Pushing Against Journalism Systems
Three stories that show lack of fact checking, or outright bias
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle the other night that, “Most systems are broken in some way or another… The question is, how much meanness do you want to have in a system, how much cruelty do you want to have in a system.”
Morris was talking about his new film, “Separated,” which explores Trump’s migrant family separation policy, which reached its peak in the summer of 2018.
More than 1,000 children are still not reunited with their families.
Morris’ film is based off of MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name.
Unsurprisingly, Morris sees the separation of young children from their parents as they escaped violence in Central America to be unspeakably cruel.
So do I.
Morris and Soboroff pointed out that punishing migrants rather than addressing the causes that are making them flee has been U.S. policy since Clinton. Soboroff is clear that the reason Trump had such an easy time turning the cruelty meter up was because the structure was already in place.
But it’s the systems Morris speaks of that I want to address. I’m kind of obsessed with systems. And I think what Morris said about most of them being broken in some way or another makes a lot of sense.
It’s entropy. Any system - a car, a way of working, a clean house - is pushing against some sort of friction that makes it work less than perfectly. That’s why we have maintenance. We’re constantly pushing back against that entropy.
When I write about journalism, I am writing about the systems that uphold our national and local organizations, which have fallen into various states of entropy.
The scariest thing to me is how few journalists realize they are part of a system - much less a system that needs constant care and maintenance.
We focus on our stories, but we often don’t think about why we’re telling them, or what the point of the system is.
Journalistic Entropy
There were a few pieces of journalism this week that highlighted this problem with systems that perpetuate the error, with seemingly no one overseeing them.
The first is a piece in the Atlantic by Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare. She takes a look at the reporting on the various new election rules in Georgia.
In doing so, she brings context to the story that most legacy journalists have missed. Or have (willfully?) misinterpreted.
The bottom line? The sky is not about to fall.
“The likelihood that a Georgia county board’s refusal to certify could be used to overthrow a presidential election is essentially nil,” Bower wrote.
She cites a number of reasons:
State administrative bodies “can adopt only rules that are authorized by and consistent with Georgia statutory law” which lays out “a crystal-clear, mandatory deadline by which counties must certify election results.”
That law uses the word “shall.” As in “local election officials shall certify election returns a week after Election Day.”
If county election boards use their new “reasonable inquiry” rule to not certify by the Monday after the election, courts will intervene.
Georgia Secretary of State Chief of Staff Gabriel Sterling (you know, the guy who gave the angry press conference in December of 2020 saying “this must stop” ) “told election administrators that his office has already ‘game-planned’ litigation strategies in the event that a county refuses to certify.” Bower thinks any attempt by an election board to flout the law and refuse to certify will be overruled within two days.
If it’s not, the newly strengthened federal Electoral Count Act has mechanisms to ensure each state’s electors are certified and and that those certifications are returned to Congress by January 6.
The worst case scenario is that the certification goes to the Supreme Court. Bower and I differ on how terrifying that is. She seems to think even this Court won’t rule in a partisan manner.
She thinks the law will prevail.
Whether it does or not, I’ve never read or heard any journalist explaining it the way Bower has.
Everything I’ve heard in national journalism implies that the new rules that allow county election boards to conduct “reasonable inquiry” ARE law. They are not.
The other issue Bower clarifies came down a couple of weeks ago mandating that three people in each precinct hand count ballots.
Stacey Abrams was on MSNBC the other night pointing out (or perhaps just implying, I can’t find the original video) that three people hand counting votes in all of Fulton County (where Atlanta is) would cause egregious delays.
But, as Bower notes, that’s not what the new rule says.
“The rule does not require a hand tally of votes,” Bower writes. It “requires a hand count of total ballots—the sheets of paper that are stored in every ballot scanner in each precinct at the end of Election Day—not a tally of totals per candidate.”
And the three people who will be doing the hand-counting are per precinct. Fulton County has roughly 525,000 voters. And 44 precincts.
In other words, if 1,000 ballots are reported out of Precinct A, the board wants the three people in that precinct to double check with a hand count that they have 1,000 ballots.
Bower points out that this has been done in other states, like Illinois, for years.
I understand - anybody who has tried to count large numbers understands - that hand counting is less efficient than machine counting. And the hand counters are more likely to make a mistake. But if they count 996 ballots, one can reasonably assume they missed four.
That, though, is the real point of Bower’s Atlantic piece. “Reasonable assumption” has left our political discourse. And partisans who want to be right rather than sensical - aka all of the authors and acolytes of Project 2025 - will quite literally make a federal case out of any hand-count discrepancies.
While that federal case will, in Bower’s legal opinion, lose in court, the danger is that the challenges, themselves, will create unrest and violence.
“Even relatively minor reporting delays,” Bower writes, “are soil in which misinformation thrives.”
Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr Bueno described how this kind of misinformation actually happened this weekend, when (what looks like) a bot spread a fake story Friday night about someone in North Carolina beating up a FEMA director. The tweet even had video, which Orr Bueno traced back to a security guard throwing a woman down outside a Texas bar last year.*
“By Saturday morning,” writes Orr Bueno, “what started as a fictional account of a FEMA director being assaulted had spiraled into actual threats of violence.”
Those threats of violence - from a seed planted by a likely hostile actor - could easily turn into real violence if we have to wait a couple of days to see if the hand-count of total ballots equals the machine count in Georgia.
And while legacy journalists will be plying their headlines as if were still 1992 (“Counts Off by Four Votes!” the headlines will scream), the violence caused by the disinformation will leave more people dead, and a movement even more certain that killing for their cause is justified.
*Here is a still from the image showing the supposed FEMA director being beaten up. She appears to be wearing very little clothing, much less work clothing or a uniform. The original poster either didn’t note that, or assumed that MAGA people assaulting any woman would strip her as part of the assault.
Trickle-Down News Reporting
There are two other pieces I want to quickly look at. One was published in the Washington Post on Friday, as part of a news story on how the Biden Administration headed off the dockworkers’ strike.
The piece, by Jeff Stein, Ian Duncan and Lauren Kaoli Gurley, is framed around how troubling it is that Biden was able to avoid what could have been a devastating economic blow by siding with the International Longshoreman’s Association, pressuring the shipping companies to give in to the union’s demands.
The trio writes:
“[T]he resolution of the strike…highlights Biden’s distinctive approach to labor unrest, one that has defied even his Democratic predecessors and sparked unease in some parts of the party. Even as White House officials claim vindication about their strategy, questions persist about whether Biden’s pro-union advocacy will be codified as the new Democratic approach — or represents a rare aberration in a long bipartisan tradition of siding more closely with management.”
Notice the key “tell” words here: distinctive, defied, unease, vindication, questions persist, advocacy, aberration.
In case we missed that these three journalists think that government should favor business leaders over their workers, the trio notes a few paragraphs later that “The White House’s strategy is not without its critics, both among Democrats and Republicans, who consider it far too deferential to labor unions.”
Deferential.
I don’t seem to remember legacy news economics writers saying that the 2017 Trump tax cuts were “deferential” to corporations and hedge fund managers.
Leaning Into the Entropy
Then there’s this opinion piece in The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi about a good piece of local reporting that was then misinterpreted by national journalists who furthered the story.
The original story was about Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s criticism of state Attorney General Dana Nessel’s decision to prosecute student protesters at the University of Michigan.
Tlaib talked to Steve Neavling from the Detroit Metro Times. She noted that there have been other protests in the last half decade that have not been prosecuted.
“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest … We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
After this statement, Neavling, or his editors, added the line: “Nessel is the first Jewish person to be elected Attorney General of Michigan.”
Nessel apparently took that to mean that Tlaib’s criticism was antisemitic. Not only did she go after Tlaib hard, but journalists like CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash followed suit. Then Jewish publications picked it up. Followed by a condemnation from House Democrats.
For something that Tlaib did not say.
This all led to a cartoon that ran in a national magazine showing Tlaib wondering why her pager was beeping - in an apparent attempt to link an American of Palestinian heritage to Hezbollah militants.
For his part, Neavling was all over Twitter calling out the lies and willful misinterpretations of his story.
“Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened,” Neavling wrote in a tweet. “US Representative @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people.”
Neavling even took to his own newspaper to publish a comprehensive factcheck of the distortions of his story.
Look, I understand the deadline pressures on daily journalists. Often they don’t have time to read a full report or indictment. But I’ve also seen too many journalists who do have the time who don’t want to be bothered with actually going to the source. In this case, reading the original piece would have told them everything they needed to know.
Sadly, I’m not sure they wanted to know.
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