Mass Media and Politics

Fascinating research has emerged that has hinted that widespread misinformation about the coronavirus, especially from conservative leaning outlets, led to a weakened response to the pandemic and potentially more spread than would have occurred without. Since the start of the pandemic, Fox News has certainly had much to say in that regard. Whether it was downplaying the pandemic's severity, opposing mask usage and social distancing protocols, or generally advising that Americans need not worry about COVID-19, the studies that will emerge on the effects of these messages will certainly be interesting. Special attention should be paid to the channel's coverage of Anthony Fauci. Ever since Fauci emerged as a sometimes oppositional voice to that of former President Donald Trump's, he became the target of ferocious conservative criticism. Even today, long after Fauci has been a visible enemy to Donald Trump, Fox News runs negative stories about him regularly.  A quick search of ...

 "Before I took office, I promised I help was the on the way. Just three months in, I'm proud to..." blah blah blah... "Here's the deal: Wall Street didn't build this country..." blah blah blah... Several weeks in Joe Biden's presidency, we have now come to terms with a crucial fact - The President's twitter feed no longer makes news. I don't mean this as a criticism of President Biden. Rather, I simply mean to point out that gone are the days of the news cycle relying so heavily upon the Twitter feed of one man. For nearly four years, political reporters needed only to head to Twitter.com to hunt down their latest story, because the chances were good that Trump had just tweeted it out for them. Now, journalists who became dependent on this method are having to get creative, because as you can see from the sample above, Biden's tweets are simply not newsworthy. They are your typical, professional tweets that we came to know in the Obama y...

 In January, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell story that former President Trump had urged an investigator to "find the fraud" in Georgia in an effort to alter his loss to President Biden in the state. They ran this juicy quote in their headline and stuck it in their lead, only to have to issue an embarrassingly long correction two months later that they had misquoted the former President in their story after an audio tape was released. There are a few points that need to be made in light of this correction. Immediately after it was ran, everybody jumped all over the Post, and they deserve criticism of course. However, before we get into the original mistake, it is important to remember that the criticism needs to be in fact of the original error, and not of the large correction itself. We should be glad that one of the nation's largest newspapers would correct a major aspect of a bombshell story in the first place. A much worse alternative would be if our mainstrea...

After over two months of waiting, the media finally got its chance to have a formal press conference with President Biden. The lack of a press conference turned into a mini-scandal of sorts, especially on right wing media outlets, but also mainstream media as well. As a result, you might expect that the DC press corps would come armed with a wide range of questions that produce valuable, insightful answers from the new President about the many problems facing the country. But the press conference was a boring, barely newsworthy affair that's most reported on answer involved the horserace politics of an election four years away.  The new President simply was somehow not asked about the pandemic that has dominated the news cycle for the last year. Instead, the majority of the questions centered on the surge of people arriving at the border from Central America. Immigration and border stories are important, and the problem isn't that he should not have been asked about that. But s...

Protests are among the most powerful ways that citizens express their discontent with those in power. It follows that stories and coverage of protests are an essential and powerful form of reporting that can help people understand the events on the ground where protests unfold. But reporting from protests is also one of the more hazardous places for a journalist to be. Throughout last summer, we saw attacks and arrests increase starkly against journalists doing the important work of covering protests on the ground. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker reported a significant uptick in these incidents, and we even saw the dramatic scenarios play out on TV.  CNN's Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television in Minneapolis last summer. This highly publicized event brought to the spotlight the real risks that protest reporters undertake when bringing these important stories. This of course plays out internationally as well. Over the last two months, violent clashes between protestors and the...

 Since 2004, more than 2000 local newspapers have gone out of business. Readership of local papers has plummeted by millions. More than 2000 counties do not have even have a daily paper in circulation . This problem is well documented, but Americans and the media class are still trying to grapple with the powerful loss of local community journalism that we have seen in this century. As the business model has waffled and the papers shut down, Americans have increasingly had to rely upon national publications for their news, or their own curated newsfeeds with content from hundreds of sources that may not adhere to journalistic principles. As a result, everyone has become more disconnected. Americans on either side of important issues no longer understand each other. They see each other as the characterizations that are often presented on cable news, and not as the real people in their communities that may have a nuanced opinion about one of the many defining, complex issues of life ...