On the podcast today state Rep. Matt Eidson told me he’s going to do his best to do a good job both as an elected member of North Dakota’s legislature and a working journalist for the Grand Forks Herald and Prairie Public. I’m not convinced he can do it. I say that not to besmirch Eidson’s…
Plain Talk: Can You Be an Elected Official and a Reporter at the Same Time?
On this episode of Plain Talk, state Rep. Matt Eidson (D-Grand Forks) talks about how he plans to manage being an elected official as well as a reporter. Eidson has taken internships with Prairie Public and the Grand Forks Herald (owned by Forum Communications Company which also employs me), and says he’ll work hard to…
The National News Media Isn’t Even Particularly Good at Being Biased
The national news media has a pronounced leftward lean in their ideology. This is no big secret. Honest members of the media industry acknowledge it, and at least pay lip service to correcting it. The national news media, for the most part, also hates President Donald Trump. One needn’t watch many pundit panels on CNN,…
Print Column: The Problem With Journalism and Politics Is Us
MINOT, N.D. — Between the BuzzFeed catastrophe and the Covington Catholic High School mess, I’ve been thinking a lot about journalism these past few days. This is a topic I’m not fit to weigh on, according to some. Not so long ago columnist Jack Zaleski wrote that I shouldn’t refer to my reporter co-workers as colleagues, which is an…
Alternatively, More Conservatives Should Join the News Media
Yesterday, in response to consternation among media types over the demise of conservative news and opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, I argued that if “mainstream” media types were so concerned about it they ought to try hiring more conservatives. I received a lot of feedback on that post through various mediums, and one consistent and well-made…
The News Media Should Hire More Conservatives
There is a lot of consternation of late about the demise of The Weekly Standard, a right-of-center publication founded by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes and owned by Rupert Murdoch from its founding in 1995 until 2009 (right around the media mogul purchased the Wall Street Journal). The Standard is hardly the first ideologically-driven publication…
Twitter Isn’t Harming Journalism, Journalists on Twitter Are
John Ziegler, writing at Mediate, has an interesting piece today headlined “The Top Ten Ways That Twitter Has Greatly Harmed Journalism and Destroyed Our Public Discourse.” An excerpt: I have written before about some of the many problems which exist with Twitter, the platform which now, partly because of President Trump’s love of the outlet,…
Print Column: The Public’s Loss of Faith in Mass Media Began Long Before Donald Trump
MINOT, N.D. — It’s become fashionable for journalists to blame Donald Trump and his attacks on “fake news” for undermining the public’s trust in mass media. An example of this are recent editorials from newspapers across the country, coordinated by a call to action from the Boston Globe, criticizing the President’s “dirty war on the…
This Is Why Right-of-Center Americans Don’t Trust the Journalism Industry
I awoke this morning to two stories in my news feed I feel are pretty strongly related to one another. First was the results of a Pew Research study into public perceptions of the media. According to Pew, far more right-of-center Americans distrust the journalism industry than their left-of-center neighbors: Fresh data affirm a long-running…
Hiring Comedians to Insult Republicans Is Not How Journalists Will Regain the Trust of Americans
In January of this year Gallup released a poll showing 84 percent of Americans thinking the press is very important to the health of our democracy, but 43 percent saying journalists were doing a very poor job of supporting it. Flash forward to last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner where comedian Michelle Wolf berated…