Posted By Ruth King on December 19th, 2020
The smart people at Harvard’s Nieman Lab want you to know that reporting on crime is really just another way of perpetuating white supremacy.
Among the many things 2020 has helped clarify is that journalism, particularly the journalism practiced by the corporate media, is in bad shape. From the media’s coverage of impeachment (remember that?), to the presidential election, to the pandemic and the riots and everything else, it has become painfully obvious that the establishment press isn’t interested in journalism as such, but in woke political activism and race hustling.
The media reckoning that came and went
Plus: The New York Post works to destroy trust in journalism, and Public Media for All.
By The Objective Staff Dec. 18, 2020, 12:15 p.m.
Dec. 18, 2020, 12:15 p.m.
Editor’s note: The Front Page is a biweekly newsletter from The Objective, a publication that offers reporting, first-person commentary, and reported essays on how journalism has misrepresented or excluded specific communities in coverage, as well as how newsrooms have treated staff from those communities. We happily share each issue with Nieman Lab readers.
It’s
Friday, December 18th.
This time on The Front Page: The media reckoning that came and went, The New York Post works to destroy trust in journalism, and a shitty media man in Pittsburgh.
Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?
It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but years, and in some cases decades of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. After all that, the ending is likely to be a carefully negoti
Defund the crime beat
The title of this post is the title of this potent posting authored by Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli at the NeimanLab site. Here is how it starts (with links from the original):
Let’s be honest: Crime coverage is terrible.
It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve. And because it so rarely meets the public’s needs, it’s almost never newsworthy, despite what Grizzled Gary in his coffee-stained shirt says from his perch at the copy desk.
This should be the year where we finally abolish the crime beat. Study after study shows how the media’s overemphasis on crime makes people feel less safe than they really are and negatively shapes public policy around the criminal–legal system. And study after study shows that it’s racist and inhumane.