Identifying the media
There needs to be a distinction made as to what people see as “the media.”
As a reporter for the Journal-Tribune, I cover small-town news in a rural county. Along with my coworkers, I try to highlight what’s important to the people of the county in terms of what the schools, village councils and local government agencies are doing for the people. We are not a part of the majority, which I’d say is the mainstream media.
In my eyes, the mainstream media is comprised of big news outlets who have an aggressive online presence and are always trying to update stories at breakneck speeds. That industry requires its reporters to always be updating information as soon as possible. And, as I covered in a column before, they’ll get a robot to do the work sometimes.
We here at the J-T are a handful of reporters who work on a daily newspaper. We don’t try to rush information out at 3:45 a.m. to ping a news alert to everyone’s phones about a 100-word update to a story, nor are we getting robots to write our sports stories.
That part about the job is pretty good, in my eyes. It ensures we don’t have to strain ourselves to get information out at every possible second. It means we can take the time to make sure our information is correct.
It also means we can cover issues on a more personal level. Readers get information that pertains to them, not somewhere in Youngstown or Arizona.
With that said, I think a distinction must be made if someone is talking about “the media.”
I dislike mainstream media sources. I don’t like how the bias is very prevalent in certain, large sources and the fact money drives that sort of news.
I believe in the concept of “fake news,” but in some other senses: yes, the literal “this is a fake story your internet-illiterate aunt shares from illegitimate websites to Facebook” examples, but also the idea that the term punishes stories with heavy bias or contradicting points in the story.
When you have outlets like Business Insider or the New York Times keep pushing the message that the elections were hacked, have always been hacked and will always be hacked no matter what. What good does the media do for the people if it keeps creating fear-mongering content that promulgates a one-sided issue with no chance at a counterpoint? That to me would ring as the less literal definition of “fake news.”
In defense of the J-T, we try our best to educate people about issues going on in their schools, government offices and others, while also informing them about key election information. We take time to carefully craft an accurate message that we try our best to not have it dripping with vitriol or praise for a certain entity.
While I welcome criticism of the media, I would ask residents to make sure to differentiate the two. We’re small, and we’re not trying to change the minds of a country. We’re not clamoring to speak to unscrupulous sources to fit an agenda or meet an insanely short deadline, and we don’t have a fanatical obsession to bludgeon those we don’t like and then unabashedly praise and defend the other side.
We’re just doing our best to work in a world that will quickly subsume media outlets like ours into something bigger and more depressing.
-Jacob Runnels is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.