Thre was one projects that stood out to me as very plausible: The Minors: Minor League Sports Matter.
The Minor's ideas was very concise and concentre idea: reporting on minor league sports, and not only about the beauties of sports but also the issues surrounding minor league sports. The minors are not covered as much due to lack on endorsements and big company ads, but that does not mean Minor League sports do not have a concrete community and culture surrounding the games, Nick's idea really captures the sense of community. Also, Nick's expertise in minor league sports and communities because of his background interning for the Red Wings in Rochester also makes it so that the website it started by an insider that has the connections necessary to start a project like this. One of my favorite aspects of the project was that one of the focuses was going to be on the hardships some of the players have to deal with in the minors off season -- and even during the season -- when it comes to wages and economic stability. Sometimes I feel that the U.S. takes their athletes fro granted and I feel that those topics would be a valuable aspect of the sports world to explore.
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The way conservative news outlets like Breitbart and FOX News do is an insult to journalism because they create news, not report it. Most of the time, they create things that harm others when they do not deserve negative exposure.
For example, what James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles did to ACRON, a group that just wanted to help people in poverty, was out of sheer spite. What do they gain from defaming ACORN? Other than being a joke within the journalism community and getting a few lawsuits. Although ACORN has been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations, the reputation they left behind after being shut done was as a place that aid in illegal activity and not a place that helps those who suffer from structural classism get ahead. It is almost as if O'Keefe and Giles wanted ACORN to be shut down. FOX News has also been caught creating news and hyper editing clips to make people seem as if they're talking about something they are not. It happened with Shirley Sherrod, then Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture. Fox News edited a speech she was hosting to make it sound as if she would not help a white farmer because of being white. The reality of the story was that she ended up helping the farmer keep his land and this was a learning experience for her when she first joined the department. Sherrod ended up losing her job, and FOX News still gets to sit pretty and frame people in a defaming nature. What worries me, however, is that even after these two hoaxes have been proved incorrect, FOX News and Breitbart are still allowed to mass distribute information and not one bats an eye other than other journalists and people keeping tabs on these publications. There should be parameters set in place that once a mainstream news publication does something like this -- literally create news and distribute false information -- that they get a punishment greater than slap on the wrist. I feel that mainstream media gets to get away with things to a point that they can mold reality to extremes and that is not a safe thing, for anyone. Most people in the U.S. do not have access to a level of education that allows them to know how to criticize the news, and most journalists in many places know and understand this. Places like FOX News use this to their advantage and absorb the minds of their viewers until they create a cult-like following. I've said it many times and I'll keep saying it: the U.S. practices subtle propaganda techniques and Donal Trump's administration is just making this more evident, more dangerous, and making overt use of it. The debate of journalists being activists is one that has always confused me. A journalist is not an activist, but with the reporting a journalist does they protect certain parts of democracy, like activism and protests.
When we assume that a journalist is not going to about the things that they are passionate about we assume journalists robotic. No one is going to extorting research and investigations into something they do not believe in or want to refute. David Carr's article, Journalism, Even When It's Tilted, ends with a very critical tone towards journalists who seem to participate in activism, not realizing that the premise of journalism itself was rooted in the need to protest the establishment; the need to give government itself a check and balance. Carr has a sentence in his article in which he states his opinion: the activism can impair the vision of the journalist. If he was to actually practice the objective journalism he seems to be preaching left and right though his piece, he would have left his two-cents out of it. Carr managed to criticize journalists who believe in a cause in a very ironic matter, by curtailing an article to fully show his point of view on the matter. Does his cause not give him tunnel vision? Or does this only pertain to those who identify with the left. My overall problem with Carr's piece is that it is neither a news piece or an opinion piece, and I should not have to figure out which is which in a New York Times article. This is the true problem when it comes to objective and subjective articles. When I read something from Glen Greenwald I can obviously tell when he is commentating or when he is reporting. The mainstream media mixes so much of both opinion and news into stories people are getting confused. At least journalists who are also in a way activists are transparent about how they talk about things. I've mentioned in many of my previous posts that I am terrified of the propaganda model that U.S. media is becoming, taking away net neutrality does nothing to soothe those fears. Right after President Donald Trump was elected, The Verge came out with a piece about net neutrality that outlined the ways net neutrality was at risk. In it, they mentioned that Ted Cruz had said in 2008 that net neutrality was "Obamacare for the internet," and that it would slow down private sector innovation.
Ironically, net neutrality does quite the opposite. Because so many sites are competing with each other, and most of them are part of the private sector, it forces them to bring out the best possible product every day. Having to be the best when competing with millions of other sites on the internet requires content investment and innovation in the best technologies, marketing strategies as well as ensuring that the people get the best possible product. Is this not what capitalism is about? What republicans want to do with net neutrality is make it so that those who already have the means to be on the "fast track" can be on it and keep making money and sharing information that is complicit to the Republican agenda. Those who do not have the means have to "pull themselves from their bootstraps" until they find a way to pay the fee to be seen in search engine results. The internet was the one thing in the United States that did not structurally discriminate against those who had less; is was the only entity that started everyone out on an even playing field. Why republicans would want to ruin the one thing that actually ascribes to the true meaning of capitalism -- when capitalism is all they talk about -- is because they find the control on information to be more important that the development of online enterprises. Being able to control everything has always been the objective of the Republican party, not enterprise or little government involvement. This is why in 2010 they heavily gerrymandered states all across the country to benefit their own interests and votes. Talk about being heavily involved in the decisions your constituents make. People have to recognize that the Republican party is hiding behind a screen of conservatism that has very authoritarian and dangerous undertones. Donald Trump is the vehicle they were waiting for to bring their dangerous tactics into the forefront. The world of public radio outside of the United States is a parallel universe. In the U.S. public radio has the connotation of being on the side of the government especially in other countries. Traditionally, many people associate government radio to authoritarian regimes who control what they want citizens to see. We talked in classes about how France's public radio is more in bed with the establishment, and how that is also a viable way of making news instead of reporting it.
But what happens when the established government is giving its opposition public radio stations? Colombia has just ended a 52-year civil war and one of the clauses in the peace treaty was giving the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) 31 radio stations. Now that the treaty is in place, people are wary about giving the group that caused the displacement of seven million people due to landmines, kidnappings, and violence a platform to speak of these ideas. Granted, more people in Colombia are actually scared of socialist ideas than the murder of thousands of people, but that's the way the Cold War made us. Having Venezuela as a neighbor does not help either. I do not believe in suppressing new ideas, and since FARC is now a political party they deserve a platform. But 31 radio stations? In a country whose information is still mostly distributed through radio waves? When most other political parties have evolved into T.V. stations that really only higher socioeconomic classes watch? Are you trying to enact another revolution? When we just got out of a war? We also do not know how radical FARC journalists would get on airwaves. It is unfair to assume that they would advocate for violence, or suppression of ideas. Hopefully, they preach for socialist ideals in a way that is politically correct and does not go handing hand with human rights abuses and the stifling of freedom of speech. At the same time, as someone who lost family to the war, I cannot help but be fearful that these ideas will be too radical, even for someone like me who identifies as a socialist. But I don't want to be the journalist who says "we need to draw a line" because I understand that marginalizing ideas create hostility and violent uprisings. A big part of independent media is branding. Part of finding a niche as well a catchy name is only part of the work when branding a website or a news site, and although branding is a marketing term usually associated to big cooperations -- sometimes it even has a negative connotation -- but every media site has a personality, a look, and a feel and all of that is the brand.
The negative connotation of the word branding disallows Adam Westbrook to mention how branding yourself within social media goes hand in hand with branding your content. Since independent media is very much about having a connection with the people who publish the content -- we discussed this when talking about blogs -- branding yourself on social media will give a face to content, and make it easier for people to identify your sight and the things that you believe in. When in comes to independent media, since revenue streams are not necessarily from ads, the content itself has to be a product that can stand on its own. Distribution is social media, but how to get people to read the content has a lot to do with what they identify your content with. For example, when you read something like The Intercept, their brand is dark, investigative and smart journalism. When you look at The Nation, you think of progressive, polished and eloquent features and columns. The people who actively read The Intercept are thought of as pundits, and those who read The Nation are taught of pundits as well, but with a little more sophistication. Even when finding a niche group, if the way the content is presented or the overall vibe of the site does not jive with the readers, or the content itself is discombobulated (maybe that's the brand?) it might not give a face to a name, almost. What I am trying to say is that even though this is independent media, there should be something that readers or listeners want to get out of being a part of the online media community one is creating other than news. That themselves what to be identified as "woke," conservative, liberal, progressive, latino, masculine, socialist feminist or whatever niche you're writing about. If the sight does not give them that validation in their own identity, then the long term success of a site is debatable. Being able to control information is a luxury that many countries cannot afford, but the United States managed to do it so seamlessly that no one seems to notice that the monopoly on telecommunications is borderline authoritarian. Since it's masked under capitalist structures, no one realized that they are being monitored by what seems to be four companies who then dictate the adds you see, those random junk emails you get and ultimately decide what channels are available for certain prices.
An article in The Week, Why is American Internet so slow? introduces the idea that telecommunications in the U.S. are a monopoly that are stifling technological advances specifically in the speed of the internet, but what it forgets to mention is that whoever controls the infrastructure controls the system, in this case, the system is content. If we really think about it, only a handful of companies control internet access, and most of these companies sell packages in which you can get cable and the internet all on one bill. Most people in the U.S., if they are not millennials, still watch an instrumental amount of television, and if only a few companies are providing access to T.V. channels, then only a few channels will actually be offered, which means only certain things will be viewed by everyone on television. For example, everyone has access to reality T.V. and mainstream media news. Reality T.V. has shown to distort the way teens view their own reality and want to act like the dramatized reality T.V. stars in real life. And as I have discussed many times before, mainstream media also distorts reality by advocating "non-baised" half truths. But, if you pay a little extra, then you'll have access to channels such as Comedy Central and HBO where people can watch Trevor Noah or Jhon Oliver deconstruct the news. Some might have access to more documentaries and information about structural deficiencies and not about what salad the Kardashians had that day. The monopoly of infrastructure has created a monopoly on content as well as created a classist system of distributing information. When attending the Izzy Awards Q&A, there were at times that I felt like a journalist praising amazing and ruthless reporting. Other times, I felt like a woman of color listening to a group of white journalists tell stories that when I talk about them, my identity seeps through the pages and it is seen as biased and pinholed. The issue of whiteness is media is more so the fault of a structure that disallows minority voices to be taken seriously. The masses -- whatever that means -- are so in tune with the idea of having a white savior bring the disenfranchised out of poverty and racism, be it through war or news. It is not media's fault that people don't listen to those who are disenfranchised tell stories themselves, but Independent Media is trying to bring more voices to the newsroom; it's just sometimes we don't see it.
I talked to Ari Berman at the end of the Q&A and he said something that although I did not like, i agree with and recognize the validity: white people covering stories such as these is what makes other white people care. It's unfortunate, but its true. This does not mean people of color should be kept out of the editorial board. We talked about The Nation, its student conference, and its internship. While attending The Nation's student conference I could tell that the magazine was making an effort to bring in an array of students into the room. There were people of color, white middle class, those who talked about immigration, the environment, sports, those who covered transgender issues, those who were transgender and we were all put in a room to talk about activism and news. I had never felt more safe or more at home, but while the room around me was diverse and include, the editorial board at The Nation seemed awfully white. At first, I was not surprised, somewhat annoyed and found it somewhat hypocritical, but after talking to Ari personally, I realized that it's not that there isn't a space we're just transitioning. In my impatience of wanting diversity right now in every single newsroom I lost sight that it's my generation who is going to bring that to newsrooms. Sure, we need non-racists hiring managers, I feel that progressive independent media is the place where that starts. I will say, however, that in order for that space to be truly safe and cohesive for everyone, people who do not have a stake in a story (e.g. white people talking about race issues) other than putting their structural privilege at risk. Although, if that is said repentantly, it might diminish the amount of necessary news satires and investigations on race, class and gender issues. So I guess I'll keep that unpopular idea to myself, for now. Slate's article, Non-profit journalism comes at a cost, makes a great point that investors are still investors, and their decision to back a news outlet usually comes with a hidden agenda. My problem with is is why is this a surprise?
Non-profits and corporate media are both funded by the same type of person: people with money to spend. The only difference is that Corporate media does it for the money and non-profits do it to feel as if they've done something good for whatever cause they're supporting. But, a billionaire is not going to throw money at a publication for the sake of good journalism, they're going to do it to support a cause, a political ideology or their needs as humanitarians and achieve that through good journalism thanks to the widespread opinion that journalism is at a downfall. The New York Times has some of the best reporters in the world, but what they decide to report on and their lack of transparency in their bias is the issue, not their quality of work. What makes corporate news and non-profit news different at the end of the day is that when you go and read The Intercept you understand what the end-game is, what they're going to talk about as well as who runs it: you have enough context to know why they say the things they say. When it comes to something like NBC or The New Yorker, a reader does not have the context behind why NBC or The New Yorker say the things they say. Understanding the publication is very important when trying to understand the news they report. Being disgusted at the fact that non-profit news will follow a certain agenda is naive when thinking about human nature. No journalist came into journalism without an agenda or bias, and if a person sees the merit in journalism to support a cause they will throw money at it to support whatever that cause may be. The article is right, however, that good journalism doesn't make money because people don't see it as a commodity, and it shouldn't be. The business model of news has always made me uncomfortable because even though I want to be paid as a journalist to make a living, I understand the basic function of journalism is a need to the basically functionality of democracy. Many would say it is a right. People should have access to information without a cost, making it hard to pay journalist or keep a site going without someone or something funding the outlet. I can't envision a society in which profit or non-profit journalism isn't sponsored by an agenda if the people writing the news need wages to survive. And right now, envisioning a work without wages or need for them is not even possible. This past week, TheWarHorse.org broke a story on a Facebook group with a total of 30,000 Marine Core active and veteran midshipmen that shared naked pictures of women in the Marines. Pictures of the female marines social media handled were also shares, comments about how these women should be raped soon followed.
Thomas Brennan, an Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran and Purple Heart is the founder of The War Horse and is also the man who wrote the story. He has been getting death threats from people in the military because of his story. The great thing about this story is that it's not the military protecting its own, but the military not putting up with misogynistic and sexist behavior. Although Brennan is a veteran, he is still a part of the military and a traditional aspect of military culture is that you don't "rat out" your colleagues and you protect the reputation of the military in order for it to be held to the highest regards. Many of the military's arbitrary laws such as not being able to talk on the phone and walk at the same time when you're in uniform or not being able to hold the hand of your significant other are set in place to keep a pristine and decent image of the armed forces. Anything that makes midshipmen or cadets look like degenerates will be sunk. This time, it wasn't. This is why I think Brennan publishing this story is admirable. Sure, it was just a Facebook group, but the Marines have the highest rate of sexual assault and abuse than any of the other branches. They are also notorious for not wanting women amongst their ranks. Brennan publishing this story cracks the sexist issues within the Marines - and to an extent the Navy - to the public eye. Most of the times cases like these are Court Marshaled, the military's judicial system, and a lot of the details are not disclosed to the press. Since this story was taken to the press first it will lift a veil in the corruption found within midshipmen. My problem with the story is how everyone else is talking about it, focusing it on the Facebook group itself and not the fact that both the Navy and the Marines have had multiple cases of sexual abuse resulting in officers keeping their jobs and midshipmen being damaged for life. The hierarchical system within the Military makes it hard for women and men who have been victims of abuse and harassment to press charges against their superiors. The bigger picture this is the patriarchal and sexist nature of the military as a whole. The military has been trying to push towards a more inclusive, an effort spearheaded by the Army, but there are obvious flaws with the plan and the biggest one is the culture surrounding certain branched such as the Marines. We now have the story, it's time to look deeper. |
AuthorHi! I'm Isabella Grullon. I am a junior journalism major at Ithaca College from the Dominican Republic and Colombia.
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