6 minute read
Black, White, and Read All Over
MEDIA AS A SQUID GAME
BY HARRISON BERRY
Idaho Capital Sun Editor-in-Chief Christina Lords has one of the strongest resumes of any journalist in Idaho, having worked at some of the Gem State’s most prominent newspapers. Hate mail has always come with the job, but helming a nonprofit newsroom has increased the intensity of the vitriol aimed at her inbox.
“I’d sit in front of my computer and take a few deep breaths and say that whatever’s in my inbox is not a reflection of me as a person,” says Lords. “I’ve had to accept constructive criticism and take in what’s legitimate and disregard the trolls who show up in my voicemail and inbox. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, it was pretty rough.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened old tensions and added new tensions. People’s hackles have been raised by what they see and hear in the news and from one another, and while people being polarized by the media is an old problem, its incarnation in the age of social media has taken the intensity to new heights. Algorithms privilege content that incites viewers’ emotions and instills an us-versus-them mentality. Anti-civility has become an accepted call to action, and the purveyors of true stories and verified facts have become the targets of harassment and attack.
Online aggression doesn’t get Lords down. Her newsroom is one of a crop of nonprofit and small-scale independent news outlets that have broken away from the common business and editorial practices that support journalism and may be the surest signs that straight, sharp reporting is not lost.
The journalist-as-popular-figure is nothing new, but social media has deepened the potential ethical hazards of journalists developing or cashing in on their own brands. In 2021, numerous reporters from a slew of national and international news organizations were fired for their pro-Palestinian tweets, and The New York Times came under fire for terminating the employment of an editor who tweeted about having “chills” when President Joe Biden arrived in Washington, D.C., for his inauguration.
Meanwhile, misinformation Squid Game and so-called fake news spread faster than news sources can fact check–often with the blessing of social media algorithms, says Kyle Moody, an associate professor of communications media at Fitchburg State University.
“A false claim presented as such spreads faster due to the nature and appeal of social media,” he explains. “By the time it’s been fact-checked, it’s already been widely disseminated.” In the fall of 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, blew the whistle on the social media giant’s content promotion practices, which have included incentivizing and pandemic has spreading angry, polarizing, and divisive posts about hot-button issues like the heightened old 2020 election, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and COVID-19. Facebook, tensions and which holds more than 72% of the global market share of social media, has long added new been under scrutiny over the algorithm it uses to promote users’ posts. Haugen’s tensions. testimony revealed what many suspected, that the social media giant had privileged its financial interests over the information needs of its users, steadily feeding them blistering outrage and outright misinformation to keep up impressions, likes, comments, and shares.
The purveyors of misinformation and many journalists have something in common, according to Moody. They may be engaging in a kind of online echolocation. Even trained reporters may use social media to project their political or social identities, attract sympathizers, or troll those who disagree, but the overall effects have been information silos and bitter political division.
“We post and try to seem like we’re continuously showing our presence, showing where we are,” Moody says. “The reality of misinformation comes from posting where we are in terms of what we’re thinking about a topic, or on an identity level, that it shows part of our identity.”
Traditional American media has always been the playground of financial giants, and just a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies like AT&T, The Walt Disney Company, Netflix, NBC Universal, and others control over 90% of the market share when it comes to producing written and broadcast content. Along with the advent of digital media giants like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube) have come new gatekeepers of information. The current Congressional grilling of their unfettered techniques of engaging children’s attention at the cost of safety further erodes public trust in the media.
Today, just 36% of Americans say they have trust in mass media–barely up from 32% in 2016. According to the nonprofit journalism school and think tank, the Poynter Institute, more than 90 local newsrooms closed during the 2020-’21 pandemic, and since 2004, 1,800 newspapers shut their doors. Many more have experienced shrinking staffs and diminishing news-gathering resources, leading to the formation of news deserts and a lack of coverage of everything from local school sports to city hall. Most that have perished and all that remain, regardless of ownership, must compete for attention in spaces provided by the new media monopoly: social media companies.
That would seemingly be true for editors like Lords, whose products live primarily online. The Idaho Capital Sun is an affiliate of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit with partners in nearly two dozen states that allow print and broadcast organizations to use their reporting for free with attribution. It also gives Lords the latitude to determine what issues and her small team of reporters cover and how. The result has been a steady stream of timely, sophisticated, and richly detailed stories.
“It was just such a strange juxtaposition for me, coming from a company that really does care about page views [Lords is the former editor of the McClatchy Company-owned Idaho Statesman] to where we don’t get that type of pressure. Do the policy stories. Do the un-sexy stories. Do the things that people actually need to read, and do them well. That was the directive to me,” she says.
The Idaho Capital Sun is one of several recent entries to Idaho’s local media market. Others include the IdaHome magazine you are reading; BoiseDev, focused on Treasure Valley-area city hall, development, and growth issues; and Idaho Education News, which specializes in education and the Idaho Legislature. Most reporters still come from traditional news media like print, radio, and television, but their tailored areas of coverage, in-depth storytelling, and alternative funding models are redefining the relationships between news organizations and audiences.
Nonprofit newsrooms have been opening nationwide at a rate of about one per month for the last dozen years, according to NiemanLab, and otherwise independent shops are also on the rise. While observers like Moody say it will take time to see if this new trend will have a mass effect on the national media landscape (and particularly journalism), it’s already bearing fruit in Idaho. Lords and her team have made a name for themselves for their in-depth analysis and coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the Idaho Legislature and politics in general.
When time and resources allow, Lords would like to boost the Idaho Capital Sun’s coverage of housing and growth. She currently has a staff of three, including Audrey Dutton, Kelcie Moseley-Morris, and Clark Corbin, and her eye is on growing her newsroom, not reducing it. For her next hire, Lords would like someone who can report on one of the most important issues facing Idaho: the environment.
“That’s something we haven’t hit as well as we’d like,” Lords says. “There are so many public lands issues in Idaho to get at. We did some reporting on the wildfire season and that’s only going to get more important as the years go on.”
