Weekly roundup March 10, 2023
A journalism nerd’s roundup of interesting things I read, saw or heard this week. Views my own.
Best reads 📚
- American Health Care Is Dying. This Hospital Could Cure It by Ricardo Nuila. “Visiting a hospital or clinic today feels like facing a firing squad, with rounds and rounds of bills coming from every direction.” This op-ed proposes a solution — a difficult one to enact, to be sure, but there is a better way.
- Why Poverty Persists in America by Matthew Desmond. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”
- What Happened To Us by Jon Mooallem (Feb) takes a deep dive into a Covid oral history project. It captures the complexity and uncertainty of living through a slow-moving catastrophe:
“While the pandemic created widespread pain and vulnerability, it also made existing pain and vulnerability more visible — others’ and our own. It was as though, in normal life, we knew to brush that discomfort off. We made suffering invisible, blocked it out. We buried it in our blasé and carried on. But when the production of normal shut off, so did our machinery for suppressing that vulnerability….It’s amazing — something this dramatic could happen, with well over a million people dead, and it really didn’t make all that much difference. Maybe one thing it shows us is that the general drive to normalize things is incredibly powerful.”
Photo 📸
Engagement Journalism News
- If you are an academic doing research on engagement journalism, please consider submitting your work to the Participatory Journalism Interest Group at AEJMC this year! imho, actionable research on how journalists can best meet community needs is p damn important, and last year we only had 11 submissions!
- There will be a new engagement journalism category in the Covering Climate Now awards this year, as well as one specifically for social media and special honors for solutions and justice stories. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have the brilliant Mekdela Maskal, engagement journalism ’19, on staff! You should submit!
- The Trace is launching local bureaus “with one community-focused engagement reporter per every staff writer.” (Feb) We love to see it!
Engagement journalism alumni Diara Townes, ’19, and Julia Haslanger ’15 (not pictured here), joined other Newmark J School at CUNY former students and faculty at NICAR in Nashville!
Quotable
NYU professor Jay Rosen offers the best description of Fox News I’ve seen:
“The commercial arm of a right wing political movement, specializing in strategic resentment and aggregated grievance in the attention economy, while behind the scenes it tries to be a kingmaker and party boss, riding the tiger of manipulated rage.”
I mean, it sure isn’t a news organization if employees are saying things like: “Or maybe they should base [election] calls not solely on numbers but on how viewers might react.”
Thoughts 🤓
- This excellent critique of NYT’s coverage of trans people and issues by Gillian Brandstetter not only brings in important historical context, but also makes a point that has driven me crazy about how mainstream media organizations perform objectivity on this and many other subjects for decades. “This use of “activists” as an epithet can also be found in much of the recent Times coverage around trans rights and health care” Brandstetter writes. Scholars who examine media coverage have found that one way journalists perpetuate the status quo is through a very thinly (if at all) veiled suspicion of any form of advocacy. Views from “regular folks” are encouraged, but if a source has organized in some way for a particular cause, then they are quickly discounted entirely or written about dismissively e.g. “some activists say.” Some of this is a natural outgrowth of journalists trying to assert their independence from any particular faction, but citizens organizing to advance their interests is exactly what they are SUPPOSED to do in a democratic society, and if anything probably makes them much more informed, rather than less.
Ls 😞
- WTF is happening in my home state of Wisconsin? Republicans are signaling they will block policies requiring meningitis vaccination for 7th graders and new rules on chickenpox. Anti-semetic flyers blanket Wausau. Meanwhile, surrounding states are doing great: Minnesota’s governor took executive action to protect access to gender-affirming health care in Minnesota, and “Michigan House Democrats passed legislation to deliver on a key promise to union activists: repealing the state’s right-to-work law” AND gave final approval to legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.
Watching 👁️🗨️
