With so much media analysis, news organizations still can't frame stories properly
What happens when you know both the disease and cure but don't actually do anything about it?
The last four years should have taught us that language matters. We should have learned from the very first day of the Trump administration that when you have officials who blatantly lie about things that are easily proven to be lies, like inauguration sizes, you have to adjust. But the political press didn’t.
Words like “appears to be” or “seems like” graced the pages of every outlet, instead of “flat out lies” or “makes shit up.”
(Image via Shutterstock)
We’ve talked about story frames many times this year, and two other aspects of framing land on a story’s placement and sources/voices in the piece.
A story running on the front page or at the top of a nightly newscast has a greater importance, one determined by many factors, of course. Newsworthiness, weight of story, or exclusivity. But also those being cited/quoted can amplify or mute a point.
Take this weekend, for example.
Eric Boehlert’s Press Run has a compelling piece today about how news organizations reported on the very strange Oval Office meeting between the president, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn that spilled out into the New York Times on Saturday. It’s a story as much about conspiracy theories run amok, most notably the suggestion of Trump enacting Martial Law while re-doing the election after the military grabs hold of election machines, as it is about palace intrigue. But where did it land?
From today’s Press Run:
Incredibly though, the Times did not run its martial law story on page one on Sunday. Instead it was tucked inside on page 28. (It was also buried on the paper’s website.) Additionally, the military coup aspect of the report — the fact the President of the United States might want to enlist armed players to destroy free and fair elections — wasn't even included in the Times headline, or in the lede of the story.
"Trump Discussed Naming Sidney Powell as Special Counsel on Election Fraud," read the botched headline. Fact: There was no "election fraud" in 2020, so it's irresponsible for the Times to treat the debunked claim as fact in its headline by reporting Trump might appoint a special counsel for the phony topic.
Boehlert continues that it wasn’t just the Times who buried the story.
On Sunday morning, the Washington Post homepage included no mention of Trump considering the idea of imposing martial law. I couldn’t find a single major newspaper that ran the story on the front page over the weekend.
On the Sunday morning network talk shows, the discussed coup attempt was given just passing attention. NBC'S Meet the Press hosted Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), but never asked him about the White House martial law meeting where Trump wallowed in unhinged schemes with conspiracy attorney Sidney Powell (she claims Venezuela was behind Trump's November defeat), retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani. Sunday's CBS's Face the Nation also never mentioned the Friday meeting.
Wildly downplaying the severity, ABC News referred to the idea of imposing martial law to illegally secure Trump's power as a "scorched earth policy."
Speaking of the morning talk shows, criticism this weekend once again revolved on the continued frame of who gets to air their grievances. Meet the Press, once the must-see Sunday morning political gabfest, continues to attempt a ‘both sides-ism’ through its guests, but winds up missing completely as it had on two journalists (Hallie Jackson and Yamiche Alcindor) and a rightwing opinionator (Rich Lowery).
And it appears to be a pattern.
All of this stems from the false equivalency generated by almost a quarter century of Fox News’s ‘fair and balanced’ mantra, where the media needs to believe in an objectivity that doesn’t exist; how the canard of mainstream journalism is that it leans left.
While doing so, news organizations have elevated voices on the political right while diminishing, if not branding voices on the left as foolish or divisive. While left-leaning outlets, for example, will have right-leaning voices to show a whiff of impartiality, we rarely see right-leaning outlets have that left-leaning voice.
At the same time, right-leaning outlets like Breitbart, The Federalist, National Review, are elevated to “journalist” status, giving the sense of objectivity and fairness when they are anything but. However, when a centrist or left-leaning outlet does the same, they are branded as a tool of the Democratic party.
And now Republicans are talking about this openly, albeit from the political perspective. In yesterday’s New York Times:
They believe the president’s departure might allow Republicans to return to some of the themes that proved effective in down-ballot races last month, while also depriving Democrats of their most dependable boogeyman. In that rosy vision, lawmakers might step gingerly in public to avoid Mr. Trump’s wrath but otherwise go about their business, assuming Mr. Trump’s focus will never linger on one matter for long, while they elevate the perceived excesses of the left.
“When Trump is no longer in office there’s going to be less focus on personality and ‘What did he tweet today, what did he say today?’” predicted Senator John Cornyn of Texas, adding, hopefully, that Democrats would soon struggle with internal divisions in a “Tea Party moment” akin to what Republicans faced a decade ago.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was even more succinct, arguing that the Democrats’ left wing would alienate moderate voters.
“Our problem is tone, their problem is policy,” Mr. Graham said of the two parties. “We’ve both got to overcome problems, but I like our chances better because we can act better and it’s harder for them to legislate differently.”
The Washington Post calls this ‘the GOP whitewashing.’ Republicans’ focus on what ails us has been Trump’s tone will be a message played out in interviews and TV roundtable discussions for the next two years. But let us also not forget the damage that’s been done because of the platforms.
And over the last decade, as the social platforms reward engagement, we have seen “the media” shapeshift from one of a trusted conduit of information to one of “whoever gets the most engagement is now therefore an outlet of trust.” (Even from a platform like Facebook that has repeatedly said it is not an arbiter of trust.)
In the runup to the 2020 election, Facebook, for example, implemented a new algorithm that would give news organizations more weight than outlets that rely on the spectrum of lies, half-truths and twisted truths. The effect was immediate, with outlets like the New York Times, CNN and NPR regularly appearing in top posts. Then, after the election was decided, Facebook started to roll back this improvement.
According to the New York Times last week:
Facebook confirmed that it has in the past few days rolled back a change that lifted news from authoritative outlets over hyperpartisan sources after November’s election, signaling a return to normalcy for the social network.
The change involved boosting the weight that Facebook’s news feed algorithm assigned to an internal publisher quality score known as “news ecosystem quality,” or N.E.Q. It was implemented several days after the election as part of Facebook’s emergency “break glass” plan to combat misinformation during the critical postelection period, while votes were still being counted.
The change resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall. After the election, some Facebook employees asked at a company meeting whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, according to several people who attended.
Indeed, here’s Facebook’s top 10 performing link posts from Friday.
Framing matters. And it’s time media companies look at how where they place stories, who gets quoted/represented, who gets elevated. The last four years should have taught us that the press needs to move beyond a Right vs. Left construction, and one towards a truth vs. not perspective. This is the strongest way to hold those accountable, while also informing the public of the cliched ideals a journalistic outlet espouses: speaking truth to power, with neither fear nor favor, etc.
With the pandemic the biggest story of our lives, it is irresponsible not to.
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Phish, “Saw It Again”
Some interesting links:
For media apologies:
The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star (Kansas City Star)
After legal threat, Fox airs news package debunking election fraud claims made by its own hosts (CNN)
The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media (NYT)
The ‘Caliphate’ retraction won’t end the New York Times’s woes (WaPo)
For media reporting:
What I’ve learned from covering a year of media layoffs and closures (Poynter)
The journalist and the pharma bro (Elle)
For platforms:
Facebook repeatedly blocked ads showing wheelchair, says disabilities apparel retailer (Ad Age)
For retail:
Amazon closes New Jersey warehouse after workers test positive for coronavirus (CNBC)
For brands behaving badly:
Fast food workers walk out to demand Chipotle stop making them work sick amid concerns of growing Covid-19 breakout (SEIU press release)
This should always have been in question and not just in politics. Here's just one piece I did over at the Reynold's National Center for Business Journalism about finding sources:
https://businessjournalism.org/2020/12/forget-the-sources-fancy-pedigree/
The population of Credentialed People Will To Make Crap Up is large and overly anxious for attention. Reporters have to start doing better everywhere.