools and seniority, to name just a couple of the pressures that weigh on teachers and shape education in this country—received considerably less attention.

Educators no longer offer merely a curriculum to students; they offer mental support services, character education, economic support, and protection from active shooters. The opiate epidemic has left many young people adrift. Teachers juggle the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of young people even as they are held accountable for those students’ assessments and mastery of concepts. In January, West Virginia educators again rallied outside of schools, this time to call for better resources for students struggling with mental health and with poverty. “We can’t educate with curriculum alone,” a teacher told a local newspaper in Wheeling.

“We need these services for these children to thrive.”

Stories of triumph are important; they inspire us to keep going back to our classrooms when we’re emotionally and mentally spent.

But young people and their communities also need stories that examine why so many teachers feel this way.

Jessica Salfia is a teacher, writer, and activist in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. She is the president of the West Virginia Council of Teachers of English and coeditor of 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike (2018).

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It would be easy to call the PR work of Sitrick evil and journalists the prevailing warriors for truth.

But it’s not so simple.

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client confidence matter,” he says.

It’s brilliant spin. I can’t think of him as a Weinstein-defending monster when he’s telling me a story about the death of his mother, can I?

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itrick tells me about a client, no name given, who was facing a rape allegation. The client showed Sitrick texts from the woman indicating that the sex was consensual. Confronted with the texts, the woman admitted to making the charge up. Done. Wrong made right.

But what if it wasn’t made up, I ask? Women often text their eventual rapist, who often starts out as a friend or lover. Women are afraid to go forward with a rape charge.

She lied. He protected a young man’s life and career.

But what if he didn’t? I push.

Sitrick is calm and self-assured: the facts are there. The facts support him. He’s not here to debate what-ifs. “In this case she lied,” he says. “In this case she admitted it.” I drop it. He spun me. I know he spun me. He spun me the whole interview. But how can I argue? He is so confident. He seems to know the truth, while I’m just looking for it.

But facts are hardly neutral. How the cards are stacked determines the outcome of the game. In the words of a former ABC employee with extensive knowledge of the Food Lion case, Sitrick’s PR work was “fake news before fake news existed.”

Sitrick doesn’t see what he does as dishonest; nor does he see the media as the enemy. Sitrick is careful; he doesn’t dislike the media.

He understands they/we are underpaid and overworked. We’re all competing for scoops and now, with the internet, it’s hard. He gets it.

He hires journalists. He just wants us to understand “the truth.”

Sitrick’s favorite tactic is one he calls “lead steer.” The idea is that you find a journalist who is respected and you give her a story that counters the accepted narrative about your client. Journalists want a scoop. And where one journalist goes, others will follow.

Sitrick isn’t wrong. That’s the problem. The reality is, contrarian hot takes are the bread and butter of online journalism. Entire media companies like Gawker were founded on them. But at the heart of the metaphor is that journalists are cattle. After all, as every cowboy knows, one of the ways to end a stampede is to ride to the front of the herd and lead the livestock where you want them to go.

The stampede rushes forth. As a journalist, reading Sitrick’s ideas about PR and media is like looking at yourself in a funhouse mirror— it’s you, but warped. They aren’t bad rules, either. “Never lie” is a good one, although lie seems to be a matter of spin. The rule that “no comment” can be “PR malpractice” is another that seems okay to me, as a reporter. But access journalism often comes at a cost to objectivity. Where is the line? It’s easy to see why the moral compass of a journalist might get skewed by his magnetic force.

In Spin, Sitrick explains that journalists see themselves as “the countervailing force that keeps the oligarchs and plutocrats at bay. And if in the process a reporter can manage to make a name for himself— respected by his peers and honored by the Pulitzer committee—who’s to say that’s such a bad thing.” It’s a line that cuts journalists to their core. A not inaccurate profile, but one that feels dismissive, declaring

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us social justice warriors, motivated by an underdog. He understands us better, perhaps, than we understand ourselves. Like I said, Sitrick fucks with you.

So he woos journalists. He’s kind to them.

He answers their calls, before deadline. He makes his clients available. He gives facts.

He gives stories. He’s likable and charming and good at what he does. If writing is like building, arranging the information so that it stands, Sitrick not only blows the house down, he rebuilds it for you. During the reporting of this story, Sitrick was kind and generous.

He offered a list of journalists and employees who would answer any of my questions, and they all did. They all spoke glowingly of Sitrick. He also did research on me. He read my articles. He knew about my divorce; he empathized with me. He said, “I think your ex was a jerk.”

I was mad when he said this. It felt manipulative. But I was also flattered: he did more research on me than the last four guys I dated.

I think he meant it. It felt like he meant it. Or maybe I just got spun. Maybe both can be true.

If so, Sitrick is the paragon of the present moment. He truly believes what he’s selling.

He truly believes the media got ephedra wrong. He truly believes we got Food Lion and Patricia Dunn wrong.

And that’s the thing: it’s not really about spin, but about belief in what truth is, what justice is. About how two people can look at the same facts and walk away with different stories. But if journalists are seekers, Sitrick is the guru. He believes he knows, while we are merely looking, and it’s that seeking that makes us malleable. He knows we are malleable. We want to get it right. So if he can

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sow doubt, with something that looks like proof, well, then? He has an in. And it’s hard to trust the story that you know is right when someone is telling you you are wrong. If it were a relationship, we’d call it gaslighting, but it’s a profession, so we call it PR. Also, Sitrick’s touch is so light. Seth Lubove, a former Bloomberg News journalist who now works for Sitrick, says that he’s heard him yell in the office, but never at a reporter.

In The Fixer, Sitrick notes that punching back at reporters is never a good idea. You have to be nice, and when you do fight back, you fight back with information and with the wheel of pain—relentlessly demanding the facts. Often he treads so carefully, journalists barely know he was there. Even those who were railroaded by him never knew his name until afterward.

This is often because Sitrick isn’t hired by his clients themselves, but by their lawyers.

Sitrick then directs the operation under the aegis of attorney-client privilege.

And he’s not always wrong. In the HP case, Pattie Dunn was being hung out to dry; surely other executives were equally guilty of doing what she did. With Metabolife, sure, maybe some people used it and didn’t die.

It would be easy to call the PR work of Sitrick evil and journalists the prevailing warriors for truth. But it’s not so simple.

The reality is, he’s right. Media does mob.

Journalists do get sloppy. Journalists can be evil. PR reps can fight bullies. The news is sometimes fake. The spin is sometimes right. Truth and fiction are contained in both occupations. Michael Sitrick will fuck with your moral compass. But then again, so will journalism. cjr

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P O LL

How Does Journalism Happen?

For decades, we’ve known that Americans don’t trust the press. What we haven’t known is how people view the makings of journalism, from the use of fact checkers and anonymous sources to the question of whether money skews journalistic decision-making. This new national poll for CJR answers those questions, and points to how big the trust gap remains.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Design by Darrel Frost

A great deal of confidence

Confidence in Institutions

Only some confidence

Hardly any confidence at all Military

Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in the people running this institution?

Law Enforcement Universities Supreme Court Exec. Branch The Press Congress

Confidence in the Press

Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in the people running the press?

A great deal of confidence

Only some confidence

Hardly any confidence at all

75%

50%

25%

0%

Democrat Republican

White

Credibility interval = +/- 2% for total, +/- 3% for Democrats and Republicans, +/- 5% for Blacks and Hispanics.

Black

Hispanic

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News Sources Where do you get

Mainstream Media Percentage of

respondents who consider the organization “mainstream.”

3 +156122840

most of your news about current events and politics?

Social media 12%

Online/internet 28%

Print newspapers/ magazines 6% Radio 5%

Mobile news apps 5% Other 1%

Television 40%

None of the above 3%

CBS

76%

NBC

75%

ABC

75%

CNN

73% 70%

NY Times WaPo

66%

WSJ

66%

Fox News

66%

MSNBC

65% 46%

HuffPost NPR

40%

Reuters

39%

Yahoo! News

38%

TMZ

28%

Rachel Maddow

27%

The Daily Show

24%

National Enquirer

23%

Vice News

22%

BillOReilly.com

19% 75%

50%

25%

Male

Female

Urban

Rural

No College Some College College +

0%

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How often do you think reporters...

Double-check basic facts with multiple sources?

Report facts regardless of their personal opinions?

Write an article before learning the facts of the event?

Very Often

Sometimes

42% Confidence in the Press

Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in the people running the press?

of Democrats believe that the media does not have a partisan bias. Only 10% of Republicans believe the same.

A great deal of confidence

Only some confidence

Hardly any confidence at all

75%

50%

25%

0%

WHITE

H I S PA N I C

B L AC K

R E P U B L I CA N

D E M O C R AT

A L L P O L L PA RT I C I PA N TS

WHITE

H I S PA N I C

R E P U B L I CA N

B L AC K

D E M O C R AT

A L L P O L L PA RT I C I PA N TS

WHITE

H I S PA N I C

B L AC K R E P U B L I CA N

A L L P O L L PA RT I C I PA N TS

Never

D E M O C R AT

Almost Never

Employed Full-time

Retired

Credibility interval = +/- 2% for total, +/- 3% for Democrats and Republicans, +/- 5% for Blacks and Hispanics.

Self-employed

Unemployed

71

Focused on Profits Do you agree or disagree with the statement “The mainstream media is more interested in making money than telling the truth”?

Neither

Strongly agree

Methodology

Somewhat disagree

17+26+2116173 48+29+1163

Somewhat agree

Strongly disagree

Democrats

Republicans

Prospects for the Country Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in the people running the press?

A great deal of confidence

Only some confidence

Hardly any confidence at all

Don’t know

11+21+626 22+35+8

Those who think the country is headed in the right direction

Those who think the country is on the wrong track

This poll was conducted online by Reuters/Ipsos from December 7 to December 20 throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 4,214 adults, including 1,657 people who identified as Democrats and 1,505 who identified as Republicans.

It has a “credibility interval,” a measure of the poll’s precision, of about 2 percentage points.

20%

of respondents from urban environments think InfoWars is a mainstream news organization (compared to 9% of those who live in rural settings)

75%

50%

25%

Millennial

Gen X

Baby Boomer

Urban

Suburban

Rural

0%

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Trust in Individual News Organizations Please indicate whether you personally trust most of the reporting from each news organization.

Don’t know

Trust most of their reporting

Total

Dem

Rep

Do not trust most of their reporting

Male

Female

ABC CBS NBC PBS Wall Street Journal CNN New York Times Fox News Washington Post ESPN AP MSNBC HuffPost NPR Yahoo! News Reuters Los Angeles Times The Daily Show Rush Limbaugh Rachel Maddow TMZ Vice Dallas Morning News National Enquirer Pod Save America Stay Tuned with Preet

Credibility interval = +/- 2% for total, +/- 3% for Democrats and Republicans, +/- 5% for Blacks and Hispanics.

White

Black

Urban

Rural

60% 31% 41% of all respondents (54% of Democrats, 70% of Republicans) believe reporters get paid by their sources sometimes or very often

of respondents who think the country is headed in the right direction have confidence in the press (compared to 56% of respondents who think the country is on the wrong track)

of respondents say that they’re less likely to believe a story with anonymous sources (36% say it makes no difference)

Breakdown by Religion Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in the people running the press?

A great deal of confidence

Only some confidence

Hardly any confidence at all

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

None n=835

Muslim n=36

Hindu n=17

Jewish n=78

Mormon n=54

Catholic n=974

Other Protestant n=311

Episcopal n=50

Presbyterian n=89

Lutheran n=183

Methodist n=223

0% Baptist n=525

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ALEXANDRIA NEASON

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At a private school in East Hampton, the best media literacy program money can buy

EDUCATION

Students of Truth

AUTHOR

Alexandria Neason PHOTOGRAPHER

Matthew Septimus

A

bout a hundred miles from New York City, among the trees in East Hampton, Long Island, sits the Ross School. Started in 1991 by Steven Ross, who founded Time Warner, and in larger part by his wife, Courtney, as a tutoring group with extravagant field trips, today the school is a campus of glass and stone. In attendance are some 450 day and boarding students from across Long Island and around the world, in kindergarten through 12th grade. In front of the high school building, at the back of campus, is a reproduction of the Winged Victory flanked by a fountain.

One day in November, students in navy blue and khaki uniforms filed into a classroom in the basement. Their chatter was multilingual—English, Czech, Chinese, German. The teenagers, in grades 9 through 12, took their seats at three tables arranged into a U. Their teacher, Paul Gansky, 33, wore a gray blazer and a button-down with brightly colored stripes. He carried a jade-colored teacup. (“It’s a FireKing milk glass,” he says.) His students call him Paul.

Gansky directed everyone’s attention toward a projector screen displaying an image of a factory—row after row of bright-yellow machines with robot arms—belonging to Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. This was the Apple supplier in Shenzhen, China, that, several years ago, earned significant media attention when China Labor Watch reported on conditions there. After a quick review of the report

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(it was a survey of a small number of workers, Gansky explained, and those who spoke about their experiences did so at significant personal risk), Gansky asked the class how much workers tasked with assembling laptops should be paid. “What would be a fair wage?

How many hours do you think it would take to assemble a single computer?”

Hands shot into the air. Estimates varied widely. Luisa said $70 an hour; Cristina suggested $8 and change. Katharina, a boarding student from Germany, said that assembling the computers required skilled labor. “So I would expect a good wage,” she explained.

Gansky pulled up the real numbers. A student, visibly shocked, whispered “Fuck!” under his breath. According to the 2012 report that Gansky had in hand, workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen earned $250 a month—less than $2 an hour—and paid up to $18 for dorm rental as well as fees for the privilege of having been given an opportunity to interview for the job. The class scribbled notes: on hundreds of workers sleeping on cots in a single room, on the dangers of working with copper, on what low-level radiation and excessive heat do to the body, on suicide rates.

Gansky encouraged the students to consider why Foxconn might insist that its workers use banana oil, which is toxic, to polish screens before they’re packaged and shipped around the world, erasing fingerprints “as if nobody built this machine at all.”

The class, e-commerce, an elective, is a component of the Ross media literacy program, aimed at teaching students not just how to consume and produce different types of media but also how to interrogate a narrative—how to pick it apart, flip it around, and inspect it for flaws that its makers worked hard to conceal. Over decades, Ross has set scholars on the task of crafting its curriculum, with ample resources—annual tuition is $72,800 for boarding students, $41,200 for day—yielding a sophisticated approach reminiscent of graduate-level programs.

The result is a scholastic counterpart to the refinement of the Hamptons, an area known for its beachfront mansions, luxury cars, and elite social scene. (Alexa Ray Joel, daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, attended the Ross School, as did Scott Disick, onetime love interest of Kourtney Kardashian, among

CJR

TEACHING MEDIA Paul Gansky, left, and Marie Maciak, right, helped develop an innovative curriculum that rivals graduate programs.

other children of the Hamptons upper class.)

For Gansky, the decision to tackle media literacy as part of an education in the culture industry at large—with attention paid to journalism as well as film, advertising, video games, and other kinds of storytelling—is about restoring a sense of political agency lost in the hyperpolarized world in which Ross kids live. His most effective message to the class is “You guys are living in a sort of media narrative that’s been designed for you,” he tells me. “And they kind of perk up across the board, whether we’re people who read news or who play Fortnite. That’s when you start to see, across nationalities, folks begin to go, ‘I can interrogate that. My video game is actually worth analyzing the same way that a news article is.’ ” The next day, the class watched a segment of a documentary about Shenzhen produced in 2016 by Wired magazine as part of a series called Future Cities. Before Gansky hit play, he asked his students to predict what information from the China Labor Watch report might appear. Liam Murray, 17, suggested that American income stagnancy—and with it the fight to raise the minimum wage—might be

M AT T H E W S E P T I M U S

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

offered as a point of comparison for US viewers, to encourage empathy for the low-paid employees of Foxconn. “American viewers familiar with disappointments in wages could relate,” he said. Harlan Beeton, 18, thought the filmmakers might try to make an explicitly political statement, exploring what the US and Chinese governments were doing to combat the human rights offenses the class had discussed a day earlier.

But the beginning of the film offered none of that. Instead, it was a glossy introduction to Shenzhen: the camera sweeps through a busy market where salesmen offer iPhones, tablets, and the tools needed to take them apart. Drone shots ogle a crowded, booming metropolis, its buildings fitted together like Legos. “Oh my gosh, I love Shenzhen,” a man says. “You can’t talk bad about Shenzhen.”

About 10 minutes in, Gansky hit pause and turned on the lights. He wanted to talk about what the class had seen so far—and what it hadn’t. “Our students are coming from incredible privilege, and many of them end up writing New York Times best-selling books, or they end up being editors at major newspapers, or at places like CNN, or they become

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film producers,” he tells me later. “They have a real leg up in terms of where they’re going to be in the culture industry. I want them to know, as producers, that they need to take the same sense of critical analysis to the projects that they deal with as professionals. Because they’re setting the discourse. They’re really shaping how our country thinks of itself.”

I

n the wake of the 2016 elections, lawmakers, aghast at the prevalence of “fake news”—outright lies designed to look like legitimate information—sprang into action. States began adopting legislative fixes. In Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo signed two bills mandating that the state’s education department consider adding media literacy to its curriculum. In Washington State, the superintendent of education conducted a media literacy survey and launched a website enumerating practices for incorporating relevant lessons into curricula.

Similar bills have been introduced or passed in Connecticut, New Mexico, California, Hawaii, Arizona, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Internet resources like Snopes (a fact-checking site),

MY S IDE OF TH E STORY

Hoda Katebi

Blogger and Community Organizer The pervasiveness of structural violence against Muslims is deeply alarming. Such violence is created and perpetuated by institutions, including journalism. Reporting on Muslims frequently falls into dangerous Orientalist representations, creating simplistic dichotomies. For Muslim women, the difference between “free” and “subject” is regularly minimized to the way we dress—namely, with or without the hijab.

That reductive idea has been used as justification for America’s ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan, among other invasions and wars. In 2017, a frequently shared photo of women in Kabul in 1972 was used to convince Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post, that “Western norms had existed there before and could return.”

But the US presence in Afghanistan has been destructive for women— who have suffered bombing, rape at the hands of soldiers, and the killing of loved ones. Afghan women were once wearing miniskirts, the reasoning repeated in the media goes, and therefore were free. But real freedom is choice, not any particular way of dressing.

Orientalism is most potent when journalists cover Muslim bans or drone strikes—if at all—without including the voices of affected individuals. Muslims need opportunities and tools to tell their own stories, on everything from foreign policy to fashion. With my own publication, I can bypass frustrating editors who want to use my “ethnic” name to validate a story they want to tell. If your writing is not critiquing the status quo, challenging injustice, and expressing unapologetic truths about the world, then it is complacent.

Hoda Katebi is the voice behind JooJoo Azad, a radical political fashion online publication; author of the book Tehran Streetstyle (2015); host of international book club & podcast #BecauseWeveRead; and founding member of Blue Tin Production.

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FactCheck.org, and Common Sense Media’s Digital Citizenship curriculum are being adopted for use in classrooms all over the country. The dizzying election cycle that delivered Donald Trump the White House heightened America’s media-related anxieties, giving them tangible form. The need to devise a solution became urgent. “Now it’s about mobilizing students,” Gansky tells me.

But media literacy has been on the minds of educators for generations. When, on October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds, a radio account of a fictitious alien invasion, and caused panic in American households, the public came to understand the technology’s dark potential.

The extent of the hysteria has since been called into question—media historians note that newspapers, eager to discredit the new medium cutting into their ad revenue, grossly exaggerated the reaction; even so, the broadcast sparked concern about radio’s application in the widespread dissemination of propaganda. Scholars began to study radio’s impact; a group of researchers, teachers, and journalists founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) at Columbia University. In a 1939 report, Howard Cummings, an IPA researcher, wrote of a need to teach the public “general habits of analysis” and “attitudes of skepticism.”

In addition to researching how public opinion is influenced, the IPA promoted study groups in public schools that would teach children how to identify propaganda.

Edward Filene, the department store baron, funded the institute and, working with Clyde Miller, a former reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and a faculty member at Columbia’s Teachers College, gave more than $1 million to create what was essentially a media literacy curriculum. Miller oversaw the publication of articles with such titles as “How to Detect Propaganda” and “How to Analyze Newspapers.” The materials were shipped to thousands of teachers, librarians, and college professors.

In the fifties, as television came to the fore, teachers adjusted their efforts to suit a new generation of kids. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan determined that “the medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media, which turned up in classrooms

KEVIN WHIPPLE

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ALEXANDRIA NEASON

79

The message to Ross students is: “You guys are living in a sort of media narrative that’s been designed for you.”

all over. During the seventies, Elizabeth Thoman founded an influential magazine, Media & Values, that would lead to the opening of an organization called the Center for Media Literacy. Eventually, focus landed on the production of media, including film.

The eighties and nineties ushered in cable television and the so-called 500-channel universe. Media literacy emphasized the minimization of harmful messages that could be delivered through TV (sexism, racism, violence).

By the following decade, legislators were receiving complaints, spurred in part by the religious Right, of violence in the media.

“Media literacy came up again,” Renee Hobbs, part of a fledgling group that would soon become the National Association for Media Literacy Education, recalls. “We all got to go to Washington to meet with President Clinton and talk about media as prevention strategy.” Broadcasters, in an effort to avoid congressional regulation, created educational programming focused on health and crime prevention.

While Congress aired concerns about violence in media, agents of the state could

be seen on camera brutalizing people.

Hobbs, a professor of communications at the University of Rhode Island, made a documentary instructing viewers in critical analysis of the distressing scenes they saw on the news.

Called Tuning In to Media, it examined coverage of Rodney King, a construction worker in Los Angeles who was beaten by police, and the riots that ensued in response. She sought to prevent desensitization—a goal that has not become easier to achieve in the years since.

“The fact that the media is always changing means media literacy is also always changing,” Hobbs tells me. “It’s a moving target.”

W

hen Courtney Ross wasn’t in the Hamptons, or at her home on Park Avenue, in Manhattan, she was traveling the world with her daughter, Nicole, whom she homeschooled. The experience, Ross realized, was an opportunity to help her child make connections across subjects and cultures. Soon, she started bringing along Nicole’s friends; after Steven died, of cancer, in 1992, she became an “edupreneur,” pouring more than $330 million into building the Ross campus. To formalize the academic

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offerings, she tapped her extensive network of accomplished friends; in 1995, William Irwin Thompson, a poet and historian, and Ralph Abraham, a chaos theorist, developed the “spiral” curriculum, which thematically links all subjects into a narrative telling “the evolution of human consciousness.” During those early years, the school was for girls only and had no class periods; learning would not be circumscribed by arbitrary limits on time.

It follows that instruction in media literacy at Ross was always highly experimental.

That’s thanks in part to Marie Maciak, a documentary filmmaker the school hired in 1996 (along with a Tibetan monk and a Maasai warrior, both scholars in residence). She came to capture the school’s attempt at building a learning environment that would, in Courtney’s terms, produce “global citizens.”

“In my early years at Ross this was a very vibrant community where people were coming in and discussing current events and issues that, in their specific fields, were cutting-edge, and seeing where those issues fit in a K–12 education,” Maciak tells me over lunch in the school’s Center for WellBeing (it houses the gym and a cafeteria

CJR

that rivals those of corporate offices). One day, a group of students approached her in the studio on campus where she edited her work, curious about what she was doing.

“Interest grew,” she recalls. “Within a year I was asked to set up a proposal for integrating media into the curriculum.”

Maciak suggested a focus on “construction and deconstruction”—teaching kids how to make media, evaluate it, and use it to effect change. Working with people like Goldie “Red” Burns, the founder of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, Maciak began to build an outline. “We started to lay out the structure of how we can ensure that kids are empowered to produce their own messages but can also think critically.”

Over the years, Maciak tailored her students’ media projects to align with themes they were learning about in other classes, like social studies. In the early aughts, Ross’s fifth graders were studying ancient Sumer, so Maciak gave out assignments connecting that region to current events. “We were talking about the upcoming possible bombing of Iraq, and kids were very active,” she says.

M AT T H E W S E P T I M U S

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

“Kids were protesting, were making PSAs.” Maciak, who had been working on a film about refugees in Syria, connected her class with a group of Iraqi children living in Damascus. Using Skype, the students collaborated on a project: those in Syria would write a play about their experience, and those at Ross would perform and record it for them.

They Skyped back and forth, sometimes working on the script (with help from an interpreter) and sometimes just talking.

Technological advances forced changes in how Ross approached media. Cameras became smaller and less expensive, which made production appealing, but the long blocks of time needed for kids to edit footage were impractical for a school schedule. (By this point, periods had been introduced.) Classes that focused on filmmaking became electives or independent studies. Today, Maciak explains, “In the courses that are mandatory, we put the whole focus on understanding how media functions—media consumption issues, ownership.”

Students are asked, “Who created this? What is their agenda?” They look at conventional outlets, such as the Times and CNN, and turn to resources like Democracy Now! and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group.

Gansky, originally from Colorado, received a PhD in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin and arrived at Ross in 2016.

Reflecting on his period immersed in scholarship, he recalls, “The big focus at that time was moving away from areas where mass audiences were constructed for television and radio, and into these more complex and, in some cases, much more insidious realms.” One of his professors was especially interested in Alex Jones, based in Austin, who for years had been broadcasting conspiracy theories via

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By the end of high school, Gansky says, students are “ready to consider the fact that reality is constructed.”

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InfoWars, his multimedia company. “It was really hair-raising to see how he weaponized information,” Gansky says. “He wanted to reach a certain audience, to create extremism in the discussion for that audience, and he really couldn’t care less about any sort of empirical truth. I was totally hooked.”

Gansky took a teaching job at Ross—a place that he says has both the money and the “political chutzpah” to prioritize a serious media studies program—and worked with Dan Roe, formerly a teacher and now the school’s communications director, on writing an updated media literacy curriculum. The framework would be based on an exploration of “persuasion—how thoughts, actions, and speech are transformed or engineered,” Gansky explains, and would feature both production and critical-studies tracks. It would be intended for students in every grade; by high school, he says, students are “ready to consider the fact that reality is constructed.”

The embrace of a theory-heavy approach— “My influences are primarily Natasha Dow

Schüll, Jonathan Sterne, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Elihu Katz,” he says—is unusual for children. Students frequently work with news articles and film, but their conversations go much further than simply identifying material as credible or not. After Gansky’s class watched the Wired documentary, Murray, who has been a student at Ross since grade 9, told me how his perception had shifted: “I was expecting to see an exposé, like, Oh my god, look at this horrible thing.” Instead he found himself musing about Wired’s interest in portraying Shenzhen in a certain way. “Wired is a company that benefits off of every electronic that those sorts of companies produce,” he said. “When I first thought about what I was going to see, I didn’t take into consideration that it was Wired, a tech magazine. I didn’t really think about how they’d frame it. Then as I’m watching this, I’m like, ‘Of course. China Labor Watch are the ones putting this information out. So Wired doesn’t really have an obligation to say, Look at this terrible thing happening.’ ”

U

ntil recently, so-called digital natives—children born after computers and cell phones became ubiquitous—were assumed to be better equipped than their parents to parse the constant flow of information. But kids, supposed masters of the screen, tend to be novices at interpreting the information they are so adept at sharing. Meme culture on social-media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, where huge numbers of young people convene, further complicates matters.

How four schools incorporate media literacy into the classroom Media Arts Collaborative Charter School

Lee M. Thurston High School

CLASS English Language Arts

CLASS Media and Digital Literacy

AGE LEVEL Middle school

AGE LEVEL High school

LESSON PLAN Students watch TV shows

LESSON PLAN This course, which was started over 20 years ago, contains units on news, advertising, films, and cyber safety. Students are encouraged to look for multiple perspectives on the same topic, with sources ranging from liberal to conservative websites.

ON THE SYLLABUS The documentaries Killing Us Softly Advertising’s Image of Women (2010); Tough Guise Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity (1999); and “Today’s Front Pages,” from the Newseum.

TEACHABLE MOMENT “In our initial years, we looked at TV news, but now we are monitoring the conversations on social media,” says Kara Clayton, who founded the class.

Redford, Michigan

Albuquerque, New Mexico

and answer questions such as “What kind of political or social interests are reflected in this show?” or “How could this message influence you?”

ON THE SYLLABUS “5 reasons why people share fake photos during disasters,” CNN, September 8, 2017. “How social media is affecting teens,” CBC News, February 24, 2014.

TEACHABLE MOMENT “Many of my students have never even picked up a newspaper in their lives,” Anne Strader, the teacher, says. “So the first thing I do is show them what a newspaper looks like.”

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

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In 2015, researchers at Stanford University’s History Education Group set out to measure what they called “civic online reasoning,” the ability of young people, from middle-school to college age, to assess the credibility of information they consume on the internet.

The group evaluated 7,804 student responses to 56 media-related tasks in 12 states. The goal was not to ask participants to make murky distinctions about the best answers to questions. Instead, the group set a series of what they believed to be reasonable benchmarks: For middle schoolers, the hope was that they’d be able to distinguish between a news story and an advertisement. The researchers hoped that high school students reading about gun laws would notice that the origin of a chart was a political action committee for gun owners.

And by the time students reach college, the researchers thought, they should look askance at a website with a “.org” URL that focused on just one side of a contentious subject.

“But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” the researchers wrote in 2016, when the first results were published. Over 80 percent of the 203 middle schoolers surveyed believed that native advertising—even when labeled “sponsored content”—was a legitimate news story. The high schoolers, meanwhile, were asked to examine a website on the minimum wage that included links to news articles published by the Times; the site was managed by the Employment Policies Institute, which self-identified as nonpartisan. Only 9 percent of students enrolled in an Advanced Placement

history course could correctly identify the group as a front for a conservative DC-based lobbying firm. (A quick Google search of the organization’s name pulls up several trustworthy results identifying it as such.)

Later, 25 undergraduates at Stanford were asked to spend 10 minutes examining two websites: that of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a trusted group with an 88-year history, and one for the American College of Pediatricians, a fringe organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group for its stance linking homosexuality to pedophilia. The students were asked to determine which site was more credible. More than half chose the American College of Pediatricians and, even among those who selected the AAP, most spent their time on the organizations’ websites; they failed to venture out and independently investigate details about the groups before making a judgment.

News outlets have lamented a decline in trust from adult readers, but kids, unable to

Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School

Moses Brown School

CLASS Digital Journalism

CLASS American History and Global Thinking

AGE LEVEL High school

AGE LEVEL Middle school

LESSON PLAN Students learn how to

LESSON PLAN This history class includes a section on the origins of news.

ON THE SYLLABUS “The danger of a single story,” a 2009 TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; the 2001 documentary Promises, which looks at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the eyes of seven children.

TEACHABLE MOMENT “I encourage my students to ask what makes a source credible, and who are the authors, and also to look into aspects like Google search optimization,” Jonathan Gold, the teacher, says.

Providence, Rhode Island

Chicago, Illinois

differentiate between propaganda, fact, and opinion. In a weekly current-events quiz, students are tested on how well they can differentiate fact from fiction.

ON THE SYLLABUS The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune; news sites like The Chicago Defender, The Root, and The Grio.

TEACHABLE MOMENT “Journalism isn’t just about developing questions. It is about being curious about your community and working collaboratively to find answers through credible sources,” David Teeghman, the teacher, says.

—Zainab Sultan

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reliably interpret information online, don’t engage with credible journalistic outlets either. In December, a Knight Foundation survey of high school students found sharp drops in teen news consumption: just 14 percent of high schoolers said they “often” watch their local TV news stations, compared to 30 percent in 2016; 12 percent reported watching cable news often, a fall from 26 percent.

Even engagement with news on social media, where teenagers spend hours daily, dipped from 51 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2018. The proportion of respondents who said they “hardly ever” share news articles on their time lines jumped from 53 percent to 64.

Eighty-one percent said they hardly ever talk about news at all.

There are numerous ways to teach media literacy, and Hobbs says many teachers rely on resources like the New York Times Learning Network, which provides grade-appropriate lesson plans for teachers looking to use the day’s paper in their classrooms. Some approaches focus on teaching kids to identify the genre, author, and source of information in order to categorize articles on a continuum from fallacious to credible. Another method, created by librarians at the Association for College and Research Libraries, advises that media literacy (they call it information literacy) focus on six core frameworks, including “Authority Is Constructed and Contextual”

and “Information Has Value.”

But the most effective programs, according to Hobbs, take up media literacy not merely as a set of skills—how to spot a fake headline or fact check an article—but as a sensibility that must be taught, nurtured, and practiced.

“One of the dispositions teachers complain about is intellectual curiosity,” Hobbs tells me. “Ironically, they have a powerful search engine at their fingertips, but kids have difficulty generating questions.”

At schools without the resources that Ross has—which is to say, nearly every other school—taking a holistic, long-term view of media literacy can be an unaffordable luxury. Access to curricula costs money and time, and public schools are bound by state requirements that private schools have leverage to ignore. Particularly for students living in under-resourced districts in cities or rural areas, there isn’t likely to be a whole lot of room for experimentation and unique elective coursework of the sort students at Ross enjoy.

Still, Hobbs insists that private, moneyed schools are not the only places meaningful media literacy education can happen. She points to the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a public school in Bensonhurst for gifted elementary and middle school students, which partnered with Rhys Daunic’s The Media Spot to integrate media literacy into the curriculum. Classes led by Amanda Murphy, a social-studies teacher at Rhode Island’s

M AT T H E W S E P T I M U S

The most effective programs take up media literacy not as a set of skills—how to spot a fake headline or fact check an article— but as a sensibility that must be taught, nurtured, and practiced.

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Westerly High, are among the most impressive Hobbs has seen, thanks to Murphy’s integration of media literacy concepts. In Philadelphia, Mighty Writers, an after-school workshop for public-school kids, offers sessions on fake news that make use of tools like Snopes and Checkology, a partnership between the News Literacy Project and the Facebook Journalism Project. Teenagers dissect memes, discuss where they get their news (or don’t) and why, and hear from journalists on how they conduct investigations.

But once kids learn to be skeptical of what they read online, everything can be thrown into question. At a recent workshop in Philadelphia, a clever boy asked the instructor, “How do you monitor Snopes? If they’ve told the truth before, they could slip in a lie without you noticing.”

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he pressure on children to question all they see can be overwhelming. The same feelings of burnout and disillusionment that adults have reported while following the news over the past several years have affected kids, too. Especially when it comes to the fake news that fills their phones, the idea that they might not be able to trust is a heavy burden to carry, Gansky explains.

“As much as they like to perform being adults, man, you can hit just a couple of pressure points and they go, ‘I don’t like being in the deep end. What do you want me to know?’ ” Students pick up on the declining faith in major news organizations. “A couple years ago, when I began teaching, calling the New York Times the paper of record raised no eyebrows,” Gansky says. But the polarization of politics—and of news consumption—has changed that. “Now I think students are dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance where they go, ‘God, everything has to be interrogated; there’s no stable referent here.’

How many betwixt-and-between conversations can they deal with before you have to draw a line in the sand and say this can be empirically proven, and this seems like supposition or speculation? And are there very, very clear ways that we can tell those two apart?”

The types of news media that Ross students consume vary widely, and international students bring a range of perspectives. An

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“When are we going to talk about something happy in this class?”

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assumption of belief in the existence—and necessity—of a free press can’t be taken for granted. “My Chinese students present a really different scenario,” Gansky says of his e-commerce pupils. “They will say, ‘Well, we know that everything is fabricated by our state.’ So my job is to say, hey, there are certain things that we can tell are true, and if you follow these steps in terms of basic research you can start to tease out whether this thing has legs or not. For them, it’s working through their immediate cynicism.”

American students “are usually the worst” at judging the credibility of information found online, Gansky tells me. “They are so confident in their abilities to tell what’s true and what’s not that they often don’t do the basic research. They’ll just trust their emotions.”

German students, he adds, tend to be good at spotting where the truth has been stretched.

When all of these backgrounds come together in a classroom, teaching can be complicated. During a lesson on Airbnb and Uber as disruptive technologies, the e-commerce class sifted through news articles, academic reports, and op-eds offering divergent viewpoints on the two companies. The frustration of the class, Gansky recalls, led to “a mutiny.” He explains: “They were saying that the data didn’t stack up and they didn’t know what I want them to get from this.

What’s the multiple-choice answer? What do you want from me? You’re my sense of authority.”

He was honest with them. “I share your confusion and I share your fear about what might be true and what isn’t,” Gansky remembers telling the class. “ ‘What you guys are feeling is not just an 11thgrade problem. It’s a problem that adults are having.’ That is kind of refreshing for them.”

Ross has long looked for ways to bring current events into the media curriculum in real time. In the past several years, the tone of the news seems to have become grimmer—sexual assault, mass shootings, war, family separations, racist comments from the White House—and even though Ross students come across as particularly savvy, they are still children. Maciak recalls the sense of despair her class felt after spending several weeks engaged in news media. “Many kids would react by saying, ‘This is incredibly depressing. When are we going to talk about something happy in this class? I just want to shut this off,’ ” she says.

When the content of the news is inherently age-inappropriate, how do you bring it into the classroom in a responsible way?

That question was put to the test in late September, as the country geared up for a contentious confirmation hearing: Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee who was credibly accused of sexual assault, was set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about allegations made against him by Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor from California who knew him when they were teenagers.

The Ross Academic Council—made up of administrators and teachers, including Gansky—met to consider how best to approach the event. Should they round up the students, sit them in the gym in front of a television, and screen the hearing? Gansky says there were concerns about plunging them into the deep end without the necessary context. Did the students, especially those from abroad, sufficiently understand the nuances of the Supreme Court and its

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history with allegations of sexual abuse?

Were they prepared to discuss a woman’s assault with sensitivity and maturity? As for the faculty, could they handle the trauma that such a conversation might evoke in students?

“Some felt that 11th and 12th graders could handle it, but middle schoolers had barely gotten to sex education,” Gansky recalls.

“Middle school teachers said, ‘We don’t feel comfortable bringing this into the classroom.

We haven’t done enough groundwork.’ ” Gansky had discussed related news stories in his classes. His students had learned of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, and when they arrived at school talking about it, Gansky assigned reading from the Times and The New Yorker to facilitate a class discussion about the allegations. At the time of the Kavanaugh hearing, Gansky says, “I was really hoping to pair up with a history teacher so they’d get some understanding of the judiciary and I could explain how the narrative was instructed by news media.”

The council, which makes recommendations to the head of the school, decided against a mandatory Ross-wide screening of the hearing, advising instead that teachers make case-by-case decisions based on student preparedness and age. The hearing was, of course, a spectacle, lasting eight hours; afterward, Gansky wanted to let his students decide whether they would discuss it in class. The topic was clearly on their minds, but Gansky says the group, perhaps uncomfortable with the subject matter, opted for business as usual.

Still, the lessons they’d been learning helped them process the events of the day—and would stand them in good stead for those yet to come. In November, for instance, Beeton voted for the first time. “If I read something and I don’t think that it’s the full truth, then I’ll ask someone about it, or look it up online, or find a different article about it,” he says. “I think this e-commerce class and the 11th-grade media class helped everyone who took them get to a place where we can critically question or analyze information. Not to a point where we’re constantly distrusting of the news, but we know how to question and we know where to look.” cjr

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On Video To learn more about the media literacy program at Ross, visit cjr.org.

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‘Is It Journalism?’ VOX POPULI

Nine people from across the country, chosen at random on the streets of New York, weigh in on the minds and methods that make the news Interviews and photographs by Nicole Craine

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STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Justin Foster, 36 Charlotte, North Carolina

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It’s hard for me to believe much of anything that’s on TV or in the news. I guess there is some truth in the fake news.

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How do you feel about anonymous sourcing?

“Anonymous” means you’re speaking the truth, you’re just not willing to put your name and face out there. I think anonymous would be more truthful than people who come out and say certain things just because they want to get the TV exposure.

Elaine Rodriguez, 24 Union City, New Jersey

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Mariel Crespo, 24 Barceloneta, Puerto Rico

Emanuelle Coimbre, 32 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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mariel  

Why does a person want to share something and not give their name? What’s the fun in that?

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Aladdin Dimagnaliw, 22 Queens, New York

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What do you think journalists do?

A whole bunch of investigations, a whole bunch of interviews, getting information that normal people usually can’t get.

What do you think could change about the news?

Taking out the fluff. Adding more real stories, less on celebrity gossip and stuff like that.

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John Bigolski, 34 Ruth Tucker, 38 Brooklyn, New York

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ruth

I work for the city in an investigative capacity, and a lot of times I read articles about my work and it’s completely way off. I can tell they’re just sort of googling something. It’s just a lazy investigation, reprinting what they read everywhere else, instead of going out and pounding the pavement.

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I would go with my local news over national. National is a lot of bogus information. Local is a lot of bogus as well, but I feel like I get more information locally. It keeps me in tune with the shootings, the violence that occurs.

Stephanie Parks, 29 Bossier City, Louisiana

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Ryan Lamb, 25 Cleveland, Ohio

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I’m on social media— that’s where I get my news—so whatever I’m following. . . if I don’t like what I’m seeing, I just unfollow.

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A partisan site in Alabama exploits trust in local news

ONLINE READING

As You Like It

AUTHOR

Lauren Smiley ILLUSTRATOR

Dadu Shin

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ebra Bearden, a real estate agent in Mount Olive, Alabama, wants her news right down the middle. “Just tell me the facts,” she says.

She considers herself right of center politically—a CNN and Fox watcher, never MSNBC (“They’re a bunch of loonies over there”). Not long ago, she went on Facebook to dis AL.com, the major statewide news outlet in Alabama, for failing to meet her standards. “AL dot com has not been a reliable news source for many years,” she wrote. Bearden didn’t type her critique on the AL.com page—she doesn’t follow the site on Facebook—but on a post from something called Yellowhammer News. The Yellowhammer post urged readers to “reject” AL.com, and many commenters complied, calling it “fake news.” Someone posted an emoji of applauding hands.

Bearden, who is 56, stopped subscribing to The Birmingham News before 2012, when Advance Local (owned by the Newhouse family, whose portfolio also includes Portland’s Oregonian, Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, and Condé Nast) merged it with three other publications into a “digital first” outfit called Alabama Media Group, known simply as AL.com. Even if you don’t know the details, you know the story:

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As it becomes harder to pinpoint the sources of the information that fills our social feeds, it also becomes more difficult to distinguish between those sources on the basis of credibility, bent, or attachment.

hundreds of reporters were laid off, the newspapers became bureaus, and the print schedule was reduced from seven days a week to three.

When I arrived in Birmingham, seeking to better understand the media scene there, the staunch AL.com reader working the desk at the Ramada Inn told me, “Nobody gets the newspaper anymore.

Memaw and Pepaw get it delivered.”

Bearden’s reasons for bailing were more ideological. “I just got tired of reading one-handed stories,” she tells me. “It’s gotten to where they want you to believe what they believe.” Asked for an example, she says that AL.com won’t point out when a crime suspect is an undocumented immigrant—Bearden considers this to be editing the truth to fit an agenda. (In fact, many AL.com articles do identify crime suspects as such.) But the criticism that the site is “liberal” is one that editors there are used to hearing. Its op-ed writers span the political spectrum, and in 2016 the editorial board joined the vast majority of American newspapers in endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, casting AL.com as a voice of minority opinion in a state with a Republican-run legislature. Donald Trump went on to nab 62 percent of votes.

Yellowhammer, on the other hand, was among the first outlets in Alabama to court Trump. In August 2015, Cliff Sims, the site’s founder and former CEO, invited him onto Yellowhammer’s radio show and gushed, “I love what you’re saying.” Trump told Sims he was “a big believer in the Bible” and said, “I go out of my way to use the word ‘Christmas.’ ” Sims started Yellow Hammer Politics, named after Alabama’s state bird, in 2011, soon after Republicans won a supermajority in

the statehouse (Sims had been an adviser on one of the races). He incorporated Yellowhammer Multimedia two years later, while continuing to work as a political consultant. Soon, he moved the company into the former headquarters of The Birmingham Age-Herald, a historic Beaux Arts building with hip antique decor, with the help of funds supplied by Yellowhammer’s co-owners: Tim Howe and John Ross, a pair of conservative political consultants with clients in the highest reaches of state government.

Both are former directors of the Alabama Republican Party. Yellowhammer’s branding, on its homepage and on Facebook, made it out to be a news site. The email newsletter is clearer: “You’ll now receive a daily dose of news, analysis and opinion from the conservative perspective you’ve been looking for in Alabama.”

Howe, now the editor, tells me, “In Alabama, there was something we tapped into with ideology. There’s a perception that the more traditional newspapers and news outlets were left-leaning. We wanted to talk about Alabama, and everything interesting in Alabama, in a way that the majority of

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Alabamians would be receptive to.”

Bearden, as a casual reader who “liked” Yellowhammer by clicking through Facebook, noticed that its writers were sometimes rightleaning. But she never pieced together that Yellowhammer’s mission is conservative news, or that it is owned by (now former) Republican lobbyists, or that its contributors also work for Breitbart (though there’s no formal relationship between the two sites, they say). She was unaware that last year, Yellowhammer raked in more than $185,000 in advertising and in-kind donations from political action committees and political campaigns—all Republican—dwarfing Alabama Media Group’s $38,000. (“If you’re a Republican in Alabama, especially if you’re running statewide, you definitely want to consider getting ad space or some coverage from Yellowhammer so those readers know who you are,” Jeff Elrod, a Republican campaign strategist and a college friend of Sims’s, tells me.) Bearden didn’t know that Sims went to work for the Trump White House, as a communications aide, or that when the job didn’t last, he wrote a book about the experience, which came out this winter, called Team of Vipers. (In it, he crows about a run-in with Steve Bannon, described as a Yellowhammer fan: “The Hammer!? Epic,” Bannon is quoted as saying.) “I just thought it was a newspaper,” Bearden tells me.

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hat’s fine by Yellowhammer, one of a spate of sites attempting to extend the partisan journalism landscape into local news, with many of the trappings of a traditional newspaper—real reporting included.

“It’s just a microcosm of a macro phenomenon,” Allison Ross—the publisher, and wife of John—tells me on a gray December morning at a Red Cat Coffee House in Birmingham.

We’re in an upscale district of converted warehouses; a young customer helpfully advises me not to squash the insect ambling across my laptop screen (“It’s a stinkbug”).

“In this age,” Ross continues, “there are so many sources of information that now you have to figure out your niche and fiercely sow that. That’s the only way to be successful in media now.”

Ross, who is 40, is polished: squared-off eyeglasses, turquoise shift dress, ankle boots.

To meet me this morning, she has driven her white SUV from Memphis, where she now lives, running Yellowhammer from afar.

Howe, having come up from Montgomery, sits across from her. He is 44, in a nice suit and leather boots that peek out from under his pant legs.

For a while, the company kept its benefactors’ identities under wraps. Otherwise, “Cliff would have no credibility to stand on,” Ross explains. “Everybody would have assumed he was slanted.” The truth came out as a scoop in a 2014 report by Eddie Curran, an independent investigative journalist, who published a leaked email between Sims and Howe. But the story wasn’t much of a surprise. Many in the state’s reporting ranks—as well as observers on Twitter—have persistently argued that Yellowhammer is too entwined with the Republican Party to be properly considered a news outlet. When I relay that to Ross, she doesn’t miss a beat: “Wouldn’t you say 67 percent of Alabamians are cozy with the Republican Party?” she asks. “You can choose which way you want to focus: Are we cozy with the Republican Party, or are we cozy with our audience? I’m arguing the latter.”

Yellowhammer has found acolytes on that most successful of online echo chambers: Facebook, with 100,000 followers. That may be a fraction of AL.com’s total (about 728,000), but it’s greater than the number who “like” any of its three consolidated newspapers—the Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times, the Mobile Press-Register— or The Montgomery Advertiser, owned by Gannett. All of these outlets recognize that social media has decontextualized traditional news, creating a flattening effect that puts investigative journalism on the same plane as listicles, memes, and phony stories. That has provided an opportunity not only for publishers peddling clickbait, but also for those with subtler ideological approaches to delivering news and opinion. As it becomes harder to identify the sources of the information that fills our social feeds, it also becomes more difficult to distinguish between those sources on the basis of credibility, bent, or attachment.

Suspicion of mainstream-media bias can darken the “sharing” prospects of legitimate reporting and let partisan material sneak into the sights of readers like Bearden, who in

Who Shares What?

Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center examined the Twitter activity of 44,074 users who had retweeted Trump or Clinton in the 18 months before the 2016 elections, analyzing which news sources they shared. A primary finding was that people retweeting centrist and liberal sources tended to cite a wide array of mainstream news outlets, and the false information in their midst tended to get fact checked before it had a chance to blow up. Conservatives, on the other hand, were siloed in a media bubble where falsehoods were repeated and went unchecked.

The research was focused on national media, but Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, pulled data on local outlets for CJR. Those in blue-leaning areas—Madison.com, in Wisconsin, and the Hartford Courant, in Connecticut—were more frequently tweeted by Clinton supporters. The Dallas NBC affiliate and Sunshine State News, a conservative site in Florida, were heavily retweeted by people who retweeted Trump. In Alabama, AL.com’s retweeters skewed mildly toward Clinton; Yellowhammer’s were in Trump’s camp. The sample size was small, Roberts says, though if you burrow down into the media “likes” of some of Yellowhammer’s Facebook commenters, you’ll encounter people who follow conservative media exclusively, from Fox to Breitbart. —Lauren Smiley

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outlets like Yellowhammer find coverage that reflects—and reinforces—their views.

Al Cross, who heads the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, has observed the growth of sites like Yellowhammer for years—an era, not coincidentally, of cutbacks to local coverage. In the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center, newsroom employment fell by nearly a quarter; since 2017, more than a third of the largest US newspapers have made staff cuts. “Outlets like this are filling the gaps,” Cross says. “But I’m afraid the audience isn’t always aware it’s from a certain perspective.” He doesn’t see a new trend so much as an old one, harking back to the early days of American journalism, when papers were openly partisan (Horace Greeley’s Whig organ, the New-York Tribune; the incendiary broadsheets of the Reconstruction-era South; the warring dailies in large towns, one on the right, the other on the left). The ethics of objectivity emerged as an alternative, through the formation of the Associated Press, in 1846, which provided politically neutral stories to appear in papers of every stripe, and the vow of The New York Times, in 1896, “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” The Federal Communications Commission established the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, requiring TV and radio to broadcast contrasting sides of a story on matters of public importance. That policy was scrapped in 1987, enabling the rise of punditry. “We’re reverting,” Cross says, “to a bad old form.”

Is Yellowhammer masquerading as news, or is it what Howe says it is: an authentic (if retro) style of journalism designed to suit consumers in a conservative market?

Many of the site’s articles make its political position clear: some mercilessly criticize AL.com; others chime in predictably on the happenings in the statehouse; a review of the stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird playing on Broadway is passive-aggressive (“It is not an indictment of modern-day Alabama, nor of conservatives or who conservatives elect. Given American pop culture. . . that’s saying something”).

Yet a reader will find that not all of Yellowhammer’s dispatches are nakedly partisan. It runs AP stories, and Sean Ross,

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Is Yellowhammer masquerading as news, or is it an authentic (if retro) style of journalism designed to suit consumers in a conservative market?

the site’s most prolific writer, often deploys a straight-news tone in his reports. There’s also a steady drip of feel-good Alabama coverage with no obvious political angle: a pickle company moving production to the state, Alabama college football, a video feature in which an interviewer asks passersby, “What is Christmas?” Yellowhammer has paid to boost political stories on Facebook, and Allison Ross says she does the same to spread these lighter pieces, aiming to bring in an audience beyond political junkies.

What’s more, there has been some substantial journalism. Leada Gore, a reporter for AL.com who has covered Yellowhammer, tells me, “To Cliff ’s credit, he’s an excellent marketer. It came at the right time; it was slick.”

(Sims declined to comment for this piece.)

There have been moments, Gore adds, when “I’d look at Yellowhammer and say, ‘Dadgum, I wish I had that story.’ ” In the spring of 2016, for instance, Sims published a tip from “multiple confidential sources inside of state government” that Robert Bentley, the governor of Alabama—and a Republican—had left his home after arguing with his wife about an affair he’d been having with a political aide,

and had driven to his beach house on the Gulf of Mexico. Bentley realized he’d left his wallet behind, Sims reported, and ordered that the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency helicopter it to him—which it did. John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for AL.com, would later commend Yellowhammer for the scoop, calling it “one of the most jaw-dropping bits of the puzzle” in covering a fiasco that led to Bentley’s resignation.

Cross, however, remains unimpressed by sites like Yellowhammer. “That’s not the way you should do journalism,” he says. “They’re presenting material in a way that is journalistic, without acknowledging or being plain about where they’re coming from.”

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t’s telling that, when Russian disinformation agents of the Internet Research Agency created Twitter profiles to meddle in US politics, they often chose names that sounded like local newspapers: @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews, @Seattle_Post. Many of the agents had played the game for years, posting legitimate local news to build a following before they were caught by Twitter

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and axed. Homespun disinformation threats have done the same: during the 2016 election season, a man from the Los Angeles suburbs named Jestin Coler created several Facebook accounts to pump out fake news meant to discredit Hillary Clinton—for profit—and ultimately built a website called the Denver Guardian. “I had studied what methods people use to debunk fake news,” Coler said at a 2017 conference hosted by NewsWhip, a firm that tracks social-media engagement.

“So I built the Denver Guardian, which is the evolution of where this is going next. It featured a lot of local news. It looked just like a local newspaper.” Local media, more attuned to the particulars of readers’ lives and the cogs of community government than to sweeping dogma, tend to be considered more trustworthy than national outlets. According to a recent Poynter survey, the difference is about 20 percentage points.

Yellowhammer is merely a relatively mature example of the attempts to create alternative local news outlets that capitalize on America’s media polarization where it dovetails with community news credibility.

And as local newsrooms continue to be wiped out, other untested publishers are rushing into the void.

One is Kentucky Today, started in 2015 by the Kentucky Baptist Convention, the association for the state’s Southern Baptist churches.

Beyond its stand-alone website, Kentucky Today functions as a wire service—providing articles about state politics to some 15 local newspapers as a free alternative to a pricey AP subscription—and it recently launched a radio program offering state news for local stations to pick up. The site is edited by Roger Alford, a former AP reporter who also serves as the Baptist Convention’s communications director; he hired a handful of journalists away from mainstream newsrooms. In a state where more than one in four people identify as evangelical Baptists, Kentucky Today has amassed a Facebook following of 15,000.

Its homepage discloses that its mission is to serve readers of faith, though its Facebook “about” page claims that the outlet’s stories have caught on with “conservatives of every kind, from every corner of the state.” The op-ed page runs predictably conservative— and includes a vertical on church affairs—yet

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Alford insists that his state politics reporter “plays it right down the middle.”

Not everyone agrees. Speculation abounds, for instance, as to the site’s benefactors: Kentucky Today launched around the time Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican, entered office. No friend of journalists—he regularly ignores press inquiries and once referred to a reporter who challenged him as “#PeepingTom” on Twitter—Bevin granted a one-on-one interview to Kentucky Today, which graded his first year as an A-plus.

(Bevin, in a 2017 speech, offered this media criticism: “With all due respect to what now passes for traditional media, it’s dying for a reason.”) Alford denies that he has received funding from Bevin or the Republican Party, saying that the site takes money from the Baptist Convention and received a $300,000 donation from a “gentleman” in rural western Kentucky only “known to the director of the Kentucky Baptist Foundation,” the fundraising arm of the church.

To the south, in early 2017, Michael Patrick Leahy, a Breitbart contributor; Steve Gill, a hard-line conservative talk show host; and Christina Botteri, a Tea Party activist, launched The Tennessee Star. Their site, which has 12,000 Facebook followers, covers state politics from a Tea Party perspective and offers workshops that, as Leahy wrote to me in an email, “help parents raise children who believe in America.” They have a business office in Nashville; there are writers, but no newsroom. Leahy says the site is supported entirely by advertising from local companies that endorse their limitedgovernment view. They received a “six-figure equity investment” in August, he tells me— from a “for-profit private investor group,” the details of which he won’t share—to establish similar websites in 17 swing states that Leahy says will decide the 2020 election. Each site will be a state “bureau” with local newspaper branding and cross-posting on “Battleground State News,” an upstream aggregator. So far, Leahy and Gill have hired seven contributing reporters; The Ohio Star and The Minnesota Sun are live.

The Facebook numbers for the newer sites are fairly paltry. “Ultimately, Facebook, in our view, promotes a partisan, Far Left Democrat agenda,” Leahy tells me. In reality, Facebook

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“With all due respect to what now passes for traditional media, it’s dying for a reason.”

has been entirely accommodating of conservative posts, and executives have even made overtures to Republican leaders; furthermore, any page can self-identify as a news site. Last fall, Facebook started an index to register legitimate news outlets, an effort that has, to date, rolled out only to a small portion of the English-language market. The company defines “news” as sites with bylined and time-stamped stories that cite sources and don’t rely on user-generated or aggregated material. Yet setting parameters is difficult, Facebook executives have admitted, when news goes from merely shamelessly slanted to straight-up disinformation, and the company relies on third-party fact checkers (FactCheck. org, PolitiFact) to debunk untruths. Sites shown to be disseminating falsehoods get a lower ranking in the news feed. Facebook has also launched a feature to give readers more context on sources in the news feed: an “i” button that, when clicked, shows the site’s Wikipedia description (Yellowhammer’s calls it a “conservative site”), how long it’s been on Facebook, and a sampling of other recent articles by the publisher.

Campbell Brown, the head of global news partnerships at Facebook, has acknowledged

that local news may present unique challenges. “There are lots of new organizations cropping up on the local level, and some of them may have an agenda as opposed to the more traditional news outlets,” she told CJR in a recent interview. But when it comes to ideology, in Facebook’s latest forays into local media—including its “Accelerator,” which aims to help local newsrooms boost their subscribers—she said, “We didn’t really think about that.”

Conservatives are not the only ones going the partisan local news route. As alt-weeklies, the left flank’s traditional challenge to mainstream dailies, crumble, new outlets are emerging online. The Greenville Gazette, run by two sisters in South Carolina, according to its “about” page, has accumulated an estimable 719,000 followers on Facebook by posting apolitical clickbait interspersed with liberal-pleasing political memes, often with links to Amazon pages selling Trump troll dolls and toilet paper emblazoned with an angry Trump face. (The site didn’t respond to CJR’s request for comment.) Shareblue Media, run by liberal activists who pump news pieces into social networks, maintains a local news vertical.

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Holly McCall, a prominent member of the Tennessee Democratic Party, recently called for a Star-like mouthpiece on her side.

Quoted on a local blog, she said, “We need a full service digital shop to compete with the other party, we need to be creating our own original content. There’s a publication called the Tennessee Star that represents the right very well. Now, I don’t agree with anything they say, but I think they do an excellent job of representing the views of the far-right conservatives, and we don’t have anything like that.” Leahy sent the quote to me as a sign that he and his cohort are gaining traction. Soon after, I learned that McCall’s wish had already been granted, sort of: in the wake of the 2018 midterms, a Facebook page called “Sounds Like Tennessee,” focused on local news, was revealed to be the work of News for Democracy, a group funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire baron of LinkedIn, who has committed to backing liberal causes. (Facebook is investigating the page, along with 13 others News for Democracy helped create.)

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or Yellowhammer, sometimes being partisan presents its own internal conflicts. In 2015, Elizabeth BeShears—a recent college graduate who had worked for the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, and Citizens for Media Accountability, a site with Yellowhammer connections that covered press bias—became an editor of Yellowhammer, and ran up against political walls. BeShears, who says her politics are socially libertarian and fiscally conservative, claims she was directed not to publish a profile she’d written of Jonathan McConnell, a primary challenger to Richard Shelby, the incumbent Republican US senator. “Cliff Sims told me not to run it,” she recalls.

Soon after, she quit Yellowhammer and joined the McConnell campaign. It wasn’t until the election was over (Shelby won) that BeShears saw federal filings showing that Shelby’s campaign had spent $10,000 on Yellowhammer ads and $459,431 on the lobbying firm of Howe and Ross.

After Sims left to work for Trump (he also sold his stake in Yellowhammer), Howe and Ross sought to replace him and

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eventually hired J. Pepper Bryars and Rachel Bryars, conservative writers, as chief editors.

But Pepper, who calls himself a National Review–style conservative, disagreed with management over Roy Moore—the US Senate candidate who allegedly sexually assaulted minors—writing in a column that Moore was a liar. In an editorial by Howe and Ross, Yellowhammer officially endorsed Moore, and its Instagram urged any conservative who had a problem with him to simply vote for a straight Republican ticket to avoid having to check the box by Moore’s name. With two months remaining on a twelve-month contract, the Bryarses left. Howe quit lobbying, he says, and has since dedicated himself to Yellowhammer full-time. John and Allison Ross moved to Memphis; Allison is now a co-owner of Yellowhammer and John works for a medical supply company, Preferred Medical Systems, of which Greg Reed, the State Senate majority leader, is executive vice president.

In Birmingham, I meet John Hammontree, a hometown boy and editor of AL.com’s “indepth team.” Wearing stylish horn-rims, he shows me around the Birmingham News office and its hall of archival photographs documenting the city’s 1960s civil rights battles.

Those were exciting days for politics and journalism in Birmingham. Evidence of the paper’s diminished status isn’t hard to find; even remaining subscribers have expressed disappointment—delivery only three days a week means they can’t get the Friday high school football scores until Sunday. “The team just continues to do the best they can with the resources we have,” Hammontree says. We walk in search of coffee. As for partisanship, he explains, “I think the idea that Alabama votes Republican, and thus Alabama news should only reflect a conservative viewpoint, is a way of silencing dissent. It’s not a way of giving people legitimate news.” Still, he adds of Yellowhammer, “I don’t think we would ever want to silence them. We would just want them to do their jobs better.”

Derision for AL.com was baked into Yellowhammer’s editorial mission—Sims routinely called it an “Alabama sports website and liberal political blog,” a line Yellowhammer continues to trot out today— and op-ed writers persistently mention “fake

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news” that they claim to spot on AL.com.

Some readers parrot Yellowhammer’s slights.

Henry Yearwood, an IT worker in northern Alabama, regularly trolls AL.com on Twitter. (“Thank God Yellowhammer news is gaining strength. There has to be an alternate news source to leftist Alabama Media Group,” he tweeted in October, later appending the barbed observation that Yellowhammer is “locally founded and funded at this time.”)

Does Hammontree worry what might happen, at an already troubled time for local newsrooms, if readers slide over to Yellowhammer entirely? “If the mainstream press weren’t out breaking news stories then I don’t think Yellowhammer would have anything to write about, other than whatever Republican talking points they get emailed to them each morning,” he tells me.

Yellowhammer faces its own challenges, chief among them being the fact that in January 2018 changes were made to Facebook’s algorithm that would make it harder for news organizations of all kinds to promote their work. But Allison Ross says her team is focused on other moneymakers: sponsored posts and banner ads that run on the site, app, and daily newsletter; an hourly news update in syndication across more than 35 stations in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle; and a weekly show on YouTube.

Yellowhammer hosts sponsored live newsmaker events and ticketed awards dinners (mostly for Republican movers and shakers) and hawks merchandise branded with its bird logo.

In the past year, Ross says, she’s fielded calls from others interested in replicating Yellowhammer’s model. It’s simple, she tells them, though that doesn’t mean it’s easy: “Respect your audience, serve them, diversify your revenue.” Recently, she entered a partnership with Y’all Politics, a conservative site covering Mississippi. Ross is also talking to two or three other outlets about business agreements in places where Republicans “feel like the conservative footprint is at risk,” she explains. “Battlegrounds, or some of them used to be battlegrounds but are trending blue.” Given Yellowhammer’s track record, she sees an opportunity to “take the secret sauce on the road.” cjr

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MY S ID E OF THE STORY

Qasim Rashid Muslim Scholar

In 2015, when two Muslims committed a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, media outlets and politicians jumped to label the event an instance of “radical Islam.” Two years later, when a Christian pastor in San Bernardino brutally murdered his wife, media obsessed over how he had been such a loving husband. No one asked how the pastor was radicalized.

When journalism amplifies violent and false stereotypes, it fails the public and provides fodder for governments to discriminate against the marginalized. Media propaganda played a significant role in justifying the 2003 Iraq War—which has since led to the murder of an estimated 500,000-plus civilians, the rise of Daesh, and ongoing drone warfare—all on false pretenses. Credulous coverage was widespread; rare dissenters, as The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote, “didn’t pierce the compliant noise from their peers.”

A study of New York Times headlines published from 1990 to 2014 determined that more than half related to Islam were negative references. Many headlines associated “Muslim” and “Islam” with words like “rebels” and “militant”; subjects such as “alcohol” and “cancer” were framed with positive terms more frequently, while less than 10 percent of Islam-related headlines were positive.

The study’s authors concluded that a Times reader “is likely to assign collective responsibility to Islam/Muslims for the violent actions of a few.” One can only imagine what role this plays in America’s record highs in anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes.

Qasim Rashid is an attorney, author, and Truman National Security Fellow.

He’s a former Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Islamic Studies Program and has published extensively on domestic and international human rights.

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Life in a News Desert The proliferation of news deserts in the United States has been welldocumented, including by CJR. But what are their effects? How is life in a news desert any different from life in the rest of the country? We worked with the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism’s Expanding News Desert project to identify ten counties across the country where no general news publication exists. Then, using statistics from the US Census Bureau and elsewhere, we compared living conditions in these news deserts with national averages. The results, as you’ll see, provide new reason to worry about the death of local news.

1

2

3

4

News Deserts vs. National Average

5

Poverty Rate +4.71%

National Average High School Grad Rate -1.19%

Median Household Income -13.2%

Broadband Access College -9.12% Grad Rate -10.17%

6 DATA COMPILED BY

Design by Darrel Frost

Amanda Darrach Andrew McCormick Zainab Sultan

NEWS DESERTS

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2

3

4

5

TREASURE COUNTY, MONTANA The last weekly paper, the Hysham Echo, closed in 2015. Home to fewer than 1,000 people, Treasure is Montana’s second least populous county.

FREMONT COUNTY, IDAHO The weekly Fremont County Herald-Chronicle closed in 2003.

The economy of the county (pop.

13,000) is predominantly agricultural, supplemented by tourism to Yellowstone National Park.

MCPHERSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA The last weekly paper, the Tryon Graphic, closed in 2009. With a population of just 499 in 2017, McPherson is the eighth least populous county in the United States.

COLFAX COUNTY, NEW MEXICO The Raton Range closed in 2013. The county, 12,000-strong, was once an important coal-mining area, but today it is home to numerous outdoor recreation areas and ski resorts.

COCHRAN COUNTY, TEXAS The last weekly paper, the Morton Tribune, closed in 2011. Across the state line from New Mexico, Cochran is home to about 2,900 Texans, and agriculture dominates.

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Median Household Income

Poverty Rate

High School Grad Rate

4-Year College Grad Rate

Broadband Access

vs. nat’l. avg. of $57,652

vs. nat’l. avg. of 12.3%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 87.3%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 30.9%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 78.1%

$42,454

11.7%

93.6%

23.1%

64.4%

$51,806

13.2%

87.9%

21.1%

75.4%

$60,714

12.7%

90.1%

25.2%

62%

$33,042

19.8%

88.6%

20.5%

62.6%

$37,500

24.8%

66.4%

56.3% 10.5%

National Average

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6

7

8

9

10

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BETHEL CENSUS AREA, ALASKA The last weekly paper, the Tundra Drums, closed in 2011. The region (Alaska does not have counties) is roughly the size of Kentucky and home to 18,000 people.

ORLEANS COUNTY, NEW YORK The last daily paper, the JournalRegister, closed in 2014. The county, home to 41,000 New Yorkers, is largely made up of farmland, along the banks of the Erie Canal.

UNION COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA The last weekly paper, the Mifflinburg Telegraph, closed in 2014. The county’s population approached 45,000 in 2017, and its largest town, Lewisburg, is home to Bucknell University.

PUTNAM COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA The last weekly paper, the Putnam Standard, closed in 2015. Home to about 57,000, Putnam is one of seven counties that compose the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area, a region known for metalworking and heavy industry.

KENTON COUNTY, KENTUCKY The last daily paper, the Kentucky Post, closed in 2007; the last weekly paper, the Erlanger Recorder, closed in 2013.

Kenton, with a population of 165,000, is immediately across the Ohio river from Cincinnati.

Median Household Income

Poverty Rate

High School Grad Rate

4-Year College Grad Rate

Broadband Access

vs. nat’l. avg. of $57,652

vs. nat’l. avg. of 12.3%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 87.3%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 30.9%

vs. nat’l. avg. of 78.1%

$53,853

28.7%

80.2%

12.6%

70.6%

$49,223

15.2%

86.9%

15.9%

74.9%

$53,768

12.2%

85.9%

23.8%

70.6%

$59,113

19.8%

91.9%

24.9%

72%

$58,674

12%

89.6%

29.7%

80.8%

National Average

SO U RC E : U S C E N SU S B U R E AU

NEWS DESERTS

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7

8

9 10

Partisan Breakdown On average, news desert counties tend to vote more Republican than the nation as a whole.

Vote Democrat Country Average

Vote Republican County Average

Vote Democrat National Average

Vote Republican National Average

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

2008 Presidential Election

2012 Presidential Election

2016 Presidential Election

SO U RC E S : P O L I T I C O, T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S, STAT E DATA , A N D T H E U N C SC R I P PS SC H O O L O F J O U R N A L I S M

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John Biewen’s podcast on race and masculinity IDENTITY

The Man Who Saw Himself

L

ast February, Celeste Headlee was at home, in Atlanta, when she received a call from John Biewen, the head of the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Like Headlee, Biewen is a veteran of public radio—he spent nearly a decade and a half as a reporter, working for NPR News and stations in Minnesota and the Rocky Mountain West. But he’d since transitioned into podcasting; Seeing White, his 14-part series on the history of systemic racism in the United States, had recently been nominated for a Peabody Award.

Biewen was getting ready to produce a follow-up that would use the same basic structure as Seeing White: many of the interviewees would be scholars and scientists; other segments would look at present-day politics. He was hoping that Headlee would sign on as cohost. “I remember asking, ‘Well, what’s the topic?’ ” Headlee recalls.

“John goes, ‘Gender. Masculinity. Men.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Oh boy.’ I was concerned, to be honest, because I figured I knew why he’d called me.”

A few months earlier, Headlee, a former cohost of The Takeaway, a news program on WNYC, had been one of several staffers to

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AUTHOR

Matthew Shaer PHOTOGRAPHER

Travis Dove

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publicly accuse John Hockenberry, another cohost, of sexual harassment, misconduct, and bullying. In doing so, she’d violated a nondisclosure clause she’d signed with WNYC, and the potential legal peril she’d put herself in, along with the emotionally draining interviews she found herself giving when Hockenberry was ousted, had taken a toll. (She left a subsequent gig, as host of a Georgia Public Broadcasting show called On Second Thought, citing exhaustion.) “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about what had happened,” Headlee says.

At the time, conversations about who gets to tell whose story, in what venue—and above all, who is believed when they speak—were everywhere. The #MeToo movement was ascendant; Moira Donegan had just published a long essay in New York Magazine defending her decision to create a spreadsheet chronicling alleged harassment and abuse by men in the publishing world. Some of those men, including Hockenberry, would go on to receive platforms to tell their stories in prominent literary outlets. As never before, editors, successfully or not, began reckoning with how they had overlooked—or actively ignored—voices that needed to be heard.

That process, which is still ongoing, could be uncomfortable and in ways frustrating, even when productive.

Headlee wasn’t sure she wanted to be the midwife to Biewen’s self-awareness. On the call, he tried to put her at ease. Yes, he knew

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how absurd his ask sounded: he was a white, middle-aged, middle-class cisgender dude recruiting a woman of color to help him make a show about centuries of male oppression.

But in a sense, that was precisely the point.

He wanted to create a podcast that would confront a subject that, in another era, a man might never have waded into at all. “He told me that all the #MeToo revelations had been hitting him really hard,” Headlee remembers. “He said there were obviously things he hadn’t seen, and he wanted to turn that into an opportunity, a chance to really tell the full story of how we got here.”

Headlee thanked him for the offer and told him she would think about it. In the following days, something about their conversation stuck with her. “John had said he wanted to show that sexism isn’t a female problem”— in other words, that it wasn’t a problem that women should be responsible for solving on their own. “I had full support for that,” Headlee recalls. She began to imagine: What if every man took responsibility for the failings of the patriarchy?

In the spring of 2018, Biewen flew from North Carolina to Boston to meet with Headlee and John Barth, the chief content officer at PRX, a media group that was interested in partnering with the Center for Documentary Studies on the project. It was a “trial run,” Headlee says, and the potential was evident: “We hit it off immediately; we had chemistry.” They talked for hours about

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“John had said he wanted to show that sexism isn’t a female problem”—one that women should be responsible for solving on their own.

directions the show might take. Biewen already had an all-caps title, MEN, and a potential opening segment, about a childhood incident in which he’d been smacked around by an older sibling and, in a fit of prepubescent machismo, had taken out his rage on his little brother, Todd. (In one of the most affecting parts of the finished episode, “Dick Move,” Biewen calls Todd and, for the first time, apologizes—but his brother has forgotten the incident. The trauma is all John’s.)

Headlee had ideas of her own. She suggested, for example, that Biewen reach out to Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and the author of Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (2015). Konner had spent two years conducting fieldwork among hunter-gatherer tribes in Botswana, where women have long played a central role in decision-making. Headlee liked the idea of puncturing the myth that historically and across cultures, gender roles have always been fixed.

In June, they began recording the first episodes of MEN. Headlee laid out the mission statement: “A season-long dive into patriarchy, sexism, misogyny—”

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“And other words with lots of syllables,” Biewen chimed in. “Masculinity and male supremacy, past and present.”

Headlee knew how ambitious their plan was. “To try to take a big, complicated topic like this, to try to balance the journalism and the introspection, and to try to get people to engage with the material in an intimate way, to really swim in it—it’s something that other programs have tried and failed to get right,” she says, between edits on the final episode of MEN. “It’s something that’s easy to mess up.

John and I were aware of that at the start.” She adds, “We’re definitely still aware of it now.”

J

ohn Biewen, who is 57, is slender and tall, with once-brown hair that has gone gray with age. One of five kids, he grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, an overwhelmingly white town on a deep bend in the Minnesota River. His father was a high school teacher and basketball coach; his mother was a guidance counselor. He did not set out to be a journalist. He tells me that “the moment I knew I wanted to be in radio came after I was in radio.”

And even then, he waffled. In 1983, shortly after Biewen’s graduation from Gustavus Adolphus College, a liberal arts school near Mankato, his favorite professor suggested he try working in public radio. Biewen spent the summer interning at a local station; when that gig ended, he was hired as news director at KCCM, a small station in the town

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of Moorhead. “I still didn’t think it was my career,” Biewen says—a stretch teaching in Japan and an abortive stint in a PhD program in philosophy followed. But by 1987, he was back in Minnesota full-time, working as a reporter for the Minnesota Public Radio flagship in St. Paul.

He remained in public radio for 19 years.

Biewen profiled poor farmworkers in Texas and Minnesota families forced to scrape by on food stamps; he traveled to the South Side of Chicago, to Ojibwe and Navajo reservations, and to Japan, to interview survivors of the Hiroshima bombing.

He also worked on stories that delved into the same tortured history he’d later explore in Seeing White: in 1994, he made an hourlong radio documentary called Oh Freedom over Me, which he has come to regard as the most important project of his early career. Set in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, the piece tracked the work of young volunteers conducting voter outreach in African-American communities in Mississippi, and the violent reaction of police and locals, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan. As journalism, Oh Freedom over Me is masterful: tragic and elegiac, but—with its use of historical footage and interviews from participants— visceral, too.

And yet compared to Seeing White, Oh Freedom is traditional in its approach; if not quite dispassionate, it nevertheless maintains something of an editorial distance.

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MY S ID E OF THE STORY

Lisa Rosenbaum

KEVIN WHIPPLE

Physician and Professor

Originally, Julian Bond, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, narrated Biewen’s script; in 2001, when Oh Freedom over Me was updated and re-aired, Biewen did the narration himself. “The detached journalist, above or outside of it all, just narrating the facts,” he says of the experience.

Recently, I emailed Biewen to ask if he had ever given any thought to adding his own perspective to the project. He wrote back nearly 1,000 words. “I certainly felt some unease, some sense that this was not—let’s put it this way—the optimal way to do things,” he said.

“But I didn’t yet have the clear framework or language for expressing how else to do things and, just as importantly, this is how things were done in the world in which I was working and it was considered OK. I remember thinking, about the Oh Freedom project in particular: It would be a lot better if, say, a Black Southerner were reporting and telling this story,” he went on. “Or a white Southerner, for that matter.

But, what are you gonna do?”

Biewen credits Ira Glass of This American Life and Sarah Koenig of Serial with helping demonstrate that there is another way to create potent radio journalism—one that is scrupulous and precise while allowing the perspective of the writer to come through.

“You have permission to put yourself and your reporting and thinking process into the story,” Biewen says of what he learned from early podcasts. “It knocks down the walls

Despite the many triumphs of modern medicine—a cure for hepatitis C, a significant reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease—to follow healthcare news is to see a system beset by failure. The doctor who cheats Medicare makes the news, but not the thousands who comply with regulations that are sometimes onerous. The scientist who fails to disclose an honorarium from the pharmaceutical industry is newsworthy; the scientist who spends 20 years hoping that her observations might incrementally improve human welfare will likely toil in obscurity. Society depends upon the press to expose corruption and to highlight systemic failures. What good is a medicine to cure hepatitis C, for example, if our patients can’t afford it? But what makes for a good story is not necessarily what makes for better health.

Consider statins, cholesterol-lowering medications that significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Concerns about side effects, believed by many experts to have been exaggerated, have received influential media attention. An analysis in the United Kingdom suggested that more than 200,000 people had discontinued statin therapy after negative press, which the authors estimate could result in thousands of avoidable cardiovascular events.

Healthcare journalists can improve our delivery system by highlighting what’s wrong and by helping us maintain all that’s right. But sometimes that means describing the incremental victories.

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum is the national correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Her coauthors are James T. Rosenbaum and Sandra Lewis.

between the storyteller and the story, and between the storyteller and the listener—walls that everybody knows are bogus anyway.”

Still, it wasn’t until 2016 that Biewen committed to a season-long podcast whose focus, in a sense, would be perspective itself. At that point, he’d been the audio director at the Center for Documentary Studies for eight years, during which time he’d overseen the launch of the organization’s first podcast, Scene on Radio. The first season, in Biewen’s estimation, was a “hodgepodge” affair, consisting of his old clips and sometimes the work of his students. Listenership was frustratingly low: 5,000 downloads a month.

Then, one afternoon, he got an email from his boss: a group called the Racial Equity Institute was holding a workshop not far from the Duke campus, and all CDS employees were encouraged to attend.

Biewen signed up. Not reluctantly, precisely, but with a feeling that he wasn’t the target audience. He figured he was far from it, being both the product of a progressive upbringing and a self-described “good anti-racist from way back.” As he recalls, “I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll go do this anti-racism training. But I kinda got this, right?’ ” In the event, the workshop, led over two days by a North Carolina educator named Deena Hayes-Greene, turned out to be structured

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differently from how Biewen had imagined.

The focus wasn’t on how to avoid putting your foot in your mouth when talking about race—it wasn’t about phrases never to use, or conversations one should never have in the workplace. Instead, it was a lengthy exploration of how deeply racism is encoded in the DNA of America; it was about how difficult—impossible, really—it is to separate the formation and development of the United States from the pervasive, comprehensive, enduring subjugation of people of color. Working forward from the earliest days of the colonization of North America, Hayes-Greene covered the endless ways that whites have used racism to get ahead, from land drives on Native American territory to slavery and its aftermath to insidious modern ploys such as redlining—a government-led effort to funnel investments into

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white neighborhoods, while allowing predominantly Black areas to fall into decline.

By the time the workshop concluded, Biewen felt that HayesGreene, in her clear-eyed account of systemic racism, had provided him, a white guy, with an opportunity. “I thought, ‘OK, there’s clearly a huge gap between the way that the average American—including the average sort of liberal white American—sees our country, and the real story,’ ” Biewen says. “And as a journalist, that’s a story, right? You’ve got something to work with there with a gap like that. Basically, I came out of the REI workshop thinking, ‘What if I was to do a whole series on this? On whiteness.’ ”

T

he field of “Whiteness Studies,” as it is often termed in academic circles, has existed for decades. Writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Theodore W. Allen, the author of The Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1976), have looked at the way whiteness has evolved as an ideology and a construct. In doing so, they have called into question the supposed objectivity of the work of generations of straight, white, male scholars—and helped redefine how the story of our country is told.

Journalism has been slow to catch on. The vast majority of newsrooms around the country are, and have long been, extremely white.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that white reporters have historically failed to adequately cover minority communities and concerns. Dominant narratives in the press assume a white, male perspective—even on matters of civil rights. In stories, the race of the subjects is often mentioned, but the race of the writer is rarely acknowledged.

This was the case with some of Biewen’s journalism, including his piece on the Freedom Summer. “I liked to think of myself as a person who had always been sympathetic to the cause of people of color,” he explains. But, “There was also a sense in which that was their cause and I was over here cheering, rooting them on. And that’s crazy, when you think about it. You have to personally deal with the extent you’ve benefited from it. You can’t just sit back and observe.”

After leaving the REI seminar, he decided his new project would do far more than merely observe—it would be a process, a journey, one that the listener would take with him. As would later be the case with Celeste Headlee and MEN, he was not oblivious to the optics. He needed a copilot, someone to help him process what he would learn.

He thought of Chenjerai Kumanyika, a young journalist and assistant professor at Clemson he’d met at CDS events. “As a Black person, when you’re asked to talk about race in popular media, you’re dealing with a situation where the gatekeepers are white, the audience is largely white, and there’s a certain expectation they have,” Kumanyika tells me. In his experience, when talking about race, white people tend to want absolution or praise. He adds, “The dominant line of inquiry is attitudes.” But he’d rather talk about the systems that allow racism to flourish, “about what it’s like to live as a member of a group that is marginalized and oppressed.”

He accepted Biewen’s assurances about Seeing White—that it would address the gamut of institutionalized racism in the US, not just “attitudes”—and by early 2017, Biewen and Kumanyika were talking regularly by phone, with Biewen often recording their exchanges.

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He decided his new project would do far more than merely observe—it would be a process, a journey, one that the listener would take with him.

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Episodes of Seeing White include versions of those conversations, which have an electric energy. Biewen acknowledges that he was never able to get a full picture in his previous work on race (“If I think about how I built those stories,” he says, “I’ve often treated whiteness like the proverbial elephant in the room”); at other junctures, he acts as a stand-in for a liberal white listener, confessing that he has “bristled” when people make sweeping assessments of the racism of American whites (he is, after all, one of the “good ones”).

Kumanyika acts as prod and goad, encouraging Biewen to go further—to question the way race seeps into even the most quotidian aspects of life. At those moments, Kumanyika is transforming Biewen from host and creator to subject. In one episode, Kumanyika asks Biewen, “When you graduated from college, right? Did you feel like that was a victory for white people?”

“No, I did not,” Biewen replies with a laugh.

“That thought never crossed my mind.”

“But, like, when I graduated from college, I felt like it was a victory for Black people,” Kumanyika continues. “And when I got my PhD, I felt that and was told that.”

Had the entire podcast consisted of exchanges like this one—lighthearted in tone, serious in subject matter—Seeing White might already have been successful. What makes it so effective, however, is the mating of confessional segments with historical passages. Biewen delivers incisive interviews with Nell Irvin Painter, a historian, and with Ibram X. Kendi, a professor and the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), about the European origins of contemporary American racism. (The colonists, Kendi says, not only brought over cargo to the New World, “they brought over these racist ideas in their minds.”) He talks to Janet Monge, a curator at the Penn Museum, in Philadelphia, about how phrenology—the measuring of skulls—was used to reinforce the idea that white Europeans were smarter than African-Americans; he features Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, a political science professor at George Mason University, on the bizarre and tragic cases of two foreign nationals, Bhagat Singh Thind and Takao Ozawa, who

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in the 1920s were compelled by federal courts to “prove” they were white as a condition of American citizenship.

Biewen also investigates his own unthinking respect for figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson—a so-called Great American Man possessed, it turns out, of an incredible amount of outdated, outwardly racist ideology. Having uncritical notions of historical narratives is “one of the main features, I think, of whiteness and of being an American, and of this story we tell ourselves,” Biewen says. “It requires a lot of willful forgetting, and we’re very good at it.

We have lots of practice.”

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eeing White quickly generated buzz.

Downloads of the series soon climbed into the six digits per episode; five-star reviews piled up on iTunes (more than 3,000 at last count), as did praise on social media.

(The overwhelming positivity was striking; my efforts to find negative responses turned up nothing of substance.) “A lot of the feedback boiled down to ‘Why the hell aren’t we taught this in school?’ ” Kumanyika says.

Many of the listeners were progressive whites, like Biewen. But “I know from talking to folks that it had a lot of appeal to people of color,” Kumanyika tells me. “And it was cool watching the different ways it was used. We had church groups telling us they were using it as a teaching tool—podcast clubs and community groups, too.”

One of those groups was a San Francisco affiliate of Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ, an advocacy organization. “I think the way the show approached racism by turning the lens on white people—that’s not something that’s normally done,” says Adee Horn, a high school teacher who is a member of SURJ. She invited Kumanyika and Biewen to Skype into a SURJ meeting, and has since encouraged her students to listen to Seeing White. “We’re basically taught not to think about the tarnished parts of our national history,” she adds. “But Seeing White does. I think it helps us face some of that directly.”

Last year, another educator, a North Carolinian named Michael Parker West, recommended Seeing White to a colleague in the Wake County Office of Equity Affairs, which runs training sessions for teachers

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“I think this idea has faded away that we were going to be completely objective and that we are not going to place ourselves in the story—that already feels a little outdated.”

in and around Raleigh. “Mike and I met up again sometime later, and we gushed,” Christina Spears, the colleague, tells me.

Together, they built a nine-week class for Wake County teachers based on Seeing White, complete with discussion prompts, additional readings, and an online forum. Twenty-five teachers were selected for a pilot program. “I saw educators, people from all walks of life, talk candidly about their understandings of history, race, and whiteness; we shared our own racial identities and stories,” Spears recalls. She’s now in the process of planning another course.

As for MEN, the follow-up, downloads have kept pace with those of Seeing White, and the continued fallout from a number of #MeToo scandals has meant that the material has stayed relevant. “I truly believe that listeners have realized that John and I, in every episode, we’re telling the truth,” Headlee says. “And people have responded to that.”

In a sense, Biewen’s work with Seeing White and MEN may represent a larger change in the industry: an acknowledgment that it’s sometimes okay, and even preferable, for journalists to be candid about the perspective (or lack thereof ) they bring to a piece. “I think this idea has faded away that we were going to be completely objective and that we are not going to place ourselves in the story—that

already feels a little outdated,” Biewen tells me when I meet him in his office at Duke.

It’s a brisk winter day, bright and windy, and the afternoon sun falls across Biewen’s desk, which is cluttered with books and papers. Biewen looks happy but a little worn— reporting and taping MEN is in essence a full-time job, and he still has to juggle it with his duties as a CDS instructor. But he is already mulling an idea for his next project.

Without yet knowing the exact framing, he envisions a season devoted to exploring American democracy—“our peculiar, deeply flawed version of it”—and how the government has fallen into crisis.

I wonder aloud if Biewen feels that he’s been altered by his recent work—not changed in a career sense, but transformed personally. His eyes wander over the dual computer screens in front of him, one of which is open to an edit of an episode of MEN. Finally, he says, “I guess the word I keep coming back to is clarity. Like, I almost want to blush when I see the things people write in reviews. Stuff like ‘life changing.’ But I think to some people that’s what it does feel like, because we really are putting forward something that’s at odds with what they thought they knew.”

He pauses. “And there’s a little of that for me, too,” he goes on. “Clarity. Like, ‘Oh, now I see.’ ” cjr

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End note

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E D M O N D E H A RO

ournalism is the art of listening. Often patiently, while there’s something on the stove, while the person talking shouldn’t be saying anything in the first place. When news organizations fail, is it because, at least in part, reporters— and their employers—have put their hands over their ears? It’s an irksome thought, for professional noticers especially, but the 2016 presidential election jammed it in all of our minds. Since then, a number of media companies have attempted (or advanced) efforts to show their audiences how much they listen (a New York Times Showtime series, a Sky News 24-hour livestream, engagement editors devoted to social media). Are these displays of narcissism or desperate pleas that audiences understand what reporting is? Winning the approval—and subscription dollars—of a public with little regard for the press has been a staggeringly difficult task. Two years into the presidency of Donald Trump, journalism wishes everyone (from the White House on down) to know: we see you, we hear you. —Betsy Morais

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Rohingya refugees crew a fishing boat in the Bay of Bengal near Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne