Category: About News
A Demon and a Lemon: Big-Name Firings Were Not the Same
You ought to do some soul-searching if you’re a big-time media figure who gets fired and the media reporters have to offer possible reasons in list form
But that won’t happen with Tucker Carlson, who, despite being fired by MSNBC, CNN and now Fox, is incapable of shame. And maybe he couldn’t find his soul anyway.
One remarkable aspect is that Fox even did this to its biggest ratings winner. Read more.
In Brandon Miller Case, Blaming the Media Is Way Too Simple
The University of Alabama men’s basketball program ended its season Friday having squandered its national championship chances and its good reputation. In the same process, the reputation of the news media took a thorough pounding, as well.
Many UA fans blamed the press — mostly the press outside of Tuscaloosa — for sparking national hatred of the program that showed itself in arena chants and on social media, culminating with death threats and armed security for star player Brandon Miller, who was part of the chain of events that led to the shooting death of a young mother. I got to wondering if the blame was valid. Read more.
A Speculative Top 10 List of Fox News’ “Journalistic Processes”
Fox News may not be capable of shame, but the public humiliation of it from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit just keeps getting better.
Dominion claims Fox News damaged it by knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion engaged in vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Among the current legal contests in the case is whether to protect or reveal some internal Fox communications that are currently blacked out in legal filings.
On March 10, Fox lawyers argued for continued secrecy because “prematurely disclosing these other details on Fox’s internal and proprietary journalistic processes may allow competitors to appropriate these processes for their own competitive advantage.”
Just goes to show that you can find good comedy anywhere. Read more.
Big, Unanswered Questions Don’t Have a Statute of Limitations
After Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged with capital murder, coach Nate Oats called NFL Hall of Famer Ray Lewis for advice. I don’t know what Lewis might have told Oats beyond what has been reported, but he might have said: “The damn news media will never let it go.” Read more.
I’m Failing to Get Outraged About the Death of The Birmingham News
Gonna make this short because, as grateful as I am for every wonderful person who has ever read an Arenblog post, I write primarily for my students, and I can assure you they don’t give a sheet* about the end of newspapers in three of Alabama’s largest cities.
Today marked the end of The Huntsville Times, The Mobile Press-Register and The Birmingham News, for which I busted my tail for 30 years and in which I took enormous pride (on its good days, anyway). Read more.
Sometimes You Shouldn’t Stay Out of the Story
In late December, a reporter for the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin who was assigned to report on dangerously cold weather wrote a first-person account of his decision to summon help for a shivering woman living in a tent. He feared she might not survive the night. Compassionate and heroic, is it not?
Apparently not, because he got torn to shreds on Twitter – so much so that the next day he posted that he was taking a break from the “unrelenting hatred” on the platform.
Damar Hamlin’s Horrifying Collapse Gives Some Football Writers Pause
I’m well aware of the many ways I benefited in my years as a sports journalist from the popularity of football. That’s true for all the sports media that report on, and therefore indirectly promote, football at any level.
More readership and ratings. More status and money.
It’s all good until a moment comes along that demands a look in the mirror and an answer to the question “Should I really be doing this?”
I saw some of that in the aftermath of Monday night’s horrifying collapse of Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin seconds after a normal tackle on live national TV. Emergency medical staff administered CPR and electrical shock while players kneeled and prayed and cried. Fans in the stadium hushed. Read more.
Students Discover Hating on Journalists Has No Age Minimum
Smart college journalism students enhance their classroom work by doing internships or joining a campus outlet. They get to experience the real thing: published stories seen by an audience, with all the potential good and bad consequences that professionals face. Because, really, student journalists are journalists who just happen to be students.
This is a great philosophy. Until it isn’t.
The Washington Post recently published an alarming story with this headline: “Online mobs are now coming for student journalists.” It details severe online harassment of college journalists around the U.S., leaving some spooked and reconsidering their planned career. Primarily using social media channels, attackers hurl physical threats, obscenities and insults about personal appearance. They also doxx (publicly revealing private contact information). Not surprisingly, women, racial minorities and gender identity minorities get it the worst. Read more.
Crime Stories Are Everywhere, but You Really Can Go Outside
The news media love crime stories, which, of course, is the fault of the audience for giving them clicks and ratings.
But some commentators on the press offer unreservedly brutal words for how journalists do crime coverage:
—Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli of Free Press wrote for Nieman Lab in 2020: “Crime coverage is terrible. It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve.”
—Kelly McBride of Poynter told an online seminar in 2021 that years from now, “newsrooms will issue apologies for the harm they caused” with their crime reporting. For good measure, she called it “journalistic malpractice.”
Yikes. Read more.
A Journalist Who Doesn’t Want You to Buy His Book
When the best journalists put their work in book form, they invest exhaustive effort to portray the subject as completely and truthfully as possible. Often, they nail it.
Sometimes, in hindsight, they miss.
Sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, a New York Times bestselling author whose work includes books on Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Dallas Cowboys, believes he missed with his 2016 book “Gunslinger: The remarkable, improbable, iconic life of Brett Favre.”
Remarkably and improbably, Pearlman went on Twitter on Sept. 13 and told his followers not to buy or read Gunslinger. He did so in the immediate wake of news reports that Favre, the retired Green Bay Packers and Southern Mississippi quarterback, knowingly participated in steering $5 million in government money intended for impoverished Mississippi families to building at new volleyball stadium at Southern Miss, where his daughter played on the team. Read more.
