On this election day, a major thing all people want, regardless of party affiliation, is reliable information about who won. When the polls close, people most often turn to the media for the results. A Pew study of more than 10,000 adults in early October found while roughly 60% of both Trump and Biden supporters say they will follow the returns closely on Election night, 15% fewer Trump supporters (34%) have a lot of confidence their news source will make the right call than Biden supporters (49%).
What is causing this doubt? It’s becoming increasingly more apparent that a rapidly growing percentage of American media is partisan, which has undermined the previously unshakable reliance we had on the media to deliver the facts. It wasn’t long ago that media were known as the Fourth Estate, a non-partisan entity that kept check on the government and business for the good of all people. Sadly, this may no longer be the case.
On October 25, the chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media Michael Pack (a President Trump appointee) got rid of the firewall protecting the editorial independence of news outlets funded by the federal government, including Voice of America. The move has raised fears that these outlets will become propaganda tools.
Partisanship is not limited to national outlets. According to Poynter, since 2004, about 1,800 local newspapers have closed in the United States, including more than 60 since the pandemic hit. In some cases, the void of local news is being filled by something people are calling “pink slime” journalism. According to an investigation done by the New York Times , a former TV reporter has created some 1,300 digital news outlets with legitimate sounding names claiming to be impartial, but are full of partisan leaning stories funded by conservative operatives and think tanks. The Times reporters included an example where a freelance reporter was offered $22 dollars by a publication called “Maine Business Daily” to write a story calling Republican Senator Susan Collins’ Democratic opponent Sara Gideon a hypocrite. The New York Times article listed 14 such outlets in Massachusetts including Bay State News. A recent story “Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker gets ‘D’ grade for fiscal management” was based on a report from the conservative think tank CATO Institute, which was not labeled as such in the story. Other outlets listed had names such as Massachusetts Business Daily, Metro West Times and Springfield Record.
In 2017, the New York Times raised concerns about hundreds of television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which were required to run conservative leaning content in the body of their newscasts. On October 21, the day before the last presidential debate, Sinclair hosted a Town Hall style event with President Trump.
There are signs of hope. A Massachusetts based nonprofit called “Media Literacy Now” is pushing for media literacy to be taught to all K-12 students. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the number of fact checking organizations went from 44 to 195 in five years. Journalist driven internet tools like NewsGuard give what they call “trust ratings” to more than 6,000 news outlets that account for 95% of online engagement with news. For example, they let you know whether a news outlet labels pay-for-play stories as advertisements. The website AllSides labels news stories about developments, such as the recent rise of the GDP by 33.1%, as being “from the right,” “from the left,” or “from the center.”
Regardless of what the results of the national election are, please keep on reading, listening, and watching news, but do it in a critical way. A recent article in Inside Sources recommends you do what any reporter would do – ask questions about the sources you use to get your news, including how old a site is, what sources the outlet uses to get their information, and whether they include links to sources in their articles (as we do in our blog). Force yourself to read stories from sources you don’t agree with, in addition to those you do. The answer to partisan media is not to ignore news, but to put in the work to find out the verifiable facts that will shape our future.
