Thought Portal

the things that are reported matters. the language used matters. what is left out of the story matters.

The Baltimore Sun acquisition

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local coverage of tree lighting in portland

The Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit parent of the Texas Observer, told its staff today that it is laying off employees – including journalists and editors – and ceasing publication on Friday, March 31, 2023.

This Go Fund Me was established so that readers and supporters of the Texas Observer can give a lifeline to staff and journalists who are becoming unemployed. I am James Canup and I have organized this campaign to benefit my former colleagues, having recently resigned from the Observer myself. I have launched this campaign with the knowledge of board and staff members. We ask you to contribute as generously as you can to provide cash assistance to staff who are being laid off. The Observer is not able to provide a sufficient severance package to laid-off staff due to a funding shortfall and disarray. If the board revisits its decision to cease publication and commence layoffs, funds raised here will be donated to the Texas Democracy Foundation to provide staff pay and benefits. Otherwise, funds raised here will be divided equally among the staff who are being laid off.

Those organizing this Go Fund Me campaign are striving to help journalists and staff to have some money as they take time to seek their next jobs, so that they can support their families despite losing their jobs through no fault of their own. You are invited to read some of the Observer’s recent journalism before deciding to contribute.

The impact of this shutdown on the current team is devastating. “Where else can I go to write a column on transgender issues that takes on the New York Times,” asked one writer. Another was in the process of planning paternity leave for his first child. Another was covering Texas’ war on public schools. “That’s not how a progressive magazine should treat its staff,” said one editor.

What does the Texas Observer mean to its journalists and to Texans? Editorial independence and journalistic freedom have been the hallmarks of the Observer since its founding in 1954. The publication has been freer – less encumbered by the demands of business, advertisers and grantmakers – than any other publication of its stature. As such, the institution has been a proving ground for countless journalists over the years and continuing to this day, and a vital watchdog to extremists, corporations and politicians who would harm Texas and Texans.

Will you help save the staff of the Texas Observer by contributing now?

Ohio train derailment and corporate media

some highlights . . .

the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces.

It’s easy to assume that the reason you spend so much time thinking about the news is simply that the news is so crazy right now. Yet the news has often been crazy. What it hasn’t been is ubiquitous: from its earliest beginnings, until a few decades ago, almost by definition, the news was a dispatch from elsewhere, a world you visited briefly before returning to your own. For centuries, it was accessible only to a small elite; even in the era of mass media, news rarely occupied more than an hour a day of an educated citizen’s attention.

The profound experiential shift we have recently experienced is not merely down to the fact that the news is now available around the clock; CNN pioneered that, way back in 1980. Instead, it arises from the much newer feeling of actively participating in it, thanks to the interactivity of social media. One crucial difference is that raging on Facebook, or sharing posts or voting in online polls, feels like doing something – an intervention that might, in however minuscule a way, change the outcome of the story. This sense of agency may largely be an illusion – one that serves the interests of the social media platforms to which it helps addict us – but it is undeniably powerful. And it extends even to those who themselves never comment or post. The sheer fact of being able to click, in accordance with your interests, through a bottomless supply of updates, commentary, jokes and analysis, feels like a form of participation in the news, utterly unlike passively consuming the same headlines repeated through the day on CNN or the BBC.

The instinct to look elsewhere is treated as both a sign of privilege and an obliviousness to that luxury. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. It is increasingly taken as a given that in order to help, or even just signal solidarity with, those most directly affected by the events reported in the news – undocumented immigrants facing the Trump administration’s cruelties, say – it is morally obligatory to remain immersed in the news itself.

It’s becoming clear, however, that there is a problem with this attitude, quite apart from the impact on our personal happiness. There are reasons to believe that a society in which so many people are so deeply invested in the emotional dramas of the news is far from the embodiment of an ideal democracy – that, on the contrary, this level of personal engagement with news is a symptom of the damage that has been done to our public life. This raises a possibility alien to news addicts, committed political activists and journalists alike: that we might owe it not only to our sanity, but also to the world at large, to find a way to put the news back in its place.

Today, the news is very bad indeed at ushering in a sense of calm. More and more, it is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention.

One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incident, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.

What if participation in politics is a virtue in the same way that, for example, staying fit is a virtue? A person who visits the gym occasionally is doing something good; if she goes regularly, she’s being really good. But if she spends every free moment at the gym, so that her friendships and work are starved of attention, she is doing something pathological. That is because physical fitness is a largely instrumental virtue. It is good because it enables you to do other things, so if you do it to the exclusion of all else, you have missed the point. If you do it so strenuously you injure yourself, you have missed the point in a different way: now you can’t pursue fitness well, either. There is a case to be made that our fixation with the news might work the same way.

the more you engage with politics, the more everything becomes political – and, research suggests, the harder it becomes to understand your political opponents as fully human. This is a situation ripe for exploitation by demagogues, who understand that their power consists in turning the whole of life into a battleground divided along political lines, thereby maximising their domination of public attention.

In an age of attention scarcity, living a meaningful life entails not paying attention to almost every important issue; the greatest saints in history were never asked to care about as many instances of suffering as you’ll see if you scroll through a feed of international news today.

It is also hard to do good journalism about systemic racism: This work requires time, resources, and analysis. After over a year, I was able to get a grant and two publications to give me the time to report on LaGrange in the way I wanted to, spending ample time there and filing records requests. But it’s undeniable that this story is harder to report and harder to generalize than a story about a well-publicized, single, seemingly positive event in LaGrange’s terrifying racial history.

This neglect on the part of newsrooms compounds the violence of the past. During the Jim Crow era, many white people believed lynchings, though bad, were justified, just as many whites today believe policies that disproportionately harm Black and Brown people simply represent fairness and rule of law. As a result, coverage of lynching often advocated a forgive and forget mentality. One article on the lynching of George Taylor near where I live in Durham, in 1918, was headlined “Was to Be Expected,”referring both to the lynching itself and to the refusal of local whites to cooperate with the short investigation that followed.

For white-run media to play a different role today in covering institutional racism than it did 100 years ago, it would need to face its own internalized white supremacy. It would require looking closely at this tendency to fetishize reconciliation and “conversation” while turning our backs on cases of institutional racism, even the most egregious ones (this incredible investigation into civil forfeiture in South Carolinaby the Greenville News is a good example of local media choosing to dig in). And the news media must recognize our agency in deciding which stories to zoom in on, and how these choices can be biased toward a faulty narrative of inevitable racial progress in this country. As Ward said to me, nothing good that’s come to Black people in LaGrange has come because the white community decided it was the right thing to do.

The Internet killed newspapers? uh more like vulture capitalism. The internet sure is a convenient scapegoat for what is destroyed by greed.  

“It’s encouraging many Mainers & others have subscribed to help save local book reviews. But, seriously, folks, the chief reason to read your local newspaper is you need local news,” Steve Collins, a reporter for The Sun Journal, a newspaper in Lewiston, Me., tweeted.

...It may not be obvious to those who consume news digitally, and elect not to click on spot homicide coverage, but these stories make up a substantial portion of a newspaper on any given day. Open a local daily paper, and you’ll get a sense of a city under siege. Crime has declined drastically in the last two decades, but newspapers are still doing what they’ve always done: covering crime.

...There are real consequences to this overemphasis on crime. Polling has shown that Americans believe violent crime is rising though it’s been falling for years. Think of Trump’s “American carnage.” Part of that blame falls on newspapers— for overemphasizing even slight upticks in crime stats, for blindly rewriting items in the blotter, just because police put them out.

...My essential thinking is that newspapers should cover fewer crimes, and cover them well. I don’t believe a newspaper has the mandate to cover every crime any more than it has a mandate to cover every concert. There’s no magical formula for what makes a crime worth writing about, and it’s hard to say before reporting begins. But we do know what a good crime story can do. It can expose fractures in a community, broad societal injustices, the failures of law enforcement. If the story doesn’t get at something beyond what the police said happened, don’t publish it. 

Palfrey, in his 2015 book BiblioTech, sees cardholders and librarians working even closer in an expanding laboratory space where people use information to “create new knowledge”: “Instead of remaining what was known as ‘laboratories for books’ at the end of the 19th century, when books served as the raw materials for scholarly inquiry,” he concludes, “libraries should be laboratories for a digital-plus era in which coproduction is the norm.”