Improving Our Media Diet (4/21/24)
For months, members of the Markers For Democracy community and our allies in the Comments section of Robert Hubbell’s Substack have been grumbling about the New York Times’ and other outlets’ problematic coverage of Biden, Trump, the threats to democracy, the alleged exhaustion of the grassroots and other issues. But aside from opening a Slack channel, #bad-nyt-headlines, we haven’t had a clear plan about what to do about it. Enter Milo Vassallo, Executive Director of the Media and Democracy Project who visited last Monday, presented an information-packed slide deck, and stayed on Zoom for over two hours to talk with us about actions we can take to hold media accountable.
Milo framed the problem this way: Most Americans are “feeding on a media diet that under-informs, misinforms and disinforms them . . . which threatens our democracy, our society, and life on earth.” He explained that none of this is an accident as “deregulation, consolidation, loss of ad revenue, changes in information consumption have crushed local journalism,” and "the vast majority of news organizations do not have democracy as a prime directive.” At the same time, “massive mis-/dis-information media ecosystems have been constructed which create an unreality – and which engage in information warfare – which impacts all of us.”
While it is tempting to throw up our hands and ask “but how can we make a difference,” Milo offered concrete steps we can take to help:
Sign the Media and Democracy Project Open Letter to newsroom leaders about the urgent need for pro-democracy election coverage.
Sign the Media and Democracy Letter in support of the FCC holding a hearing on Murdoch/Fox’s local broadcast TV license.
Support local journalism by subscribing and gifting subscriptions to local papers or online publications to friends and family. (Note: Markers recently hosted New York Focus, an independent nonprofit newsroom investigating power in the Empire State which covers Albany, and Beacon Media, North Carolina’s first pro-democracy media group.)
Be a critical and supportive consumer of news. Engage in media activism and outreach. Add “Heroes” like Margaret Sullivan, Mark Jacob, Dan Froomkin, Will Bunch, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and more to your media diet. Let “Zeros” know when their coverage has not met the moment by writing a Letter to the Editor, commenting, or tweeting.
Consider canceling your subscription to outlets that constantly miss the mark (Note: You can find alternatives to Spelling Bee and Wordle or consider a Games subscription) and subscribing to outlets like ProPublica and The Guardian.
Try to spend 5 minutes a day on social media to amplify the work of media heroes like those in #4 above and follow @FixMediaNow on Twitter/X. (For more on how amplification equals activism, see the purple box in this newsletter.)
Subscribe to the Media and Democracy Substack.
Join Media and Democracy Project at one of their evening meetings. They meet once a month on Monday evenings. The next meeting is Monday, May 13th at 7 pm. (A bunch of Markers attended last Monday’s meeting and it was well worth our time.)
We’ve got our marching orders. Let’s see how many of these actions we can incorporate into our activism to help fix the media and democracy crisis.