Sam Cooke sang “A Change is Gonna Come” nearly sixty years ago. The song has been used on occasion as a kind of melancholic anthem for the civil rights movement in this country, though the lyrics always spoke to me in a more intimate way, addressing broken family bonds that maybe could not be mended.
Today, I invoke it because I see a change in mainstream media reporting on a host of issues that I believe have driven millions of Americans to seize on Fox News and other imitators as an alternate source for their news. Speaking of the 1960s again, “alternative media” in those days meant Left-leaning weeklies, often distributed free, just dropped in bundles in restaurant lobbies and at Progressive bookstores, but it’s been clear to me, at least, that Fox News has become the alternative to mainstream media in the last 20 years or so.
Studies have repeatedly shown that crime and immigration are two of the most important issues that trouble many Americans, year in and year out. These are main themes for Fox and it’s paid off for them. The economy may be the number one issue overall for most Americans, and education and health would often round out the top five concerns, with a strong military, the environment, and terrorism also near the top. Not every survey will give the same results, and here’s a recent one from Gallup – it doesn’t quite match up with what I’m writing here, but it’s “close enough for government work,” as the old saying goes.
The big changes in mainstream reporting that I now see are particularly evident in reporting on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, but also crime in general, the border crisis as it relates to immigration and undocumented migrants; and differing opinions of the best Covid-19 policies going forward. I’m speaking mostly of broadcast news, free streaming services, and the daily press here, not necessarily cable news channels other than Fox.
It is NOT that mainstream media sites are adopting Fox News slants in toto, but they are recognizing that there are different legitimate points of view on a host of issues that they must acknowledge.
The Biden administration has now been challenged almost everywhere on what it is doing – or can do – about the crisis at the border. Even the willingness of more media to use the world “crisis” is progress. Last year almost all the reporting in mainstream media and legacy broadcast outlets about border crossings was all about the nastiness of Donald Trump’s wall and other actions, mostly at the expense of any real discussion as to what could be done better. I am not the only one to suggest that media outlets saw it as their obligation to stop Trump above all else rather than just giving the public all the information it might need to decide for themselves.
Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of the Leftwing news site The Intercept, is routinely misunderstood in his attacks on mainstream media and for his appearances on Fox News. He has written expertly on just what mainstream media was doing last year – they were trying to destroy Trump above all other traditional media imperatives. Greenwald has dismayed many of his earlier followers, who were mostly Progressive, yet no one seems to appreciate that his argumentation is classically Marxist – he understands that the sons and daughters of the petit bourgeoisie, which in and of itself can be considered the leading criminal class in America (in classical Marxist thinking) was just trying to protect itself in attacking Trump. I went to the University of Chicago, a Left-leaning university in the 1960s, and one of my roommates was an active member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and another was highly active in what was then known as the Catholic Liberation movement, and while I did not know Bill Ayers, I can say that I knew people who knew him. I see very clearly what Greenwald is doing; I don’t know why his erstwhile supporters don’t see it, except it suggests that maybe they were never authentically Progressive.
The Russiagate debacle – the media’s obsession with believing every suspicion about Trump and collusion with Russia – was a real tragedy for America. It put a hypersensitive, egotistical and defensive personality like Donald Trump on high alert, and so much of his presidency was consumed by fighting back in a fight he didn’t necessarily start instead of, you know, actually leading the country. I’m a “never Trumper” and am very alarmed that he won in 2016, and that even more Americans voted for him in 2020. Was this due to his nativist and populist appeals, or his outsized, bombastic personality, or was it that the mainstream media so offended so many Americans?
I thought to write this specific newsletter after seeing a more nuanced conversation on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial – but only after the trial was aired live, and after he got off – in which many media outlets admitted that his “crossing state lines” only meant travelling about 30 miles to a home where he’d previously lived and where his father was said to still live, and only after someone actually read what Wisconsin law said about actions that Rittenhouse committed. I think the relevant Wisconsin laws are dangerous if not downright wrong, but any court reporter or public safety reporter should have read the law before the media convicted him a priori. This was a major failure of most media.
I still don’t trust Rittenhouse’s motive for going to Kenosha or his statements after he got off, but the media severely damaged its credibility.
There has been less progress in reporting on our nation’s Covid response, but there has been some. The big debate of late, before the new Omicron variant was identified, was the wisdom of vaccinating young children. The evidence for vaccinating children internationally is quite mixed, and only recently do I see much of this acknowledged in the mainstream media I follow. (I am fully vaccinated, and am happy I don’t have to make the decision to vaccinate my grandchildren or not.)
The progress in crime reporting on the national level has been striking, though still mixed. Crime reporting is always stronger in local newspapers and local TV stations than in national outlets – this has been known for a long time, and I’ve written about this before in Quill, the official magazine of the Society of Professional journalists.
Nonetheless, there seemed to be a near total blackout on crime reporting at the national level after George Floyd; it wasn’t just the common though not universal pretense that all the political protests were peaceful but you’d think no crime was happening anywhere at all. Slowly, as this year went on, we saw more reporting in national news about the rapidly increasing and often record levels of murders in America. Why? People care about crime – especially murder and other violent crimes – and the media once again seems to be willing to address these concerns, not hide from them.
Ditto for lesser crimes in general. For many months we were told that crime overall was down (not including murder) without ever acknowledging that many prosecutors across the country were refusing to prosecute what they saw as minor crimes, and the strong suspicion that many police were not bothering to make arrests in the first place. Look up the closure of nearly 20 Walgreens drug stores in San Francisco because no one will enforce shoplifting laws, for example, or a Marion County, Indiana prosecutor’s refusal to enforce what he deems low-level drug law violations. Only now, with the recent rash of organized “smash and grab” burglaries in places where citizens congregate to shop, are we seeing crimes other than murders or mass shootings being reported on the national level. The following is a truism: people care about crime where they are, whether that’s at home or out and about.
I don’t want to say that bad news is good news, only that mainstream media seems to be moving back to its historic function, providing news and information that most Americans want and need. There is a place for advocacy and even agenda setting – we used to call that the op-ed pages in daily newspapers or weekly newsmagazines, and one can find opposing opinion pieces online, but broadcast news and streaming services have seemed more inclined to be in the infotainment business, willing to gin up the public to get eyeballs for their advertisers. The growing popularity of the relaunched Newsy free on-air news site, run by Scripps, shows that some media managers have stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the wind is blowing today. Maybe we’re returning to some kind of normalcy by moving closer to the center, where most citizens live. If so, I can only hope that Fox News also moves back to the center, or closer to it.
(This is a corrected version of what was posted Sunday, Nov. 29. Wisconsin is substituted for Michigan.)
How do you see the role of "public" broadcasting in all these? NPR, PBS?