FMC Fast Chat: Covering News Today

Media covering media is growing in the U.S., and in this episode, we chat about the importance of covering the news, as well as how current events continue to pose new challenges for journalists. We also talk about how America's news media compares with its British counterparts, the need to create false equivalencies, and just how hard it is to define news today. Take a listen and be in the know in 30.

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes, hosted by Fair Media Council CEO, and executive director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Today we're fortunate to be chatting with John Alsop, a freelance journalist who writes on media for the Columbia Journalism Review. John, why don't we begin with you telling us a little bit about how you approach your work?

I write about 4 days a week, so every weekday apart from Thursday, and that day is taken by my colleague Matthew Ingram, who writes— typically writes about the internet. section of journalism and tech. And yeah, in terms of like how I sort of choose the topics for it, well, I'd say first of all, I think that's changed from Trump to Biden quite a lot because Trump, you know, something insane would happen, you know, while I'm sort of asleep in the UK overnight that I'd end up having to scramble to write about. I think now things are a little more relaxed, although clearly lots and lots of important stories going on. Yeah, I should say also, I know I'm now back In the UK, and I sort of use the time difference to be able to sort of craft the newsletter in the early morning equivalent, early morning time in the US, so it can kind of go out early US time, but at a civilized hour here. Yeah, so I guess I think the newsletter is kind of CJR's space, given that we're a magazine that I think does tend to run sort of longer pieces and sort of steps back from the news cycle. The newsletter is sort of our opportunity to weigh in on the news cycle, mostly in the US, but also I think, you know, just in terms of important global stories as well. So yeah, I think if there's, you know, sort of a major political story in particular, we'll sort of look at how the media is covering that. If people are criticizing how the media is covering that, we'll, you know, sort of weigh in on that sometimes. Sometimes we'll very often offer criticisms of our own. Yeah, and as I said, I think, and then some other days we'll sort of look at maybe trends within the media industry. We take a pretty broad approach, and I think that anything You know, I think that anything that sort of has some kind of interesting, meaningful connection to the world of journalism is something that we would consider writing about. But yeah, so anything within that kind of sphere that's sort of interesting and current, and we think our readers would be interested to know, that maybe doesn't kind of either justify or would not hold for a kind of longer sort of after-the-fact thing, we'll try and sort of address it, address it in that space. So let's see, I guess that's, that's kind of basically what we, what I'm trying to do with it.

Okay. So answer this. This is probably the one big question anyone tuning in will have is how did the Brit end up writing the Columbia Journalism Review newsletter to begin with?

Yeah. Well, I think I, well, I've always had like a very strong interest in American politics and obviously then studied and worked in the US.

I mean, yeah, the biggest, I think, I mean, the biggest benefit to it I would say is, is that, as I mentioned previously, is the time difference.

I think having, you know, writing an early morning US early morning newsletter and having several hours of kind of head start of actual morning time to sort of sit and, and not just sort of a head start to sit and think, but it's sort of a time when people in America are asleep. And so the kind of like constant otherwise rush of like things happening and people commenting on them on Twitter. Obviously it's not totally dead in those hours, but it does feel like kind of a calm space where even on a very hectic news day, you can kind of sit back and actually sort of think about things without being kind of bombarded with breaking news.

And then I think, yeah, so I think that's sort of a chief logistical advantage.

I would say, you know, and obviously there are limitations to this perspective as well, but I think what I try and do, which I think can be successful on occasion, is to sort of— actually bring an outside perspective to, you know, looking at the way American news organizations cover politics in particular. I think when you are, when you sort of grow up with that system, there's a lot of things that you just input, you just will not question, just which is not, no, not to say that it's sort of an oversight on anyone's part, but just things that you become totally used to because they're sort of baked into your political consciousness from the, from the moment you develop that. I think I've actually noticed this in my writing about British politics, which I still sometimes do in the newsletter when there's kind of an interesting British media story, but also have done kind of for other magazines on the side, is I find it really hard to write about British politics because I think you have to sort of want to come at things with a certain degree of detachment, which isn't to say that, like, you know, I think that people should come at stories from a complete place of neutrality or objectivity. I don't think that's possible. But what I notice in writing about America that I don't find in the UK is I'm not sort of trying to, like, cut through a whole lifetime of kind of assumptions about the way politics works. I think sometimes you can, you know, reach a perspective that— obviously, you know, a lot of people in America have very sharp perspectives on American politics. I'm not trying to say anything like that. But, um, yeah, I think sometimes as an outsider, if you're kind of informed and you spend a lot of time actually kind of reading into that country's politics and media, you can sort of spot things that are interesting and that could maybe be done better a different way, or sort of at least could be done differently. that maybe some people who are more steeped in that, you know, culturally would maybe not notice to the same degree.

I understand. I'm kind of wondering though, when you do find yourself in a position to criticize media, how is that received?

Do you hear anything?

Well, obviously some people disagree and that's fine.

You know, I do hear people who People who, you know, tweet disagreement or sometimes email me back.

I would say, I say on the whole, I don't tend to hear too much from the people that we criticize. And, you know, I think I always—

well, certainly first and foremost, we try to always be fair. And I think sort of, I don't think we pick on people for doing things that everyone is doing. I mean, we might offer sort of examples of a broader trend, but I think we're always clear that we're sort of citing examples of something that's a bigger problem. And I think we try and— we do try and keep the focus on those bigger problems rather than sort of identifying one particular story that we didn't like and sort of spending 5 or 6, you know, long paragraphs doing a kind of deconstruction of that piece. I think it would be rare for us to do that, and it would have to sort of be— it would have to sort of, you know, have something to do with some kind of broader stakes that we were trying to illustrate, I think. So I think firstly we try and kind of like I try and keep the newsletter and the criticism, you know, when I offer criticism in it, pretty general, which isn't—

yeah, which obviously can, you know, it can be hard to generalize sometimes.

But, but, um, yeah, I think, I think what we're trying to do is sort of point, point out broad trends in media coverage that we think are sort of worth illustrating or pushing back on.

Um, so there's that.

I think also, you know, we try and, you know, sort of criticize news organizations as a whole for the stuff that they put out in their name rather than kind of picking on individual reporters or journalists who often, you know, clearly will have different relationships with their editors and don't write their own headlines, as we know, very often. So yeah, if we're pointing out kind of framing issues, I think we try and sort of keep that at the level of news organizations. So yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't tend to spend a lot of time getting into like one-on-one spats with people on Twitter. I don't think that's very constructive. Yeah, I think we try and keep things at kind of a a higher level than, than that.

But yeah, I don't— in terms of like how it's received on a more, yeah, sort of higher like conceptual level, it's interesting because when I have done, tried to do sort of more media criticism pieces involving the UK, I find that a lot of journalists here really have a hard time understanding what it is that I do.

So when you call up a journalist here and say, hello, I'm a journalist doing a story about you, a journalist, and your journalism, they'll be like, But I'm not the story because I, you know, journalists are not the story. We're taught to just sort of be behind the notepad and, and, you know, we're not, we're not important. Um, and that's obviously not everyone here, but I think it's, I think it's true to a greater extent than you find in the US. Um, and in the US, there are people who've said that to me, sort of like, I think that they tend to be sort of really old school, kind of like, you know, like kind of grizzled Straight news reporters who, you know, maybe were sort of more at home in like the saloons of the '60s and '70s or whatever. I think most journalists working in the US understand that media criticism is like a well-established kind of, an increasingly established, I think, fixture of the American media landscape. So I think it's less alien to journalists and they understand that it's something that they, you know, that might, that they will perhaps engage with at various points in their careers. And yeah, and I think that's a great thing because I think that journalists are enormously powerful, much more so than most of them feel comfortable with. And major sort of news organizations are clearly enormously powerful as companies.

Yeah, I think sometimes it can be tempting to say, well, you know, we just chronicle what's going on, we're not really the story.

And actually, like, a lot of the time, you know, I think they really are the story. Yeah, and I think it's important for people to scrutinize what these people are doing and sort of hold them to account. And I think in the US there is a better understanding than here, I would say, that that is kind of a vein of criticism of journalism that is important for accountability, and it kind of does, does need to exist and does exist.

All right, tell me a little bit about what, what you think makes for an interesting story, because you have the ability to pick and choose and kind of have maybe a broader approach than a journalist who is working full-time on a particular subject. and is more hemmed in in terms of not being able to really choose story topics. So what do you go after?

I guess I could sort of attack this question from the perspective of me as a reader, just in terms of like what I find interesting in news stories in general, and then, and obviously then, you know, from the perspective of writing stories. And yeah, I sort of have 2 facets to what I do that are a bit different in, you know, on the latter question. So yes, as I've discussed, one of them is this CJR newsletter where, you know, it's 4 days a week, it's meant to be topical and kind of focused on US media and its intersection with US politics. So I guess those stories follow a bit more of a— I wouldn't say rigid, because I think my editors still give me, you know, a really great amount of discretion. And if I want to be creative and kind of do something that might not seem like a media thing, but actually is if you look at it through a certain lens, then they're often very supportive of that, thankfully. But yes, but you know, if there are big political stories that are being very widely covered, then we'll almost always weigh in. on that. So for instance, if the US pulls out of Afghanistan and the Taliban takes over, that's going to be a big story for us to cover. And indeed, we did write about that a lot in the newsletter. The other thing I do is sort of do freelance longer stuff in my free time, both for CJR and other publications, and not always about media. I mean, I sometimes try and write about politics in Europe or just any topic that interests me. And I think when I'm doing those stories, it will just be You know, what I typically will try and do is find something that, like, you know, I and other people know a little bit about maybe, but are actually, like, potentially really fascinating and you kind of want to know more and you just sort of, like, go ahead and you can't really find more. Or stories that sort of bring something that hasn't been talked about for a long— an idea or, you know, sort of policy or whatever that hasn't been talked about for a long time up to date. So I did, yeah, I did before Christmas a piece on the Federal Writers' Project, which has obviously been written very widely about, you know, the 1930s. Roosevelt-era initiative to pay writers to document America as part of the New Deal. And yeah, I ended up finding out actually that this was something that, you know, a Democratic congressman was trying to revive in the present day, which hadn't been reported, which was kind of a lucky scoop for me. But yeah, the general point of the story going in was to say, actually, you know, there are commonalities between then and now, and it would be interesting to kind of see how that sort of history might work in the present. context. Then a piece I did recently for CJR was a profile of Mehdi Hasan, the MSNBC host, who I think is someone who has both a growing profile in the US and an interesting approach to political journalism that I think is kind of novel in the US and also comes from the UK. So as someone who I'm perhaps more familiar with than some American viewers. And so with him, I think it was more a case of, you know, knowing he had a very interesting backstory that maybe a lot of his viewers didn't know about that hadn't really been written down in one kind of really detailed profile. So it was about sort of doing that.

So those are the stories I like to kind of pursue.

I guess in terms of the first thing I said, what stories do I find interesting to read? I think there's really no such thing as like one interesting approach to a story. I do know a lot of journalists will say that a story needs to contain new information to be successful, but I find a lot of stories that contain new information to be pretty trivial new information, or to maybe privilege that new information over the kind of bigger picture. I think sometimes stories that take things you do know and are able to kind of analyze them or tell them or write them even a certain way that makes you sort of think about things differently, I think sometimes that can be really valuable too. So yeah, I think on that kind of broader aspect of it, I think it probably depends, but I wouldn't say there's like a set formula for success in my opinion.

From where you sit, do you see any big differences or similarities even between US media and the British media?

It's an interesting question and one I've thought about quite often.

I think I used to think to a greater extent than I do now that the US media was becoming more like the British media during these— I think it was an opinion I kind of formed during the early part of the Trump years. Because obviously here we have a very partisan print media, which is extremely kind of scabrous and cheeky, particularly on— and salacious and also sensationalist, particularly on the right, but also still very partisan on the left as well. And yeah, the US, I think, with the exception of papers like the New York Post, newspapers tend to have a self-conception as being kind of guardians of truth and balance and objectivity and then sort of pitch themselves much more down the middle. And I think it's tempting to think that the sort of US model is becoming closer to the British model, because I do think that Trump sort of bursting onto the scene did kind of force to some extent a taking of sides. And obviously there has been this sort of pushback about, you know, about that sort of model of down-the-middle objectivity and who it really serves and whether it is indeed actually down the middle at all. And yet I think the more I thought about it, actually, I sort of see US newspapers kind of resisting transitioning away from that model to a greater extent than they should.

And I don't really see a kind of swing towards British-style partisanship.

I do think in some respects that you actually, you could argue, and obviously this is difficult to sort of generalize as a comparison because there are a million cultural differences between the UK and the US, you could to some extent, I think, flip British TV and print and sort of then compare them to their opposite in the US, if that makes sense. So I think the BBC is actually kind of more akin to the New York Times than it is to CNN or MSNBC. Conversely, I think that you could argue that the Guardian is maybe more akin to MSNBC than it is to the New York Times. Again, hard to generalize, but I think you could maybe make the case that it's— Yeah, I certainly wouldn't want to sit here and say there's no partisan or opinionated media in the US. Clearly that would be wrong. And I also wouldn't want to say that no British news organizations see themselves as kind of down-the-middle, sort of neutral arbiters of fact either, because I think that would be wrong too.

But yeah, it's an interesting comparison to explore.

And I think recently there's been a lot of controversy and conversation about Britain kind of importing a Fox News-style model by launching these right-wing TV stations. And I think my attitude to that, which I've written about, has been very much like, you know, you can't just kind of import one country's culture war into another country and just sort of completely replicates its kind of rootedness and success. And I think you've seen that with one of these sort of like Fox News clone type channels, which is no one is watching and it's just a complete disaster already. But yeah, but I also think, you know, that the British media doesn't really need to import right-wing outrage from America because we have a lot of it of our own. It just tends to be in print rather than on TV. But yeah, but I think the US probably has a more on the whole, probably more robust media culture, but then it's a much bigger country. And, you know, if you, if you sort of take it person for person or square mile for square mile, obviously there is not enough local news in the US to go around, even though there are sort of more regional and sort of municipal newspapers that are in a healthier state in the US than in the UK. So yeah, it's an interesting comparison to draw and one I've thought about a lot, and one which you, as you can probably tell, I haven't actually, despite spending a lot of time at the intersection of the two reached kind of a firm conclusion about.

Well, it is a lot to think about, though. But I am kind of wondering, though, because for the longest time before politics became pretty much everything, you know, for a long time, the complaint about news was it was too much entertainment and not news. So hard news or soft news, compare it to, but now it seems as if we've evolved out of the entertainment aspect and into the politics. But I'm not sure if it's political entertainment or political news right now.

We actually ran a very interesting feature on this today from our new magazine, which is about the direction of political coverage after Trump, by— written by Sam Sanders from NPR. And the point he made was that this distinction between hard and soft news is kind of bogus and that actually all of it is important. And I think his argument was that what is considered to be hard news is often what has been kind of pitched at, you know, white, straight, white, well-educated men, sort of serious matters of government or whatever. And cultural stories have often been dismissed as fluffier, but actually, like, these are very important in terms of, like, assessing where you are as a country.

And I thought it was a really great piece and I agreed with it. I think also, like, I think you should— I think the news should be entertaining, or at least it should be interesting.

You know, things don't have to be boring and serious to matter, and you don't have to tell important and grave stories in boring and serious ways.

So yeah, so I think this— I think sometimes the idea that news shouldn't be entertaining is kind of—

I don't know, I think there's a conflation of reducing news to triviality and showmanship and kind of carnival barker type behavior, which are definitely a lot of which goes on, and, and sort of conflating that with saying anything that sort of presented an interesting or original law or sort of at all flashy way is not, is not serious and shouldn't be, and shouldn't be done that way.

I don't necessarily see it in sort of as clean terms as that. But yeah, if you, if you I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think entertainment is in and of itself sort of an inherently negative thing.

But yes, to the extent that entertainment means someone like Donald Trump, who is entertaining in the lowest common denominator sense of the term, to the sense that someone like him can come along and completely kind of short-circuit the attention span of America's top news organizations, and to the extent that he can sort of do WWE-style antics that crowd out discussions of more serious you know, policy proposals from more serious people. Yes, of course, that is, that is bad. And it's something to— yes, I mean, it's obviously bad. And I think we've all seen the consequences of that.

How would you, uh, describe the Biden administration thus far in terms of covering it? And even if you want to compare it to Trump.

It's interesting, isn't it?

I think, um, Well, obviously, there's one angle is kind of the way that they've treated the press, which I think is in some respects been kind of a polar opposite of what Trump did, right? Because obviously, Trump waged war on the press and was very horrible about them and sort of, you know, did a lot to undermine trust in media among his voters. At the same time, his administration was basically a sieve that information just leaked out of and everyone working in it was calling reporters from the same outlets that Trump was calling fake news. Trump, of course, himself loves to engage with these outlets, um, but, you know, very often while out the other side of his mouth calling them fake. So, so yeah, so in that sense, it was like glory days for access journalism. I think there's been a lot of pushback on reporters recently saying, um, you know, some of them I think have said, you know, without putting their names to these opinions, that we would like to, you know, kind of— we kind of miss the days of Trump because we got so much good access.

Again, I think access journalism, when it's kind of used for bad, is a bad thing.

But I don't think it's inherently a good thing, and people knowing about what's going on inside their government is good. And I think, you know, under Trump, it was possible to know about things that were going on behind the scenes. Of course, whether you could trust all of the accounts coming out, given the sort of viper's nest of different characters, you know, within the Trump administration, is a different story. But, you know, well-sourced, corroborated kind of reporting on deliberations inside the White House did, I think, shine a light on what was going on and did prove important in terms of accountability quite often. And the Biden administration has been much more polite about journalists and much more sort of professional in its dealings with the press. And, you know, there are daily briefings and the press secretary actually turns up and sometimes answers questions. But it seems by all accounts to be very disciplined and hard to kind of wring out sort of internal tensions, very, very kind of on message.

Yeah, which, which, you know, is their prerogative.

And I don't think Biden has in every respect got a completely admirable record on sort of standing up for press freedom rights, actually. But yeah, it does seem, it does sort of seem in the most basic sense, like there's a trade-off there. In terms of covering them, I think my biggest fear coming into the Biden administration would be that you'd have one of two competing extremes in the way political journalists thought about it after Trump. One of which would be Trump, you know, we must prove that we're even-handed, so we're going to cover Biden with the same level of aggression as we covered Trump.

Okay.

Which, given how awful Trump was and how corrupt his administration was, could have led to a lot of kind of false equivalency, you know, blowing up of non sort of scandals about Biden and then saying, well, we're just kind of like holding these administrations to the same degree of accountability. The other fear I had was that on the contrary, journalists would go, oh, that's okay, America's problems are all over because Biden is normal, he's a normal president, he sort of respects establishment norms and institutions, everything is fine, Trump's in the past, we can just kind of go back to the way things were in political journalism before.

And actually, I sort of hope we'd see a middle way.

I think it's hard, probably impossible really, to draw a general conclusion yet as to which of, you know, whether that middle way has been achieved or if we're sort of veering to one or the other. I think it's too soon to say.

I mean, there are definitely lots of things I could say about coverage of specific stories under Biden.

And I do think that it's certainly true that kind of outdated journalistic norms that weren't just like a pre-Trump thing, but also went through the Trump presidency in terms of blaming Democrats and Republicans equally for things that are more the Republicans' fault than Democrats, stuff like that. I think you do still see. a lot of that going on. But, um, yeah, I think on the whole, on the whole, there's also been some good coverage of the Biden administration, and that, you know, that you see on a daily basis. And I think it's, um, I think just at the kind of highest level, it is at this moment probably too soon to kind of reach a—

Okay.

One way or another.

You know, you brought up the idea of false equivalencies. And I think this is one of the terms that journalists will throw around, but I'm not sure if the public, the news consumer, really understands what you're talking about when you use a term like that. Can you give an example to explain it?

Yeah, well, essentially, it just means the idea of treating 2 things the same when they aren't the same. So that you can turn around to say— so that you can turn around to politicians and your readers and whoever and say, well, you know, the Republican did this bad thing, a Democrat did this bad thing, and we covered them both and gave them the same amount of column inches and And, you know, that was— and so we're being fair and balanced. The classic example that media critics will grab for in terms of recent memory is the coverage of Hillary Clinton's email server from 2016, right? So yeah, so the idea would be Trump did all of these extremely transgressive dreadful things, news organizations had to cover them all because he was the presidential nominee for a major party, but then turned around and thought to themselves, well, you know, given Trump a lot of negative coverage and this might appear to be sort of biased against Trump, so we need to do some stories about how Clinton is bad. Oh, look, there's this thing about her using a private email server in violation of the rules. Let's just go to town on that. And because then, you know, this is definitely not to say that there are not things that were worth scrutinising about Hillary Clinton. In fact, there were lots and lots of things that didn't get scrutinised that I think should have been about her personally. But But yes, this one story, while not unimportant in and of itself, gets kind of amplified to the same level of all of Trump's transgressions because there is an effort to sort of try and portray them as being equally bad. Another more recent example that I wrote about was coverage of this select committee investigating the insurrection, where the Republicans torpedoed the idea of a bipartisan sort of 9/11-style commission and then tried to nominate people who were essentially complicit in the same election denialism that led to the insurrection as members of the replacement committee in the House of Representatives. And then there were sort of a few political journalists who reacted to this by saying, well, you know, on the one hand, the Republicans shouldn't have torpedoed the commission, bipartisan commission, but on the other hand, the Democrats shouldn't play politics by rejecting these Republican nominees. Which, which, if you actually think about it for more than a couple of seconds, is a ludicrous way to assess this problem because there's literally no point having an investigation into something if the people that you're investigating are on the panel because they will obviously just derail it from within.

Mm-hmm.

And yet, and yet, I think there was this impulse to say, well, you know, this is Washington, you know, both sides are to blame to some extent. They're all just playing politics, you know, who's right, who can say?

And yeah, I mean, this still goes on a lot.

I do think there's more sort of voluble pushback against this now than there has been in the past. And I think that's good. And I think it is leading to some improvements. I would say on the whole, you see less of this type of coverage than you did maybe early in the Trump administration. But there is, there is still far too much of it. And I think it is a huge— as much as it's a cliché to kind of throw the false equivalency around in media criticism circles, I think it is a huge, you know, genuinely a huge problem that when you have one party that is, you know, that really needs to be held to account, but is fundamentally a political party operating within the norms of democracy, and another party that has gone off the rails and essentially rejected the norms of democracy, the idea that you should sort of persist with a model of coverage that treats those 2 things as the same and equal and sort of tries to find opportunities to criticize them both in equal measure clearly is a practice that will fail to communicate the kind of the truth in the proportion in which the truth deserves to be communicated.

One final question here because we're already at time and you've been doing great, thank you so much, is What is news today? How do you define it?

That's a very big question to finish on.

What is news today? I don't know. I don't know.

I think, I think there's like a million directions you could take that question, right?

I think news today should be the same as news as always.

been, which is, you know, communicating matters of public interest to the population that are true. Yeah, I think that's probably just what news always has been and probably what it, what it still is. Now, of course, the proportion of media that is performing that function and their relative kind of volubleness and, you know, the different audiences they reach is something I think that's changed a lot, um, you know, self-evidently. But, um, you know, the news is still things the public need to know about told to the public. And yeah, I guess that's how I would define it.

The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and Upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suite-radio.com.