Waiting for Goodnews

Belief in accurate news reporting has fallen to an all time low, according to a recent Gallup poll. I just wrote that without checking ‘all times’ since polling on the topic has only come in recent decades. ‘Trust in news sources has fallen to new lows during the polling years’ would be accurate and more specific.

Why have news sources become untrustworthy?

1) Craigslist disrupted a major revenue stream for local newspapers, driving many under.

2) That local news space has largely gone unfilled with local reporters. Large corporations with a political agenda fill some of the spaces with pseudo-local papers. Which means most of the news is boilerplate national or state news - with a conservative angle - that’s repeated in multiple ‘local’ newspapers. Then they may hire one reporter to cover a multiple county area to add just a touch of local.

3) Most working people still get their news from 5 major TV channels plus MSNBC. Most only watch one or two of those. Unlike TV in the 1950s through 1970s, many of the anchors don’t have a long career in print journalism before they arrived. Looks and voices and ‘presence’ often take precedence over newsgathering experience. For relatively unbiased, centrist reporting on TV, ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS remain pretty objective and fully credible. CNN goes slightly left, MSNBC goes left of that, Fox News goes extreme right and OneAmerica goes off the charts to the right.

It’s also rare on news teams to see a diversity in opinion now. There’s no conservative Chet Huntleys being paired with a more liberal David Brinkley. And what are the odds of getting an elderly wise anchor like Walter Cronkite when perfectly coiffed dyed hair matters more today?

4) A recent study indicates 35% of the adults in this country read at a 6th grade comprehension level, so newspapers and printed material online are limited in reach by that sad reality.

5) And while tension between reporters and politicians has always existed - and should - it’s gotten markedly worse in the past 3 decades. With both wars on Iraq and with a recent president claiming ‘fake news’ all the time, news is often managed by PR people, the Pentagon, and politicians if there’s any relation to political or foreign policy issues. Mainstream media sources can often be diverted by this ‘LOOK A SQUIRREL’ political messaging.

6) George W. Bush and Donald Trump, in particular, limited press conferences to a very few over time. Trump and his supporters have then launched entire news networks that really are just propaganda machines.

7) Online, cookies have harvested a massive amount of user data based not only what ads you click on, but also your news sources and even the online games and quizzes you take part in. Political messagers have used this data to get ads that will appeal to you based on your clicks and quizzes. Commercial entities do this as well. You buy a tee-shirt online and for weeks afterward, you’ll be inundated with t-shirt ads.

And frankly, this kind of info loop feels oppressive to most adults. You feel your privacy’s being invaded and all unsolicited ads and email are viewed with the disdain we once had for junk mail, including the campaign ads from election seasons.

8) What news delivery system do you rely on? Do you feel any kinship to the reporters, anchors, podcasters, bloggers, online or via an offline medium?

I have some training and experience in journalism and it’s a struggle to define a lot of good reliable sources to depend on. I have to reassess and cull out questionable ones on an ongoing basis. So what’s an average reader to do?

I think it’s very important to see an array of sources rather than one or two. And checking media analysts helps.

I regularly read Dan Froomkin at Press Watch, a former Washington Post journalist who’s now a political media analyst. He can be hard on left or right but his insight is invaluable in determining which journalists are falling short or being bamboozled by the politicians.

And I check in with the Poynter Institute, a longtime media analyst group. They’ve established the IFCN, the International Fact Checking Network. And MediaWise, a quick text message course you can sign up for that, in their words:

”empowers people of all ages to become more critical consumers of content online. We teach people digital media literacy and fact-checking skills to spot misinformation and disinformation, with initiatives specifically designed to engage Gen Z, college students and older Americans. Our innovative, digital-first program works constantly to address the ever-changing landscape of misinformation across the internet.

We believe that when facts prevail, democracy wins.”

Poynter’s encouraging all news sites to get their election coverage outside their paywalls with this timely argument.

My third source of media critique is Jay Rosen, a NYU journalism professor. It’s easiest to catch his stuff on Twitter.

There’s others, like Norman Solomon on FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), but I find the trio above to be clearest and most to the point. The mainstream media often get sidetracked and derailed by politicians diverting attention away from the more important stories. So I’d recommend reviewing the analysts’ messages a couple times a month, especially when there are political scandals afoot. It improves one’s focus.

So which online news media do I read?

By circulation, the biggest print publication by far is the Wall Street Journal, but unless one is invested in Wall Street, its relevance is questionable. Owned by an ultraconservative billionaire influencer, I view it as mostly useful for him. USA Today used to be #2 but covid hit it hard, so the NY Times has surpassed it. But I still find USA Today more useful because in thousands of smaller markets in red states and blue, it’s easier to find it on the news stand. While previously noting that TV news and the internet now reach more readers than any offline news source does, I think it important to see what’s getting read across the country.

And I’m pretty sure it’s not the NY Times since conservatives view it as the ‘liberal’ newspaper. It definitely is not. It’s as centrist as can be and its op ed pages can shift rightward on a dime. The only thing liberal or innovative about it is its fashion and culture pages. The Times is for the arrogant and snooty who believe New York City is ‘all that.’ (Note: I do enjoy Charles M. Blow there and on Twitter)

But the Times does have a few good investigative journalists worth reading. You have to follow it for awhile, look for the real investigative diggers and follow them.

For national - as in nationwide - news, USAToday. For federal government news, Washington Post. Before they sold off, McClatchy newspapers was a major winner with several Pulitzers in its chain, in KC, Miami and elsewhere. I have my favorites, but you have yours.

I think, beyond Washington Post and USAToday, one should have a go-to paper for their home state/state government coverage. Many big city papers are pretty reliable in places like Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Atlanta, and Kansas City. Their opinion pages, however, can be a tossup. I have a few favored op-ed columnists I like but I remind myself often that opinion preferences are often based on my own set of biases, so I read a few that don’t fit that frame. Sadly, there’s no longer many good choices among the conservative set (in my opinion). Most aren’t espousing principles any more. They’re just attack-attack-attack as if politics is a game of third grade neener-neenerism.

I’m not suggesting anyone should try to gather information from 20 different sources daily. Try 2 or 3 essential ones daily, with another 4 or 5 sprinkled over a week. I read more but do so to distill a broad array of news items to write this newsletter.

Among those I’m likely to check at least once or twice a week:

1) ProPublica, a consortium of independent - and sometimes collaborative - investigative journalists

2) The Texas Tribune, still as good at serious investigation as when Molly Ivins worked there, but not as charming without her.

3) The Guardian, a UK based paper, very well designed and readable..

4) The Associated Press and Reuters are both pretty objective news collectives on both sides of the Atlantic. They often break fresh news that other media sites follow up on.

5) More magazine style content may originate from The Atlantic, Esquire (mostly for the top commentary of Charles Pierce), Slate (Dahlia Lithwick a notable court watcher/analyst provides her Amicus podcasts, transcripts of that and an occasional article), Mother Jones, Rolling Stone for music and politics, the New Yorker, the labor-centric In These Times, and Washington Monthly : these I read fairly often.

6) When political blogging was young, shortly into the 21st century, journalist Josh Marshall began a collective blog: Talking Points Memo. It functions now like a well-honed inspection team of government watchers, matching the chops of any traditional newspaper’s political coverage. Josh can also be followed on Twitter for pithyer stuff; he adapts well to all new media so I’m waiting to see if he’ll Tik-Tok.

Other similar collective blog efforts that still offer a focus on injustices include Crooks & Liars (with Susie Madrak and Steve M prominently featured now) and Lawyers, Guns and Money. With lots of blogs out there, there’s just a few old favorites I follow anymore: Atrios at Eschaton, Digby’s Hullabaloo, Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog, though he may be falling off there as he ramps up at Crooks & Liars. Roy Edroso is at his alicublog still, along with his newsletter, but many other bloggers have shifted to instagram/twitter/podcasts/etc, post infrequently, disappeared or died. And of course, Marcy Wheeler who somehow can keep all this stuff in an outline in her head that’s as big as a football stadium. There’s others I see from time to time (Hi Avedon!) and sometimes discover an old blogger still at it that had fallen off my radar, like Attorney Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left. But I digress.

Then, of course, there’s other newsletter writers that draw my regular attention, including the oft-cited History/Politics dominatrix, Heather Cox Richardson. There’s Judd Legum’s Popular Information, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (discussing here the GOP sex game), the political and cultural musings of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, several conservatives at The Dispatch who may be the few in the US who remain reasonably sane.

But that’s very Euro-American-centric. When you consider that the population of North America and Europe combined falls just short of Africa’s (17.6% of the globe’s population) and that Asia has nearly 60% of the world’s population, or 7 times as many people as we have in North America, we should check in on other places occasionally, too. It’s harder to understand other political systems and cultures and to fully assess the journalism quality, but we still can get some important global insight on their views about our events and pick up on events elsewhere that no American media outlet is covering at all… by visiting ten of the largest that offer English translations.

China Daily (the world’s largest population)

The Times of India (the second largest population)

Jakarta Post from Indonesia (the world’s 4th largest population)

Add Dawn, from Pakistan (the world’s 5th largest population)

The Brazilian Report (the world’s 6th largest population)

The Guardian Nigeria (the world’s 7th largest pop.) which has an ‘About’ statement I like.

The Dhaka Tribune is a worthwhile choice for Bangladesh (the world’s 8th largest population. For added perspective, the US has 332 million residents. Bangladesh’s population is almost exactly half that size)

Russia is a hard nut to crack since most of its media is state-sponsored by the power and censorship of Putin. But from Latvia, a publication called Meduza publishes an array of Russian news that’s beyond Putin’s reach. It’s pretty important to know what’s driving opinions and events there in the world’s other nuclear superpower, with the world’s 9th largest population. This code sounds pretty objective to me.

Mexico News Daily provides the news from our neighbor to the south, the world’s 10th largest population.

And representing Japan, with the world’s 11th largest population - more than 126 million - there’s The Asahi Shimbun.

That’s a reasonable representation of all continents except Oceania, so toss in ABC News for Australia, technically a tv news program converted to print and video.

That’s 11 sites for better global coverage. I check them 2 or 3 times per month. Your mileage will vary.

In general terms, I admittedly don’t read enough from Black, Latino, female sources other than on Twitter. I don’t linger on Twitter long as some do, though there’s a few experts, satirists and comedians there I enjoy. Uber-brilliant-nerd Marcy Wheeler, Molly Jong-Fast, The Volatile Mermaid are just a few.

There’s also the opinion sites like Wonkette, The Root, and the relatively new Blavity to visit.

And there looks to be more innovative new ones on the way for marginalized communities.

It’s all way too much reading or scanning and I have no magic formula to remember what to check when. I could use an aggregator feed that would keep me reviewing all of them. If I was organized and efficient. But that sounds too much like work.

Note: this began as a Friday newsletter but covered so much it’s only getting published Sunday. The bottom line: I read a lot so you won’t have to but there’s plenty of great links you might choose to follow.

So let me ask you: who do YOU consider essential in the media - including Twitter - that I should add to my list?

Now is zee time at Sprockets ven ve percuss.