Archive for February, 2009
Friday, February 27th, 2009 by Joe Torres
“Do you know what your paper published about Cesar Chavez’s birthday?” a Latino leader asked John Temple, the editor, publisher and president of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado.
“No,” Temple replied.“That parking was free downtown. That’s it.”It was one of many tough questions Temple would field from the Latino community during a 2003 town hall meeting the paper co-sponsored with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
Under the leadership of its president Juan Gonzalez, NAHJ had launched an ambitious effort in 2002 to increase the presence of Latinos in newsrooms across the country as a means of improving coverage of the community. At the time, I was the Association’s deputy director who helped to launch the initiative, called the Parity Project.
The Parity Project partnered with news organizations that struggled to recruit Latino journalists and to cover the community. The Rocky Mountain News was the first news organization to join the initiative, which called for its partners to hold a town hall meeting with the community and to form an advisory board.
For years, Denver’s Latino leaders had been angry with the paper for its poor coverage of the community and for its conservative editorial positions. But following that contentious town hall, Temple led an effort to forge a new relationship.
He created an advisory board, doubled the number of Latinos on staff in just two years, met regularly with Latino leaders and developed a true partnership with the community. As a result, coverage of Latinos improved. Quickly.
The paper believed in quality journalism and the obligation to serve the public good.Temple and his staff have made a real difference in the both the city’s Latino community and the entire city.
But today, the Rocky printed its last edition. Despite efforts to save it, the paper’s owner, E.W. Scripps, announced it was shutting down the publication that has been in existence for nearly 150 years.
The closing of the Rocky is a terrible day for the Latino community, but a worse day for Colorado and for a newspaper industry spiraling deeper into crisis. Our country and our democracy need journalists and editors like John Temple and the staff of the Rocky.
Let’s hope we see their bylines again soon.
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Friday, February 20th, 2009 by Joe Torres
Did the mainstream press cover 2008’s historic presidential election with an eye toward examining race relations in America in a fair, accurate and thoughtful manner? Survey says: “No.”
An astounding 92 percent of journalists of color polled for a new survey believe the mainstream media did not effectively cover race relations during the election. The survey was conducted and released this week by the African-American news Web site, The Loop 21, and UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc.
The press’ coverage of race relations during the election was the topic of a panel discussion I took part in yesterday that included Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, CNN political pundit Leslie Sanchez, moderator Ed Gordon, formerly of NPR, and other journalists of color.
My take on whether coverage of the election illuminated the issues for people of color or provided thoughtful treatment of issues important to people of color? Again, no.
We learned little from the media about substantive issues affecting the lives of African-Americans and Latinos. When the media did focus on race during the election, it too often spun its wheels rehashing stereotypical themes and questions that distracted from real underlying issues facing our communities.
The result? Coverage that was distracting and vapid: Is Obama black enough? (Or, is he too black?) Will whites vote for a black candidate? Will Latinos vote for a black candidate? Do black churches preach hate speech? And on and on …
The media’s failure to seize the opportunity presented by the candidacy — and subsequent election — of its first black president to explore issues affecting people of color was a disappointment to say the least.
Sadly, a part of me was relieved that Obama did not often address race in his campaign because the media would likely have handled it irresponsibly. The issue here is not deliberate distortion on the part of individual journalists, but something broader and systemic.
Much of the problem stems from the fact that people of color do not control the mass dissemination of their images. Too often, other people tell their story and get it wrong. This misrepresentation of our lives and issues causes great harm. The misguided and sensationalistic media coverage of immigration issues this past year is just one example of the troubling outcome of our lack of representation in our nation’s newsrooms.
Again, journalists don’t deserve all the blame for poor coverage of communities of color. Journalists increasingly work in a media environment that is not supportive of quality journalism. Media companies are controlled by owners who care more about the bottom line than serving the public interest. In many cases, these giant media companies have burdened their news operations with massive debt as they expanded beyond their means and bought up more and more media outlets. In seeking to shore up their bank accounts, these huge conglomerates have jettisoned quality journalism to serve us junk news and tired old scripts that are cheap to package and produce.
The trend toward consolidation, fueled by bad business decisions and poor government policy, has hit journalists especially hard. Consolidation has led to record layoffs in recent years. And in a related trend that does nothing to boost race relations coverage, more journalists of color are leaving newsrooms than entering them, while minority ownership of media outlets continues its downward spiral.
While debating coverage of the presidential election is important for improving media coverage, journalists have to advocate for media policies that support and reward quality journalism, not destroy it. Maybe then, we will see issues like race relations receive the coverage they deserve. Let’s hope.
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Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by Megan Tady
There’s a changing media landscape in Washington, and it doesn’t bode well for the public.
As I reported last week, media companies across the country have scaled back their D.C. staff and even closed their Washington bureaus, getting rid of the reporters who covered policy and politicians from a local angle.
This week, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and journalist Tyler Marshall issued a report offering new evidence that a watchdog press corps covering the issues that matter to local folks miles from the capital is disappearing fast.The three-month study assessing the changing nature of journalism and national news reporting from D.C. reached three conclusions:
- Since the 1980s, the number of newspapers covering Congress has fallen by two-thirds.
- Narrowly focused special interest or niche media, such as newsletters and specialty newspapers, have taken the place of the mainstream press.
- Foreign media outlets have dramatically increased in Washington.
The report’s biggest takeaway isn’t the number of journalists who have been pulled from the D.C. beat; rather, “The real story is in where those journalists work and the kind of coverage they are providing.”
The implications of specialty publications and newsletters outnumbering newspapers that serve local interests are serious. Communities no longer have scouts watching out for their best interests in the heart of the political establishment. With fewer reporters sending stories back home about their communities’ elected officials, holding those officials accountable becomes increasingly difficult. With fewer reporters following the trail of corporate lobbyists, holding corporations accountable becomes nearly impossible.
The report put it this way: “Elites who are plugged into the new fragmented niche media of Washington will know how that government is growing and what it means, and they will be learning it through new media channels. Their fellow citizens who rely on local or network television or their daily newspapers, however, will be harder pressed to learn what their elected representatives are doing.”
In other words, our media system is becoming more class-based than ever, allowing only the people in-the-know, with the dough, to stay informed.
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Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 by Josh Stearns
About five months ago, when the first of the big national banks began to buckle under their own weight, fanning the flames of the already smoldering economic crisis, a new idiom was born: “Too big to fail.”
Phrases like this are pure marketing genius. Meant to hint at fault (“oops, we probably should have been watching those banks a little more carefully”) and, at the same time, to reassure (“but don’t worry, we’ll fix it”) – what they do best is focus attention on one kind of problem while concealing another. Hidden behind the platitude of companies being “too big to fail” is the fact that our country – indeed, our democracy – is threatened by companies that are too big not to fail.
Over the past year, the newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that have been reporting on the economic crisis have been experiencing that crisis firsthand. In between the headlines of bank bailouts and auto company loans, the news of a news industry in crisis has been pushed below the fold. But while the crisis in our nation’s newsrooms has not topped lawmakers’ economic policy agendas it has been no less destructive to the national interest.
The massive media consolidation that began in the 1980s and escalated throughout the 1990s was often justified by Big Media executives as a way to cut costs and maximize profits for shareholders whose only measure of success was the bottom line, not the byline. This cost-cutting almost always meant job-cutting, and so, as Big Media companies got even bigger, their capacity to meet the needs of a changing nation shrank.
Fast forward to 2008: Amid the news of failing banks are numerous failing newspapers, a bankrupt Tribune Co., an indebted New York Times. Radio giant Clear Channel has been shedding stations and just announced it is cutting roughly 7 percent of its work force – the same percentage that TV conglomerate Viacom cut earlier in December.
The same sort of deregulatory policies that let Bank of America and Citigroup buy up local banks allowed companies like Tribune and Viacom to take over local stations and create a near-monopoly over the public’s airwaves. The same laissez-faire policies that fostered the financial crisis have left our media system unfit to adequately cover it.
There are many indications that this financial crisis was exacerbated by media that did not adequately fulfill their duty to hold the powerful accountable and to inform the public as the crisis unfolded. As they had with climate change and the war in Iraq, Big Media missed the boat.
For years, we have been saying that Big Media are a bad idea, and now, it would seem that even Big Media would agree. But the struggles facing Big Media do not mean success for media reformers. To be clear, Big Media is still very big, and where they are failing, that failure is hurting local communities and endangering democratic discourse and freedom of the press.
As Big Media companies shed employees, close local bureaus, replace investigative journalism and in-depth debate with shouting pundits and celebrity gossip, our communities are left with less local news and critical analysis of the issues facing us all. While Big Media may be too big to succeed, quality journalism truly is too big – that is to say, too important – to fail.
It’s time to stop the slide of our country’s media. We need a media system that invests in the kind of journalism that doesn’t just report on problems after they happen, but helps us understand them as they develop and even finds solutions. We need to shore up and support news that educates and informs, and to protect the newsgathering and analysis our communities need. We must realize that core national ideal of a free press that inspired the pluralistic, local and diverse media system our founders originally imagined.
But to get there, we need to revisit the deeply flawed policies that allowed Big Media to get so big in the first place. We need to say no to decades of deregulation run amok, to put a stop to the colossal mismanagement that brought us to this sorry state. We need to come together to establish policies that support new models, put journalists back to work, and fix our broken media system. The time is now, the need is urgent.
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