A Story About the Collapse of American Journalism: The Toolkit
I had this good buddy in law school who used to sweat garlic.
Not actual garlic, unfortunately, but some kind of remnant of his homemade salad dressing and now all of us know more about that than we ever needed to.
We had a three-hour Constitutional Law class with a particularly stern professor who liked to call on people to recite cases and then toy with them like prey. I’d pick my buddy up on the way to class and we’d start talking about the assigned cases. He would already be dreading the possibility he’d be called to recite. By the time we got to the classroom, the perspiration had begun. He’d look at me as we walked in the door and say “well, time for three hours of inner turmoil.”
I was reminded of him when I was working through this series. Often, when I do these deep dives, what I discover makes me want to catapult myself to Mars.[1] If you feel the same you’ve made it to the right place. We spent a lot of time talking about the journalism we can’t trust anymore. For this project’s toolkit, I want to highlight some ways to find trustworthy outfits.
You can check a couple of quick things at any news site to tell whether you should spend more than 30 seconds there. The list isn’t bulletproof, and as we saw last week, there are plenty of bad actors out there willing to pretend something is independent just to catch your attention these days. So ask a few questions anytime you check out a new source of news.
The collapse left a void, but there are things we can all do to fill it. We’ll probably never get the old model back - corporate influence and political corruption are too profitable to disappear in today’s America - but there are still ways we can make the bastards trying to commandeer our information have to work for it.
So this toolkit is about survival and advancement more than it’s about repair.
A few questions to ask when evaluating a local news outlet:
You should be able to find most of these things on the site itself, but often the information on the site will be too basic to be meaningful. Start with the About page and work from there:
- Who owns and/or funds it: They muddy it up on purpose to make it difficult to figure out, but there are tools for tracing who owns what, including MuckRock, BallotPedia’s media ownership tracker, FCC license databases, and the freepress.net ownership tracker we linked last week.
- Is there a written policy regarding editorial independence?
- Does the site correct errors?
- Does the site cover local government?
How you can support local journalism:
- Subscribe to your local newspaper even if you read it online. I get it, by the time it hits your porch you’ve already read everything in it. Many subscriptions are cheap these days, though, and the outfits need the support. I got a sub to my old newspaper on a special deal a few weeks ago for something like a quarter a week.
- Support nonprofit local news organizations. This is key. When profit is the goal, truth suffers. It just does. Non-profits of all stripes do incredibly good and essential work.
- Attend local government meetings. Agendas are posted in advance. Local governmental units are required to provide notice of meetings. Even just sitting quietly in the back makes them all sit up a little straighter. If you wish to speak, there is always a public comment period and you can do so without any kind of credentials. There is usually a time limit, but if you show up prepared you can do a lot of good in a short amount of time.
- Share good local journalism when you find it. Your neighbors will enjoy it too! Maybe they’ll subscribe and the paper will make TWO quarters a week!
- Know your local reporters. I feel like a hypocrite here because I used to go out of my way to stay as low key as possible. I always felt like if the local reporter becomes a local celebrity they lose the plot a little bit. That’s not what I mean here though. Know who they are and understand what they cover so that when an issue impacts your community you know who to talk to or to follow for good information.
Send a Freedom of Information Act request for public records:
Citizens have the right to request certain records from their local municipality. The statutes vary slightly from state to state, so I can’t give you a universal primer on how to file. Generally speaking, FOIA is the process by which certain public bodies in the executive branch — which includes all state agencies, county and local governments, public colleges and universities, school boards, commissions and councils — must disclose public records about the workings of government and its officials upon a person’s request.
The words “person,” “public records,” and “public bodies,” have specific definitions in most FOIA statutes, and a variety of exemptions apply that allow a municipality to withhold or redact documents even if they otherwise meet the criteria for release, but FOIA statutes are designed to be pro-disclosure and meant to allow citizens to see how their government is working. Most states have a government-sponsored website that explains their FOIA statutes. Every municipal unit that is subject to FOIA must have a named FOIA-coordinator for citizens to contact.
Read Corporate Media Critically:
We spent a lot of time (too much?) detailing the collapse of American journalism and its capture by billionaires, corporations, and special interests.
My advice? Avoid corporate media completely if you can, and I’ll show you one way to do that below. But it isn’t really completely avoidable, so when you encounter it there are some things to keep in mind:
- Understand the ownership structure. Use the tools listed above to know who owns what. Remember that they deliberately try to conceal it so some digging can be required.
- Take nothing at face value. Ask yourself who benefits from the way any story is framed. If you aren’t seeing simply who, what, when, where, why, and how, ask yourself what else is in the story and why it’s there. If you can identify an agenda it is a big red flag.
- When a story seems incomplete ask yourself: Who aren’t they mentioning? What is being left out and why?
- Identify what isn’t being covered. If there is an issue in your community that is being neglected by the “local” paper, ask yourself why. Who stands to benefit from whatever the thing is, and why might they not want it publicized.
- Triangulate across sources. One corporate news source will not properly inform you. Different corporate sources might have different agendas, so use that against them to get as full a picture as you can get.
Support Legislation that Advocates for Press Freedom:
- The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act allows for smaller news organizations to join together and collectively bargain for fair compensation with the major tech platforms that distribute content. Without the Act, anti-trust laws prevent these smaller outfits from banding together.
- Support antitrust enforcement against media consolidation. When they passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 Congress opened the door for all of the bullshit that is happening now. Contact your legislators and tell them to close it.
Find and Support Local Independent Journalism:
There are a growing number of nonprofit local news outlets, local newsletters, and independent journalists working to fill the gaps left by the corporate capture of our media system. You just have to be careful for the frauds.
I encourage you to check out Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION Publishers), an outfit that works to support independent newsrooms by assisting with the business side of things.
The list you’ll find below represents the beginning of our Muckraker Reading List, a place on the site where we’ll try to collect and link independent organizations doing the good work that can be hard to find these days. The page on the site will be updated as we learn about more sites, but this list is a good place for you to start.
Oh, and one more note on the list: I’ve vetted each of these links at some point in the past few months, but as we’ve seen ownership of things like websites can change quickly. With forces at work putting fake independent news sites out there it is more important than ever that we vet our resources AS WE READ THEM. We’re often reminded to be careful what we eat, but it’s time we remember to be equally as diligent about what we put in your brains. It only takes a second to look for a byline on an article before you read it. If you don’t see a reporter’s name attached to the article, for example, it should be a red flag that makes you look a little deeper.
The Muckraker Reading List:
NATIONAL INVESTIGATIVE — The Heavy Hitters
Nonprofit, Pulitzer-winning, data-driven investigative journalism. Partners widely with local outlets.
National security, civil liberties, government accountability. Adversarial by design.
Nonprofit investigative newsroom. Money in politics is a specialty.
Reader-supported, investigative, long-form. Particularly strong on dark money and corporate accountability.
Covers the criminal justice system exclusively. Deep forensic work.
America's first investigative journalism nonprofit. Also a podcast.
Global financial crime.
Campaign finance and lobbying data.
FOIA filing platform and repository. Essential tool AND news outlet.
Open-source investigation.
PRESS FREEDOM & MEDIA ACCOUNTABILITY
Media ownership tracking, press freedom advocacy. Their Media Capitulation Index is a crucial tool.
Media criticism, fact-checking, journalism ethics.
The trade publication for journalism accountability.
Protecting journalists and whistleblowers.
CIVIC, DEMOCRACY & GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY
Daily independent news program. Amy Goodman. Long track record.
No advertising, no corporate or government funding. Viewer-supported.
Forensic journalism.
STATE & LOCAL NONPROFIT
These outlets represent both the gap that exists AND what's filling it.
The model. Nonprofit, nonpartisan, statewide Texas political coverage. Heavily collaborative.
Largest statewide nonprofit news organization in Pennsylvania. The template for state-level accountability journalism.
California policy and government. Nonprofit, nonpartisan.
Reporter-owned, nonprofit. Strong model for sustainable independent journalism.
In-depth statewide Nevada coverage. Donor-supported.
Credible, unbiased Illinois state government coverage.
Michigan nonprofit news.
Nonprofit, statewide Michigan political coverage.
Nonpartisan investigative reporting in Wisconsin.
Independent, nonpartisan, New Mexico focused.
Investigative and accountability journalism explaining how New York state actually works.
TOOLS & INFRASTRUCTURE
The consortium of 500+ nonprofit newsrooms. Their member directory is a resource in itself.
Directory of local and state independent news outlets by geography. Useful for Citizen Action sections.
Funds and supports local nonprofit newsrooms. Their portfolio shows where independent journalism is being rebuilt.
The professional organization. Also a training and resource hub.
International investigative journalism network.
Conclusion
It isn’t going to be easy. The wolves have come to the door, opened it, eaten everything inside, and are now shitting on the floor.
The model that produced some of the best journalism in our history is gone. In its place is a hollow facsimile that looks enough like the real thing that many of us still believe it is reliable. But you, Bubba, no longer have to buy that bullshit. You now have the history, the argument, and the tools to avoid being captured.
The rest of the work is yours. Go get yourself a wallet.
Footnotes
- I’d still get there before Elon.↩︎
