What a sorry spectacle to see America’s First Amendment-privileged press pleading their case to a public that has every right not to trust them.
“We are not the enemy of the people,” Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe’s editorial page, said in explaining her paper’s coordinated effort to have American newspapers editorialize against President Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media.
Whatever happened to the power of the press?
It still exists. But the press isn’t as powerful as it used to be. The arrogance of the major players has taken a hit. It’s easier for the little people to talk back.
One of The New York Times’ most derided “little people” – the son of a Queens developer (Queens!) – got elected president. Trump’s victory took the media by surprise and upended plans for the historic inauguration of the first woman president.
Major media have been on the warpath ever since. The madness won’t stop until Trump leaves office. Then the media will discover that even without Trump’s attacks, the public still doesn’t believe everything they read or hear in the news.
Good.
Americans should be skeptical of the news. Their skepticism serves as a watchdog on journalists – especially the hypocrisy of major players like A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, who recently met with Trump to warn that his “inflammatory language” will lead to violence against journalists.
Too bad Sulzberger can’t show the same concern for the lives of people destined to become crime victims, courtesy of his newspaper’s social justice crusades.
About four years ago, Bill Keller, former editor of the Times, left to join The Marshall Project, a nonprofit created by hedge fund manager and journalist Neil Barsky. The goal of The Marshall Project is criminal justice reform.
“The way to effect change is through high-quality journalism,” said Barsky.
High-quality journalism to effect change. What does that sound like? It’s not fake news but something worse: A news story that appears to be true but is deliberately slanted to favor a cause.
Spend some time at The Marshall Project’s website, and see what kind of change the journalists want to effect. In this world, mass incarceration has nothing to do with crime. Everyone is a victim, including the offenders. Go ahead and let them out. They won’t be moving to Sulzberger’s or Keller’s or Barsky’s neighborhoods. They won’t be selling drugs to their kids or assaulting them or shooting them.
Now consider the relationship between The New York Times and The Marshall Project. The Times – and other newspapers and news organizations, such as NPR – run stories “in partnership” with The Marshall Project. To a casual reader or listener it could appear as if these stories were from a neutral source, such as The Associated Press.
But The Marshall Project clearly has an agenda. It would be more truthful if the Times and other papers ran these stories as advertorials. If that’s too unseemly, then they should at least run a sidebar stating clearly what The Marshall Project’s agenda is. And they should use the word “agenda.”
It’s not that different from native advertising used by the Times and other news organizations. Native advertising is comparable to product placement in movies. A marketer writes copy, and it is visually integrated into the news hole but actually counts as ad space. It is given some slight variation and may include a notice in fine print stating that it was not prepared by the news staff.
While Keller has no problem selling The Marshall Project as journalism, he told Women’s Wear Daily: “For a place like The New York Times to go too far down that road on native advertising would be suicidal.”
Better call the suicide hotline, not only on The Times but NPR as well. Just this weekend on NPR’s “Morning Edition” I heard still another interview on a public radio show with writer Robin DiAngelo, who has written a book called “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.”
The reporter interviewing DiAngelo did not inquire about if, or why, it was any easier for non-whites to talk about racism. That would seem to be a logical question. Instead, the reporter accepted at face value that white people have trouble talking about race.
At the conclusion of this show, there was an acknowledgment of two sponsors – including the Southern Poverty Law Center. That organization has long maintained lists of white “hate groups.” Only after extensive criticism has it recently acknowledged that not all hate groups are white.
Did Southern Poverty Law Center’s sponsorship have anything to do with the reporter’s soft questioning of DiAngelo? To NPR’s credit, it at least acknowledged the sponsorship. It’s left to the listener to question whether it influenced the story.
In newspapers there has always been a symbiotic relationship between the advertising side of the business and the news side. Advertisers provided much of the revenue, and news reporters produced stories that attracted an audience, who would look at the advertisements while reading the news.
Hard to believe now, but back when newspapers were flush and advertising options were limited, there was an old saying: “The advertiser needs the newspaper more than the newspaper needs the advertiser.”
Not only did the Internet change that equation, but today’s advertisers in the media aren’t always selling a tangible product. Some of them are selling an agenda. Some of them are selling a political crusade.
Newspapers are fighting a war on so many fronts: Lack of advertising revenue; more demands from readers who don’t want to pay but want news and video 24/7; competition from social media sites.
Now big media want to drag all newspapers into its editorial protest against Trump.
Newspapers were hurting before Trump became president.
Forget his “enemy of the people.” We need to look at the enemy of the press, and it isn’t Donald Trump. Sometimes it’s other members of the press.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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From the Archives:
I was over to comment on your other article about the protest and saw this. I’ve never heard of native advertising. I have to wonder if I’ve read it and didn’t know it was advertising. Never heard of the Marshall Project either. Thanks for the heads up.
Native advertising has received attention in the journalism trade publications. When I was working on this piece I asked a few people if they had heard of it. One had. Another thought it was like a house ad where a publication advertises itself. Still another thought it was when a business handled its own advertising instead of using an agency. Some people might not care. People have so many distractions now.
There’s so much journalism now designed to sell something.
How come you haven’t mentioned the NY Times anonymous op-ed? I can’t stand Trump, but it looks like the media is out to get him. They know how he’ll react. I wish he’d disappoint them by being quiet.
The New York Times has hated Trump for so long, I don’t pay much attention to what they write about him — especially when it’s by an anonymous author. The Times, and now Bob Woodward, are still trying to playing catch up to Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury.” Wolff had a ring-side seat to Trump’s first nine months in office. While many journalists didn’t take Trump’s campaign seriously and assumed Hillary Clinton would be president, Wolff hung around the Trump campaign. He became such an innocuous presence that after awhile nobody noticed him. He became a highly observant bystander.
Journalism has always had something to sell. It’s just that now it’s often a product, a lifestyle or a political agenda — not information. You need reporters to cover the news, and those jobs are going the way of Oregon’s timber industry.
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