Over the weekend, a rather stark dichotomy in the news coverage emerged from CNN. On Saturday a shooter entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida and killed three people. Unsurprisingly, Jim Acosta convened a panel to discuss this matter, delivering his expected cant and melodrama. In the course of the segment, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was inevitably brought up, and accusatory words were thrown at the governor about whether he would deviate from his presidential campaign and fly into Jacksonville.
It was mere hours after the deaths of three innocents, but already he was absorbing critical commentary about perceived inaction. (DeSantis did make it into town quickly, giving a speech and a prayer vigil - for which he was also criticized.) What made this imbecilic commentary all the more ridiculous was a separate report from CNN at almost the exact same time.
Sunday morning saw a piece from Kevin Liptak that was a warm assessment of Joe Biden’s extended time off in the month of August. As Hawaii dealt with a catastrophe that employs the use of the term “death toll”, Biden could barely be budged off the beach, taking nearly two full weeks before arriving on the scene. The most critical word from Liptak was in quoting those darned Republicans who dared criticize Biden for dragging his sand-covered feet on that tragedy.
This type of biased, partisan double-standard seen from CNN is by now an expected reality in journalism. In my daily media column, I frequently post entries on the press applying differing standards based on who and from what party the details emanate. We are almost conditioned by now to the blatant favoritism seen from the news outlets, but every so often it helps to explore from where this partisanship derives. After all, were these journalists not schooled in the proper ways of applying reportorial skills and journalistic ethics in the execution of their job duties?
As it turns out, the bias appears to be in place when they are being formed.
On Twitter, a reliable source of leftist dogma is Jay Rosen. Scroll his timeline on any given day and you get a tangible sense of his left-leaning approach. While this is itself not a notable point, once you understand Rosen is a journalism professor at New York University his consistent combative position from the far left you can begin to get a sense of just the type of conditioning his students may be receiving before being sent out into the journalism wilderness. And he is hardly an outlier.
This month I came across a report told with alarm about the media conditions within the state of Wyoming. The piece centered on a relatively fresh news outlet called Cowboy State Daily. This is a right-leaning outlet that launched in 2019, and its popularity, as well as its coverage, is delivering deep concern, both for the type of news offered as well as how it has emerged in a time when many local papers were shuttering across the state. You get the sense of the dire opinion immediately, as you are greeted by the headline, “Trouble In Wyoming."
This panic feature was delivered by The Columbia Journalism Review, the online outlet of the famed Columbia School of Journalism. The concern is that this news outlet was undertaken and funded by a Republican donor and prospective GOP candidate, Foster Fries. In its setup of the “problems” this right-leaning outlet poses, CJR described the conditions that have led to this nefarious uprising.
Like most US states, Wyoming has suffered a decline in local journalism in recent decades; this year the Casper Star-Tribune reduced its weekly print run to three days. The drop-off follows a national pattern that’s seen the US lose over 2,100 newsrooms since 2004, a trend that, Tow Center research has found, accelerated during the pandemic with at least a hundred more news organizations (local and national) closing.
America’s growing news deserts have become vulnerable to wealthy partisans setting up local news outlets to push their political agendas. This has raised concerns about one-sided, politically motivated narratives being strong-armed into local political discourse.
What becomes rather evident in reading this lengthy assessment is that those concerns are also one-sided. If you were expecting to see examples of these problematic news outlets from both sides of the political spectrum you will be left wanting. It is clear that CJR sees the problem in one direction, and there is little in the way of open-mindedness or allowing for divergent opinions to be represented. This is seen in the primary critical focus being applied to the coverage of what it describes as “energy reporting."
Cowboy State Daily has appeared to throw doubt on the reality of man-made climate change, which is the consensus among the global scientific community.
Listed are a number of headlines from pieces that “throw doubt”, such as noting the mental impact climate panic has on children, asking about the veracity of Greta Thumberg’s popularity, and reporting that Vanguard pulled out of a climate alliance. Most notable though is that this J-school outlet is not permitting anything in the form of an open forum on the topic. It states clearly that man-made climate change is a “reality." Any journalistic exploration is, as a result, antithetical and outright considered to be wrong.
This is the type of dogma being taught to these burgeoning reporters and journalists and serves as an example why there is such a rock-ribbed slant in the news coverage these days. I looked through the CJR’s recent archives and saw little in the way of a critical voice applied to journalism on the left. One particular story caught my eye and revealed much about this J-school publication.
The headline was ‘Pink slime’ network gets $1.6M election boost from PACs backed by oil-and-gas, shipping magnates. Named after the overly processed meat products exposed decades ago, this was in regard to a practice that has emerged over the years - especially around elections - of partisan groups setting up a network of ersatz newspapers and/or digital outlets that resemble established sources.
These publications are set up to resemble legitimate local news outlets, with entries both local and statewide, regional features, and even local weather, but are designed to insert stories that frame a desired voting result as well. Candidates or other ballot initiatives will be covered in a way favorable to the backers, and these are designed to coax or fool voters into believing the news coverage is legitimate.
While this is a concerning practice, what is seen from CJR is that it is presented mostly as a one-way occurrence. The site presents this as almost entirely a conservative-right-leaning tactic. Passing mention of this being a two-sided activity is made early (something seen “increasingly by both the left and the right”), but from there this lengthy rundown is focused solely on conservative or Republican efforts.
Last fall I covered a leftist network of these ‘Pink Slime’ outlets that operated ahead of the midterms. There is, curiously enough, little in the way of curiosity about these left-leaning sources being problematic in the field of journalism. A search made on CJR of the various names of these pre-fab newspapers and websites I spotted delivers no returns. I also searched on the CJR-affiliated web outlet The Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and tellingly that site also had little to nothing to say about these Democrat-favoring news outlets.
While none of this is particularly surprising, it still becomes quite revealing. The J-school approach to things is clearly on par with what has been displayed by so many universities that foster an environment of left-wing social messaging. It appears obvious that while they might give voice to the vocation being one of non-partisan unbiased reporting, in guidance and in practice all evidence points to the J-schools being just as prone to the leftist ideology seen from many college campuses.
Understanding that they become a laboratory of left-leaning agitprop and send their charges into the journalism industry “properly” indoctrinated, you then grasp why we see so many of the problems today in the press environments.