I haven’t posted in a long time to this site – mostly because I have a fantasy in my head that I’m Bruce Wayne in a Chinese prison – I’ve been practicing. 1,342 days – I guess I DID get married, have a kid and start a new job in that timeframe. I’ve been lurking daily on DKos and a lot of other sites, learning as much as I can from the good writers and bad about policies, figuring out my positions and where I might be able to help in the giant miasma of commentary, journalism and activism. I still don’t have an answer and I don’t pretend for a second that my impact will be grand or that I have perfect confidence about the quality of my contribution(s). Like training to be a sushi chef, I don’t think “mastery” is achievable so I’m still really just practicing.
There is a rarely discussed aspect of media criticism that isn’t addressed by Media Matters or other media criticism sites. Local media. Of course, of larger sites were to cover every local news failing the commentary would be constant, have a limited audience and just like most local news stories be lost into the ether in moments. Certain stories spark YouTube infamy, and others are poorly reported to the point that they invite national attention. Therefore, it’s the little things that are slipping through.
An example – just this morning I was listening to drive time radio while on the way to work. They do two “news” segments – one on “news” and the other on celebrity gossip. The news segment is still light – hearted as the hosts read a summary of a news story and do a few riffs on the humor of the story. It’s relatively harmless, and the political persuasion of the hosts is easily hidden as their jokes play to a rock radio stations’ audience quite well. It’s all in good fun, and the audience gets the headlines in a hard candy shell of humor. It would take the pickiest person in the world to be bothered by it.
Until after hearing it every day for months, one notices how lazy they are.
The news story of the day was the pending shutdown of government over disaster aid funding. The wire version of the story is straightforwardly read, and the hosts begin their brief commentary. Quickly, the laziness is apparent – “didn’t we already do this before?”, “there are a bunch of suits in Washington”, “we used to be able to do so much awesome stuff”, and “dude” are the phrases thrown around describing the situation. The text of the wire story itself didn’t help the confusion, as the nearly Orwellian line of “Democrats and Republicans disagree about offsetting disaster relief funding with spending cuts” is read as the reason for an impending shutdown. How did they disagree? What spending cuts were in the offing? We’re never told by the text of the actual story being read, and the hosts haven’t bothered with a five minute Google search for details.
Local media, small and large(er) are awash in these kinds of stories – low on detail and read from a national script by someone entertaining, articulate, literate but almost understandably uninformed – that’s not the primary or even secondary skill for local journalists. Amidst the local crime and human interest, our local media institutions read from an AP or Reuters approved script and leave the headline at that.
This incident may seem small, but it is repeated all over the country into the ears of people who don’t keep up with politics and shouldn’t really be expected to on a regular basis. These news “snippets” as they can only be called – they’re not “news” in the sense that the listener is informed, but a small sliver of information that reaches the low – information voter (and non-voters of course who are only multiplied by the “both sides do it” trope) and is absorbed as background noise.
With incidents like this that don’t really qualify as “incidents” due to their small size and the fact that they disappear into the dustbin as soon as they occur, the question becomes how to criticize them.
There are a great number of problems with effective local media criticism aside from the “smallness” of the stories and the fact that the newsreader is an “entertainer” or “personality” and therefore doesn’t take the responsibility of broadcasting news seriously (and perhaps they shouldn’t – an issue for another day). If a national outlet with a large audience has a story, criticism is usually part of a chorus of complaint. Adding to the chorus only makes it louder and more noticeable. With a smaller outlet, your criticism might be the ONLY one. A singular voice of criticism is easily ignored as a crank, a troll or someone with a personal agenda. Organizing is an option, getting friends to complain as well, but the combination of the smallness of the snippet and the anecdotal nature that such a communication to friends must have – “I heard this silly thing on the local news this morning…” seems ineffective in the larger goal of changing bad reporting habits. And when it becomes clear that the FIVE comments that a local news story receives come from people who are all friends on Facebook, well...
It appears to be death by 1,000 cuts and no clear path for how to civilly critique our local media fiefdoms.
Crossposted at myoriginalpoint.posterous.com