On the Up Side

There's a meme going around that says if we defunded the media, we could solve most of our nation's problems. It's got a couple of problems itself. The first is that it's unlikely to be true. The word's problems exist whether the media covers them or not, and the issue irresponsible media outlets present is the way they march in a lockstep mindset about what problems they will pay attention to and what ones they won't (Hint: All of the problems they'll pay attention to rhyme with "bump").

The other problem is that we can already defund the media, so to speak, by not watching it or reading it. But that would take some thought and work and if there's one thing that a snappy sloganeer in 2020 doesn't want to do, it's put any actual work towards whatever goal is at hand.

The real problem is that media is a mixed bag of pluses and minuses. Take the independent news operation ProPublica, for example. A few days ago, it ran a long piece showing how different governors issued executive orders placing recovering but possibly infections COVID-19 patients in nursing homes. For comparison, the Washington Post was busy finding space for 3,000 words about a guest at their cartoonist's party who wore an offensive Halloween costume in 2018. Sorry to link to the Washington Examiner, but the actual Post story is behind a paywall and ought to be ignored anyway.

ProPublica made it clear that these executive orders -- including ones by CNN's favorite governor, Andrew Cuomo -- led directly to more infections in those nursing home facilities. This is the kind of reporting that's been done before in American journalism, usually by institutions like the Post or the New York Times. But as noted above, the Post has been busy running down two-year-old guestlists and the Times has been busy with everyone demanding everyone else be fired because of an editorial column no one on the staff wrote.

It's an independent site, which means revenue from donations and pledges. No ads. It'd be even easier to defund that a TV station or local paper, and you could make a case that the site would merit that defunding. During then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, before they went full Avenatti, ProPublica put out a call for anyone who went to a Washington Nationals game with the judge as a way of trying to find out whether he really did rack up credit card debt buying Nats season tickets.

But when it takes journalism seriously, PP puts out work like the COVID-19/nursing home piece. Even though I don't really think I want to defund the media I'd have to say that these days it's not all that easy to defend the media. If media outlets would spend some more time being serious, then I expect we'd see fewer calls for the former and maybe some more of the latter.