Who needs reporters?

This title of an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in the June 1 New York Times caught my eye, since I sometimes serve in the role of reporter. But it also raises an important issue we all should address: the role of reporting the news in order to hold leaders of various kinds accountable to their constituents.

Bruni notes that in recent months, Michele Bachmann, Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton used carefully made online videos to make important announcements.

You may ask, What’s the big deal? It’s one more example of politicians trying to control their image so they look good. And it follows the example of corporate America, which has been doing this for a long time.

“But corporations answer only to shareholders and customers,” Bruni writes. “Politicians answer to all of us, and have a scarier kind of power, easily abused. So we must see them in environments that aren’t necessarily tailored to their advantage.”

Someone needs to point out where the Emperor has no clothes. Someone needs to question the pretense or the image being manufactured. These leaders are accountable to us citizens? The Fourth Estate (the press) is one major way they are held accountable.

Such need for accountability applies to many other contexts, including Mennonite congregations, conferences and Mennonite Church USA. We are to hold each other accountable, by whatever method works best. That aligns with the Anabaptist “rule of Christ” (Matthew 18:15-20).

Unfortunately, reporters are becoming a rarer breed and losing influence. An editorial called “Empty Calories” in the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review, addresses the growing popularity of social media for getting news.

The Pew Research Center reports that 72 percent of all U.S. adults say the most common way they hear about news from family and friends is through “word of mouth.” And 23 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say they primarily get news from family and friends via social media.

Many people get their news from social media, from bloggers and those who scrape together items from various sources. But what kind of news are they getting? How do they know what’s true? asks the editorial. “How can they get beyond the superficial updates about Justin Bieber’s monkey or Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy?”

As “more and more journalism shops that underwrite enterprise reporting are starting to lock their wares behind paywalls,” says the editorial, “someday, in the not-too-distant future, it seems, there will be very little credible news for the bloggers and scrapers to aggregate.”

A key word there is “credible.” Reporters are trained to ask probing questions and get quotes from various perspectives in order to try to get as accurate as possible description of an event.

Social media may provide this at times, but how do we know? Or do we just go to those sources who agree with our point of view? This is what Eli Pariser has called a “filter bubble.”

Too much of what’s out there, says the editorial, consists of “empty calories.” But “general-interest media, at least, take [readers] beyond the bubble (they might come for Kim but then discover Syria).”

As we seek to find what’s credible and hold our leaders accountable, let’s pay close attention to the news we consume and where it comes from.

We all need reporters.

Only the news that's allowed

I imagine few of you read Columbia Journalism Review, which I receive at work and which is a key periodical in my profession as a journalist. This mag offers insights into trends in the industry and uncovers interesting stories of journalists and their work.

One point CJR makes often is that the industry has changed dramatically over the years in ways that have serious consequences for our citizenry and learning the truth about what’s happening in our country and around the world. For example, here’s a quote from CJR I’m using in the magazine I help edit, The Mennonite (in our August issue, page 11): “Six companies dominate TV news, radio, online, movies and publishing. Another eight or nine control most of the nation’s newspapers.”

What this means is that for much of what you read in these media, “the news that’s fit to print” (the tagline for the New York Times) means the news that won’t hurt the business of the corporation that runs that news outlet. There are alternative sources of news out there, but they don’t reach many people, and their funds are limited.

Anyway, the July/August issue of CJR offers an example of this in a story called “Cell Coverage.” CJR’s Alysia Santo interviews Paul Wright, who began his journalism career behind bars. He spent 17 years in prison and was released in 2003. While in Washington State’s prison system, he co-founded Prison Legal News.

PLN began as a 10-page newsletter but is now a 56-page monthly magazine (hmm, just like The Mennonite) with subscribers in all 50 states and several other countries.

In the interview, Wright tells how he came to start this newsletter. He says he was surprised by the treatment of prisoners and decided that “regardless of what I’d been convicted of, I deserved to be treated better than I was.”

Wright studied law in prison and filed complaints about the violence and racism he witnessed. In 1990, he witnessed a beating of a black inmate by white guards and wrote press releases about it to all the media outlets he knew but got no response. So he ran the story in PLN, and prison officials “infracted” him for “lying” about staff. Later they put him in solitary confinement.

Wright says: “One of the ironies was that I got no media interest in the beatings themselves, but my being retaliated against for writing about the beatings made it to the front page of The Seattle Times.”

He says one of the reasons he started PLN was to make people aware of what happens in American prisons, which he says is “pretty indefensible.” He says he can only try to make people aware of what’s going on. “If people don’t care about it once they know, I can’t do anything about apathy. But I can do something about ignorance.”

Wright talks about private companies profiting from using prison labor, including some of the world’s largest. “Microsoft and Starbucks used prison labor for packaging,” he says. “Boeing had prisoners making aircraft parts. Planet Hollywood, Eddie Bauer and Union Bay were all using prisoners as garment manufacturers. The height of irony was when Nintendo was using inmates at Twin Rivers Correction Center, which houses Washington’s sex-offender treatment program, to package children’s video games.”

In 1994, Wright says, a conservative Republican named Jack Metcalf was running for Congress in the district where Wright was in prison. Metcalf campaigned on being tough on crime and supporting the death penalty. But he was using a company that employed prisoners to do his telemarketing.

Wright called a lawyer friend who had media contacts about running a story about this. But The Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer said this was not a noteworthy issue. So two alternative papers, Counter-Punch and The Stranger, broke the story a week after the election. Eventually it became a page one story in The Seattle Times.

Let me add one more of Wright’s stories, and then I’ll stop.

In 2007, PLN settled a censorship lawsuit against the state of California. But when Wright talked to the Los Angeles court reporter for the LA Times, he said, “Well, we don’t really think this is of interest to our readers.” Wright points out to him that “Los Angeles County sends more people to prison than any other county in California, so surely those prisoners have family members that are going to be affected by these changes.” The reporter says, “That’s not really our advertising demographic.”

There it is in a nutshell. It’s about the money and about what’s good for the corporation that owns the media outlet. I know there are many dedicated reporters that want to break such stories, but in many cases their hands are tied. The advertisers pay the bill and get to make the rules. It used to be that subscribers paid the bill, but too few people subscribe nowadays.

If you want to take this as encouragement to subscribe to a newspaper, go ahead, though I’m not too hopeful. If you want to take this as encouragement to dig for sources that tell us what’s happening to mostly voiceless people such as prisoners, please do. Dig.