Our Fractured Media

Personally, I lament the media fragmentation that has robbed us of the common set of facts that we enjoyed in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

For society to function, we rely on an agreed upon set of facts. That’s how we make sense of the news of the day. Recently, two same-day headlines, one in the Wall Street Journal, one in the New York Times, took the same information and generated very different stories:

WSJ, June 27th:

Americans Are Leaving Unemployment Rolls More Quickly in States Cutting Off Benefits

Some Missouri businesses see uptick in applications after state set a June end to pandemic jobless aid

NYTimes, June 27th:

Where Jobless Benefits Were Cut, Jobs Are Still Hard to Fill

Missouri scrapped federal pay to the unemployed, saying it kept people out of the labor market. But so far, workers still seem to be choosy.

Heretofore, the WSJ (controlled by the family that also owns Fox News), restricted partisan bias to its editorial pages. In June, they took the unprecedented step of allowing that bias to appear in the news section. It marked a departure from straight news reporting, and more than a few media watchers were dismayed when the Journal used the front page to drive home one of their longstanding ideological points: decent people work for a living, and deadbeats abuse the system.

But the facts said something entirely different, and it took two months after Missouri and other states that stopped federal funding to their unemployed citizens for the Journal to acknowledge that fear of COVID, lack of childcare, and little desire to return to unfulfilling, under-paying jobs, were significant contributors to ongoing unemployment:

WSJ, September 1st:

States That Cut Unemployment Benefits Saw Limited Impact on Job Growth

Half of U.S. states ended enhanced unemployment insurance payments early ahead of nationwide termination of benefits for millions of people.

The Mass Media Era—beginning with radio in the 1930s, and lasting until the introduction of conservative talk radio, cable news, and the internet—was the high water mark of both democracy and journalism, the twinned-pair that provided and documented an unprecedented period of American leadership, innovation, and growth.

There are plenty of examples of bias prior to the era of mass media, including William Randolph Hearst using his newspaper empire to hurry us into the Spanish American War, saying, “You furnish the pictures, I'll provide the war!”

As if to underscore the peril we face today, a Facebook whistleblower revealed a trove of internal documents that show the company prioritizes anger and resentment—sentiments that drive engagement and keep eyes on FB—over users’ mental health and our democracy. (BTW, Credit the WSJ for breaking this story, and 60 Minutes for amplifying it. Very little is simple in the world of media.)

Add to that Pop star Nicki Minaj telling her nearly 200 million followers—without the benefit of verification—that a friend of a cousin in Trinidad got the COVID shot and became impotent.

Here are some under-reported stories:

• Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, calls bias “a boom industry,” explaining how profitable it is to scare and anger the audience.

• The New York Times: “Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies. They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.”

• According to the Washington Post, by June, Fox had angered and scared its viewers with tales of critical race theory 1860 times. (They know what FB knows: alarmed viewers stay engaged longer.)

Here are some stories we don’t see at all:

• The slow rollout of rent relief for landlords and tenants: $47B available, but only $4.7B distributed as the eviction moratorium sunsets.

• Beginning in April, the State Department was telling Americans to leave Afghanistan. They sent weekly emails, then made frequent phone calls expressing increasing urgency. Maybe State had security concerns and didn’t issue a press release, but that’s exactly the kind of thing reporters are supposed to uncover. Where were they?

• Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s Black mayor, decided that she would grant interviews only to Black journalists, a policy that has raised the ire of journalistic organizations, including the National Association of Black Journalists, and a Latino reporter at the Chicago Tribune who canceled an interview with her, tweeting that “politicians don’t get to choose who covers them,” an obvious point disregarded by the former Republican president, and now the Democratic mayor of our third largest city. NPR, The Washington Post, and USA Today reported this in passing, but nothing stuck.

Without context, verification, and a common understanding of events, our inclination toward tribalism and its tendency toward alienation and violence only escalates. Personally, I lament the media fragmentation that has robbed us of the common set of facts that we enjoyed in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

©2021 Jon Sinton