Got Them Misleading News Blues
Being at the Breonna Taylor protests in 2020, seeing just how different what I saw and experienced was from what got reported in the media, was the primary motivation behind shifting my focus to doing photojournalism. Funny that, who decides to take up a dying profession? In the years since, I've covered many goings-on as I worked on building up my journalism skills, often things the legacy media has declined to cover.
The Saturday before last, local groups put on a series of panel discussions in Smoketown under the title 'Money For People's Needs Not The War Machine.' Was mildly surprised to find one of the local TV stations, WLKY, there covering the event as well. They stuck around for the first of three panel discussions and then left, after sticking around and shooting the other two as well I returned home to discover that WLKY was reporting the event as a protest.
"The group also held a series of panels at the event." WLKY reported. Except the panels were the event, with nothing else going on aside from a few groups tabling in an adjacent room and 90 second breaks between panels for refreshments. Yet that only makes it into the next to last sentence of the article.
While this may seem like primarily an issue of semantics, it has real world consequences. Organizations and locations that are more than happy to let you use their space for education and discussion tend to be about as happy about protests there as your parents were when you threw the kegger while they were away. It also begs the question of how much of their other news coverage is similarly skewed, twisted, misleading?
Thing is, it's not just one news outlet or story. One of the groups organizing the event, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, had recently had to cancel a different educational event due to the local paper, The Courier-Journal, reporting in advance that it was going to be a protest. Is it sloppy journalism? Knock on effects of the Epstein class turning their trophy collecting fetish to news outlets?
Don't have the answers to that myself, but it seems to me a good example of the issue with allowing a tiny handful of people to control our access to information and decide what is or isn't news. Until next time y'all, and please support independent media.
The problem with journalism, any kind of journalism, is that we receive information through the reporter's filter. It's probably the case that this reporter viewed the meeting as a protest, because it promoted ideas that were not echoing the government's official line. That's not a protest. That's speech.
I've written this before on Hive: When I taught social studies, I had a weekly newspaper day. On the way to school I'd pick up a variety of dailies (we had them back then) and show the class the front page. Even before one word in the article was read, the front page showed the editorial bias of the respective papers. Which news items were worthy of front page coverage? Which articles appeared first? How large were the headlines? If an article in one paper appeared on the front page, where did it appear in another paper? Or did it appear at all?
My students were fascinated by the exercise. This was the best demonstration to them that they couldn't trust what they read, or what they were told. I explained to them that they shouldn't trust me. Even if I thought I was being honest, I could be wrong.
The most valuable tool we all have as consumers of information and as citizens, is skepticism.
There...now you know what it was like to be in one of my classes :))
That's why the whole pretense of objectivity gets me so riled up. Judging by the article, they were looking for something to tie in with the protests occurring elsewhere. Conflating opposition with protest just seems a recipe for nothing good.
Wish we'd had more teachers doing demonstrations like that, didn't have anything like it when I was in school. Then again it'd be hard to do there, the county only had a couple weekly papers. Think it was my first trip to DC that I got to see it for myself, wasn't sure what the difference was between the Washington Post and the Washington Times until my parents made me look at little closer.
Amen to the skepticism. 'Consumers of information' just speaks to how warped our relationship to knowledge has become, but that's another rant.
I was a bit eccentric. Didn't train to be a teacher (although I did get certification), so I had unorthodox methods. The kids loved my approach...the other teachers and administration scratched their heads. But my approach worked really well. Noisy, lively classroom with engaged students who learned. Very short career (exhausting) but memorable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkersStrikeBack/comments/1rvkxl4/media_misreporting_at_the_money_for_peoples_needs/
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