There are a lot of things that have annoyed me in 2020. We had a baby right as we entered into a generational pandemic, were immersed in that same pandemic, have a first-grader doing virtual school, and sold and bought a house, so the list of grievances, petty or otherwise, is long.
But maybe my biggest pet peeve of 2020 is when people talk about “the media.”
This is annoying for many reasons. Often, they do so to imply they do not trust “the media,” or to imply “the media” is biased one way or another, or—perhaps in an effort to apply a veneer of “objectivity”—to suggest “the media” is too far Left or Right and is responsible for the division so obvious in the United States.
This drives me nuts.
Each of these points—indeed, almost everything I read by most cultural critics, Twitter savants or Facebook memes—treats the media like some kind of monolithic force. It flattens “the media” into a singular entity that encompasses local newspapers, national news, news rooms, op-ed pages, bloggers, Twitter reporters, local alternative weeklies, cable TV news, cable TV news websites, local TV news, national TV news, online outlets, magazines, podcasts and radio (local and national).
This is so stupid! Those things are not the same! They aren’t even the same medium much less the same force or collection of people.
So what do people mean when they say “the media?”
I think it’s usually a shorthand way to refer to the vast majority of the above sources as being aligned behind a person or a cause. I’ve seen a lot about how “the media” was confused or misleading about: The Russia investigation; the coronavirus pandemic; the protests for justice and Black lives; the protests against pandemic regulations; Joe Biden’s alleged sexual assault case; Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assault cases; etc. etc. etc.
And so, I thought it might be helpful to walk through a few simple things that might help you distinguish one media outlet from another—and, hopefully, so you can better figure out what you’re reading and why it was created.
1. Outlets are not the same because they have different purposes.
When you hear, watch or read a story, matters a lot where or how you encountered it! The medium is necessarily going to change what the purpose of the article is. If it’s on cable news, it has to be edited and created to fit into a set time frame so producers can hit their commercial breaks. Newspapers have reporters who are dedicated to hitting deadlines but also break news. Paper newspapers have word counts that are very strict—online versions of newspaper stories do not have consider these words counts as well. Podcast producers are trying to tell a story through audio, so making sure that field recordings and emotional audio cues are in the story are even more important. Online outlets are trying to do all of these things, and provide analysis they feel is probably lacking from traditional newspaper or TV sources. Magazines come out much less often, so often mostly provide news and cultural analysis that takes a step back and tries to provide a 10,000 foot view of a trend. Magazine websites may have more in common with newspaper websites since both try to break news, but often magazine websites encourage their writers to have a stronger point of view when writing.
In short: The way you consume information is vitally important to what the information is, because the purpose of presenting this information is different in different places.
2. The same medium has a ton of different types of media.
The outlet type is not the only consideration. Is the news item on a TV news segment where the main purpose is reporting the news (e.g. a morning news break, a local evening news show, national evening news, etc.), is it a cable news show centered around the host (e.g. Rachel Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Chris Cuomo), is it an entertainment show with a news-ish bent (e.g. Fox & Friends, Good Morning America, The Today Show, etc.), or is it some combination of these?
These are all different things even though they are all “TV news.” They invest their budgets differently, they write their scripts differently, they book guests differently and they position their hosts differently. They are not a monolith.
This is true of newspapers as well. I hate it when someone says “The New York Times said” or “The Wall Street Journal said” because that is meaningless unless I know what part of the NYT or the WSJ “said” the thing. The opinion pages are not the same as the news pages—and they have different editorial structures and fact-checking rigors! The online articles are not the same as the paper copy in many instances—some parts of the online outlets do not pay their writers (usually this is for much smaller sections, like Religion or Culture) and therefore the writing is different (though, I would stress, the quality isn’t necessarily different!).
3. It matters who publishes something—and who doesn’t.
Different outlets have different strategies and different processes for news gathering. A good example of this is the infamous “Steele Dossier.” Buzzfeed published the whole thing around President Trump’s inauguration, filled with sordid accusations and poorly sourced information. Why was it Buzzfeed? Obviously every other outlet had the dossier in hand. But Buzzfeed did it because they are an online news source with a bent toward “breaking” or “covering” the news the traditional outlets won’t touch. In this case, these sources didn’t touch it because their fact checkers told them not to. You can decide for yourself if Buzzfeed was right or wrong (spoiler: Buzzfeed sucks) but it is dumb to suggest that a Buzzfeed post is the same as a New York Times piece with 24 corroborating sources that went through a fact checking gauntlet.
It’s also worth paying attention to the times when an outlet is driven by an editorial agenda that circumvents its own writers and reporters and fact-checking system. A recent example is the New York Post’s “bombshell” report about Hunter Biden’s emails that allegedly suggest Vice President Biden was at least contacted by foreign business people who were likely trying to get favorable treatment from the United States. The bylines tell you more about the truth of the story than the story itself—at least one of the reporters removed their name from the story because the fact-checking process was so poor, and one of the people credited with the story didn’t know she was going to have a byline until it appeared online. That’s a massive red flag if you’re trying to understand a story.
4. All media members have biases but some are interested in trying to mitigate or acknowledge that bias.
Every person who ever speaks or writes for public consumption is biased. But some sources are much more interested in trying to keep that at bay than others. Good outlets either make their biases clear from the get-go or have processes put in place to try to remove it. This means having strong editors, copy editors and fact-checkers. Of course, this never removes bias entirely (because, of course, each of the people involved has their own set of biases!), but there is a reason why outlets with extremely strong fact checking processes are usually placed in the middle of those “media bias” charts.
And then, there are outlets that are explicitly biased, but that knowledge is presumed so everything can be read through that lens. This is the case with outlets like The New Republic or National Review.
The danger is when an outlet purports to be “objective” but lacks the processes or staffing to actually do that job, which is how you end up with people saying “I heard on the news” when what they really mean is they read a poorly sourced article on FoxNews.com or MSNBC.com.
5. Money matters, and so does what it’s spent on.
There are reasons that there are only four or five national newspaper outlets that break national stories: It’s absurdly expensive to do so. You have to pay reporters, editors, copyeditors, transcriptionists, hosting fees, IT people, developers, fact checkers, etc. etc. etc. and usually you’re paying them for the time when they’re not breaking national stories. But having a near-endless budget allows these kinds of outlets to have time to cultivate sources that eventually deliver those types of stories—and it gives them time to ensure the trustworthiness of those sources or information.
For other outlets, this can also happen, but often it’s more complicated—TV outlets need to ensure the people they’re paying can fill air time and can be entertaining. They make their money from commercials so they need their anchors and hosts to keep your eyes on the screen until (and hopefully through) the commercial break so they can keep paying those same anchors/hosts.
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I hope these are helpful steps as we near the end (“end”) of the election cycle. Be aware of what media you consume, but also be aware of how and why it’s being created. The media is not a monolith, and the sooner we understand that the better off we we will as informed citizens.