I’m looking at what other journalists are saying about the failings of journalism in What I’m Reading Wednesdays - or WIRW, which, when you say it out loud, sounds astonishingly like Scooby Doo.
We’ll start with Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information. He and his team do incredible investigative reporting, and highlight issues the New York Times or Washington Post often ignore.
What I like about Legum is he doesn’t just write about an issue once. He updates when something new happens. This is something journalists have been taught not to do, as we define “news” as “something we haven’t reported on before, or at least lately.” My view is if a story is worth telling, it’s still worth telling when a new development occurs. That also helps audiences engage more with the issue.
This week, Popular Information ran an update on the story of Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old indigenous woman who was walking home along Highway 93 in Montana after a futile search to find a lost cell phone when she was struck and killed by a 28-year-old woman, who then drove away with her two children - a 4-year-old named Aryan and a 2-year-old named Nation.
The update is about a police investigation that seems to be going nowhere, and white a white cop who can’t fathom why Westwolf’s parents, their attorney and tribal leaders want him to investigate whether the hit-and-run was an intentional hate crime.
Legum talked to people from Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA (MMIWUSA), who noted that women living on reservations are almost 10 times more likely to be murdered than white women, and their cases often languish with police forces who are either bad investigators or blame the victim. In this case, both.
Legum also quoted Congressman Jamie Raskin, who, in a 2022 hearing on missing and murdered indigenous women, said, "The neglect shown by the media toward cases involving missing and murdered women of color is a primary reason that this epidemic remains obscure to the public.”
Copaganda!
I’ve written before about Alec Karakatsanis, who is the executive director of The Civil Rights Corps, and writes a newsletter about how the media covers police and public safety policy.
Over the last month, he’s posted a 3-part series on how and why journalists don’t go deep enough to give their readers and listeners a true understanding of police-related issues. He calls this, “The Big Deception,” which he defines as:
“The collective effect of a variety of news media practices… to give people the wrong impressions about why consequential things happen in our society.”
He’s not saying that journalists deceive on purpose - and neither am I. For the most part. But journalists are taught the tools of the trade, not how to think about stories. And, as I have written, approaching a story in a different way than your colleagues can lead to ridicule.
In the first piece in the series, Karakatsis quotes John Ehrlichman - Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel who ended up spending time in prison for Watergate:
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Karakatsanis’ basic argument is that the press ran with the lie in the 1960s and ‘70s, and we still run with the lies we’re told. And politicians need to keep telling the lies to be taken seriously by the news media and get elected. It’s a vicious circle - or should I say, “system” - that keeps real solutions at bay.
It’s a pretty fascinating series. The first piece is linked above. Here is the second piece. And the third.
I do have one niggle with Karatsanis’ argument. He sees intent more than I do. I think that journalists and the people they cover play a game, which have specific rules that we follow without question. Because who wants to buck the system?
White Liberals
Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. wrote a stunning piece on Tuesday about the complicity of white liberals, who are more susceptible to the game-playing that Karakatsanis described. And who fill the very same role, in 2023, that Martin Luther King described in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail 60 years ago.
Bacon was writing about CNN’s Chris Licht, who has been roasted lately for claiming he is a victim of woke cancelation.
But Licht is not that different from Democratic operative James Carville, or “balanced” journalist Chuck Todd, or the New York Times Editorial Board.
Bacon writes:
“People who are not White men sometimes express Licht’s sentiments. (See Democratic Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.) But it’s hard to ignore that the people most invested in these sentiments tend to be White and male. The left-wing movements of the past decade, particularly Black Lives Matter, say America is dominated by white supremacy, patriarchy and out of control capitalism. So it is not surprising that rich White men view these movements, particularly their more radical ideas, with some skepticism.”
Rich white men and the men and women who want to curry their favor, like the (white) New York Times journalists who castigated their critics who pointed out trans bias in the Times’ reporting, by noting, “Your letter appears to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of our responsibilities as journalists.”
I will say this again and again: journalism is not about centering oneself between someone’s humanity and people who will deny them their humanity.
Echoing Karakatsanis (I wonder if he reads his newsletter), Bacon noted:
“It is disappointing that some of the most powerful people in the country think the problem in America is that people are too critical of the police and insufficiently critical of transgender activists.”
A Personal Story
Thanks to readers and generous supporters who keep this Substack going, my girls and I are headed to New York for the Mirror Awards on Monday. The win here is that my daughters get to accompany me to the awards, and be proud of their momma. They get to go to New York for the first time ever. And, these musical theatre kids get to see two Broadway shows.
Thank you all so much.
Follow me on Facebook to see pics.
What I’m reading Wednesdays comes out every… Wednesday… What are you reading? Please send pieces along that you find interesting.