So I lurk a lot, both keep sane during the week, and to pick up some story ideas. I wanted to make this post a while ago and chickened out, but seeing that post about Maddow fawning over Biden's new dog made me want to try with this account again.
US media is absolutely a big-L Liberal institution. But you'd be surprised how many socialists, or socdems at least, write for smaller and mid-size newsrooms. So AMA about trying to be a reporter with leftist views in a decidedly anti-left racket, or about the inner workings of American news outlets that aren't CNN, MSNBC or Fox.
Nah I spend most days just sitting at a desk doing phone interviews.
Nah I usually say "for fucks sake I was supposed to go home an hour ago, do we really have no one else to grab this?"
:rat-salute:
Any proud moments where you managed to sneak something past editors that you figured they would have changed?
Did a story about two years ago on Christmas charities and managed to sneak in an interview with a local DSA historian about how holiday charity can be traced back to the gilded age as a bone thrown to the starving masses so they wouldn't revolt. That was pretty good.
So how do editors ultimately get hired and controlled if they're the ones that end up doing the significant ideological duties? I would imagine it's a combination of finding people who genuinely believe in a more agreeable ideology and then giving them a broad set of guidelines that they will correctly interpret along ideological lines, but maybe it's more overt.
No you've got about the size of it. Star reporters who agree with the publisher's views get promoted to editor, everyone else stays put or leaves. I've had a publisher straight up tell me before that they won't publish something I wrote because they'd lose subscriptions over it, though.
Very interesting.
It's like that in other professional fields as well. That's essentially the point of graduate schools and professional selection processes, to narrow down potential representatives to those who will be ideologically compliant without explicitly stating that this is the point.
And what happens to the rest of us who won’t tow the line? We just drink ourselves to death or slave away forever as members of the lower class i guess…. I hate this world
-
What do you think of the official podcast of this forum, Citations Needed?
-
Do cop associations and local business associations write into you guys to cover certain stories? Like certain stories about how workers don't want to work and just want to collect unemployment? Or stories about how a streak of thefts if destroying local businesses?
-
It's got amazing analysis and critique but it's also about as fun to listen to as the sound of paint drying.
-
Yes. Not so overt, but we're sometimes expected to do "feature" pieces for small business events that are basically just free advertising, and the cops pretty much expect us to always post their crime bulletins and PSAs. Also they get very mad if you write about a crime that happened without quoting them first.
I think the fact that I was raised on public access talk shows makes Citations Needed just scratch this weird itch for me. It's one of the few podcasts that I'm actually engaged with when I'm listening.
Same. I can’t stand the podcasts where all the dudes fart and burp into mics, but Citations Needed is just right.
I listen to WTYP and Citations Needed so that covers all my bases pretty well
I listen to Citations Needed when I want to learn and be very engaged. I listen to West Wing Thing if I want something more entertaining, especially when I’m doing a monotonous video game task like grinding or map clearing.
I used to listen to Bad Faith a little bit, but that got exhaustingly liberal and awkward because of Virgil shenanigans.
Luckily Virgil has escaped the third dimension so he's not around making it awkward atm
So you ever get pushback from businesses or cops if you report on them in an unflattering way?
Oh yeah, big time. Almost lost my job once over stepping on the wrong small business owner - and ad space buyer's - toes.
I once had a guy call into a talk show to talk shit about the sponsor and one of the station leads (read: one of the people that all the boomers know and love because they hear from them almost every day) got on the phone with the guy to bitch him out, then said if he ever wanted to be able to call again he needed to go on and apologize on air. Someone also once said the n word on air, but the reaction to that was less severe
-
From a minimal experience in a news room, every shift would start with calling to check at the end of the cops’ shift to see if anything had happened overnight. They’d often fax press releases that would just be reworded slightly to be less info-dump-y
-
Have you actually picked up story ideas from here? lmao
What are typical ways in which editors "liberalize" stories?
Yes; actually I sent a DM to that guy who was here a month ago talking about how MidAmerica Energy is one bad blizzard away from having its entire network go down, but he never got back to me.
A good example of "liberalization" in my own work is from when the pandemic started, I wrote a feature piece on the history of mutual aid and brought up Kropotkin, Goldman, etc. All such references were removed and replaced with a general allusion to "reformers."
Unfortunately, I'm sure that's on the more benign side of things feditors do to articles. :agony-shivering:
In your experience, were your editors true believers in the company line, just trying to avoid a red scarce shit storm, or cynically manipulating a narrative? Are the larger organizations, like NYT, more cynical than organizations with less reach?
I've never worked for NYT so I can't say about them, but most of the time its a combo of being true believers and wanting to avoid controversy. Controversy can lose you subscriptions, which can hurt the paper's bottom line.
What does the editor say when you bring a piece like that? Do they explicitly say that our readers won't like mentions of Kropotkin so you have to take it out?
Yeah. The exact quote my editor gave me on that one is "I'm worried readers will think you have an agenda above just telling the story."
Like no shit Sherlock, how am I gonna talk about an explicitly political topic without bringing the originators of that political movement's agenda into it?
:blob-no-thoughts: "Sweaty that's biased reporting! True news is completely unbiased and detached from reality."
Well if you want to DM me about what you'd want people to know about I'd be happy to look into it. I don't know if I'd personally be able to do a write-up on your situation unless you're in my coverage area, but I could definitely pass a tip along to some labor reporters I keep in touch with.
Yeah for sure, that last bit especially sounds like something that could make a good exposé. Send me a message whenever you get your thoughts together and I'll start browsing r/employedbykohls in the meantime.
Damn that all sounds bleak. I'll definitely see if either I can get on it or maybe have someone more specialized in labor reporting to take a look. Stay strong in the meanwhile comrade. Quit, if you're able, do a half ass job if you can't :fidel-salute-big:
All the time. The editorial process-cum-consent manufacturing machine starts with choosing what reporters get to write about and what they don't.
Most recently I was told I couldn't write about the Nabisco strike because it "wouldn't move the needle with our audiance."
Surely "moving the needle" doesn't come from pandering to your existing audience but by providing content that reaches new audiences you haven't acquired already. Isn't this why RT is doing so well? It provides a huge range of content that appeals to very different audiences and they all watch it for very different reasons.
Sounds like a bullshit excuse for an ideologically motivated decision to not cover the strike.
Sounds like a bullshit excuse for an ideologically motivated decision to not cover the strike.
Partially, but it's also a market decision. If the majority of your readership is suburban professional class libs and petty bourg republicans, you need to give them the right slop or they'll take their snouts elsewhere.
So give them that slop, appeal to their class interests.
If your coverage is anti-union to an audience of petty-boug shits, it will still have the effect of increasing class war. It will provide fuel that the left will use to illustrate the oppression they're under and it will serve to highlight the media is not on their side.
I'm not so sure that softening things helps. If the working class gets attacked then the working class will attack back, a lot of the reason that things don't escalate is because everything is kept at a slow-cook. There's no big catalysts that truly motivate and fuel people to fight.
Believe me, if I could tell my editor to go fuck himself without getting fired and cover whatever the hell I wanted, I would. But until my newsroom is unionized, and that's a slow-moving work in progress, it's leverage I don't really have. It's my personal complicity in maintaining the status quo.
How homogenous would you say journalism is at the moment? I was surprised when I worked at a place with a newsroom just how much of my local news is just reworded off the AP feed
AP gets all the best hints and has all the best institutional connections, so they're always first on a story. A lot of places would rather just copy them instead of paying a reporter to take the time to do an independent story.
It'll collapse along with all the other imperial institutions in due time.
Have you ever bullied the weasels who write the passive voice police blotter?
Passive voice is pretty much enforced on everything to do with cops. "Accusing" cops of something in the active voice without absolute rock solid proof is a good way to get threatened with a libel suit.
Weasels. I hate it.
Cops fire gun, people get hit by bullet. Related? Maybe.
Saying "a police officer allegedly shot someone" isn't really the issue. It's that the cops get pissy about reporters writing that they've shot someone, even allegedly, before they've had a chance to get out in front of it with their own "context" and official statements. Push too hard and you could get sued, or lose access to sources, or even get your ass beat. It's a hard hurdle to jump unless you happen to be there filming as the cop shoots someone. It's why cops have started arresting reporters at protests or getting chud local governments to throw out press privileges when covering the cop beat.
Well, this is a big question, but how does the acceptable narrative get dictated down to the people that actually write the stories? I might be asking too much.
You've got it reversed, at least in my experience. A lot of stories start more radical or at least more pointed initially, then get defanged and liberalified by editors. Editors are the middle managers of any newsroom. They're the ones who get pressured to tow the company line. And if you have a reporter who isn't willing to play ball with the editor's - and thus the publisher's - decisions, you just get fired. I've been fired for that before.
In what sense do they even give you the choice to not play ball with the editors? It would seem like once you hand the story off to an editor they would do what they want and publish it however it is.
It depends on the editor really, and how big the newsroom is and if its a union shop or not. In some situations you can haggle about what you want to keep or even just straight up demand it if you've got some other reporters to back you up. But that's rare. Most of the time you're at their good graces about what ends up in front of people's eyes, and all you can really say is pretty please, don't gut my article sir.
What's an example of a story that starts pointed but gets defanged?
Once wrote an article about a guy who got charged with assaulting a cop because as he was getting arrested on a DUI he accidentally stepped on the cop's foot. What I wrote wasn't flattering to the cop, who has a history of complaints against him. My language about "John Doe getting criminal battery for scuffing a cop's kicks" got changed to "local man was given a criminal battery charge on top of his DUI charge after police reported he tried to stomp on their feet."
I would ask what is to be done but we already know :lenin-shining:
Is Nightcrawler real?
Ever had to report on China?
Edit: How many people you work with think they're doing a Spotlight (2015)?
I genuinely love learning about shit going on and writing about it. And pinning some asshole small business owner or politician against the wall for something they did or said is fun too. Plus I'm gay and I grew up in a trade union house. Being gay in the white-boomer-guy trades is something I'd like to avoid.
How does the type of "country the US government hates did an obviously good thing but at what cost?" type of articles get born? Like the majority just accepts that this is a good look for a news site/tv/radio channel/paper?
Some of it is chasing AP and Reuters, who 100% get tips from state department / 3-letter agency sources, but a lot of it is just the unexamined American chauvanism of most outlets. American exceptionalism is a bipartisan feature of the ruling class, who buy the papers, who hire publishers who agree with them, who hire editors who agree with them.
What exactly qualifies as a midsize newsroom? Something national but not like the NYT/WSJ or the channels you listed?
I assume small would be local papers/stations
I work for an outlet that's big enough to do coverage in a couple nearby towns, but not big enough to be known outside of the region. That's kind of how I'd define midsize. Then you've got stuff like the Tribune family of papers and Patch where you've basically got bureaus all over the country but still don't have the name recognition of like CNN or the NYT.
