The Green New Deal was an important story for the Midwest. But coverage didn’t reflect that.

News and Opinion, Opinion

The sweeping Green New Deal effort to combat climate change choked in Washington this spring, dying in the U.S. Senate before most Midwest news consumers had a chance to consider its merits–or failings. That’s because fact-based journalism on the Green New Deal was rare and spotty in regional news outlets.

The majority of Midwestern media used wire from national news outlets to inform their audience about creation of the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution set to push an economical, agricultural, and energy transformation in the upcoming decade in response to climate change.

The lack of Midwest reporting on the political debate leaves questions unanswered on how the Green New Deal would affect Middle America. Even though the resolution failed, pieces of it are likely to emerge as campaign issues in 2020. Considering the importance of agriculture and industry that contribute to climate change in the Midwest, the story will eventually have to move from the policy-making chambers to the fields and factories of Middle America. But that will require an investment from regional news outlets to cover the story, and so far, that has not happened.

Pam Dempsey, the executive director of the Midwest Center of Investigative Reporting, said the missing independent and local reporting of the legislation is not necessarily a lack of reporting but a consequence of local and rural news having strained resources and tight deadlines.

To have local and independent news coverage of legislation like the Green New Deal, news editors are having to make the decision to send a reporter to a city council meeting or to Washington D.C. for three weeks, Dempsey said.

“Where are you going to spend that reporter’s time?” she said.

Unlike local news which runs on a commercial journalism model, the Midwest Center of Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit organization that can expend the resources and time to reporting on the environment and agribusiness, Dempsey said. Recent stories have included a report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention calling for more research on health risks from weed killer and a roundup of news called “Ag Alerts” covering the Bomb cyclone and the Trump administration’s plans to bring 5G technology to rural America.  

“The center is trying to fill that gap,” she said.

An exception was an article published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which the paper’s Washington correspondent Chuck Raasch analyzed the Midwest political response to the proposal. Raasch took notice of the shift in positions of the two political parties since 2008 when the Republican Party acknowledged human activity as a primary contributor to climate change.

The Chicago Sun-Times used AP wire–and not its Washington correspondent–to cover Congress’s response to the deal.

A little over a decade later some leading progressive Democrats are proposing the quasi-socialist solution of the Green New Deal, and “the GOP caucuses in Congress are sprinkled with climate change skeptics.”

“Coastal residents, who are exposed to the threat of rising seas, are more likely than Middle America residents to blame human activity for rising temperatures and to be more amenable to significant government action to combat it,” Raasch wrote.

The polarization makes the political field tricky for Democratic lawmakers in states that support the controversial Green New Deal resolution such as  Missouri Rep. William Lacy Clay, Raasch writes.

The Green New Deal, championed by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, charged the U.S. to reach a “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions in a decade through a “fair and just transition” for all communities and workers and to secure clean air and water, healthy food, climate and community resiliency, access to nature and a sustainable environment.

The legislation is comprehensive as it pays attention to not only the energy-related challenges of moving the country’s energy dependence from fossil fuels to clean energy, but also to the populations left behind in deindustrialized communities, rural and depopulated communities who struggle with the remnants of a past industry that has since contaminated their air, water, and soil.

It also sets out to train Americans to work in a green energy and manufacturing economy and working collaboratively with farmers to create green farming practices and supporting family farms.  

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley acknowledges climate change existence but argued the Green New Deal is a transfer of wealth from the interior of the country to the coasts, Raesch reported for the Post-Dispatch.

An argument from Green New Deal opponent Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican, is that climate change should be addressed in the private sector rather than by government. In the 2020 presidential elections how the country adapts to climate change will be a big issue; one that divides Democrats and one Republicans have not introduced private or public solutions.

Unlike newspapers in urban hubs of the midwest, Missouri’s state capital’s paper,  St. Joseph News-Press did have their senior reporter Ken Newton publish an article outlining Rep. Sam Graves’ and Sen. Roy Blunt’s opposition to the Green New Deal. Graves said the resolution is unrealistic and Blunt opposes the cost of the resolution.

As Raasch reports, the potential price tag of the Green New Deal is massive.

According to FactCheck.org, the $90 trillion price tag that has been headlined by the national media comes from a right-wing think tank and the actual estimate can’t be properly accounted for due to the vague nature of the resolution.

Small Midwest farms taking the lead, according to commentaries

Despite the lack of fact-based reporting, guest commentaries and opinion articles have made a significant appearance in Missouri and Iowa media.

A guest commentary published in the Kansas City Star advocated for a local approach while still supporting the Green New Deal.

The authors, Robert Leonard and Matt Russell provide hope that an honest and apolitical perspective on climate change can be brought into the discussion. Their article advocates for small farms in the Midwest to be leaders in “healing” the environment.

The authors are both from Iowa. Leonard is an anthropologist, host and special news editor for Knoxville radio and journalist.  

Russell is co-owner of a farm and the executive director of an interfaith power and light company. According to his company’s biography, he spent 11 years in ministry before working on environmental and economic sustainability.

He’s worked on agricultural and justice issues including retail agriculture, land tenure, conservation, climate change, farmer veterans, rural development, state food policy and federal farm policy. He is also a fifth-generation farmer and operates a farm with his husband.

Leonard and Russell’s article rings the alarm of the drastic effects of climate change including potential food shortages and price instability if something isn’t done on a large and systematic level. Further, it differentiates small farms and complex management farms and how national farm policies affect the two.

The writers advocate for farmers to prioritize environmental services along with commodity and livestock production. One solution the article pushes for is carbon farming, which is when carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere through the biological process and stored in the soil.

“Most commodity farmers haven’t been managing their farms to capture carbon. They have instead, as might be expected, been managing to maximize yields,” the authors write.

In contrast to a commentary supporting the Green New Deal and green farming measures, a guest commentary published in the Columbia Daily Tribune argued the Green New Deal will bankrupt Missouri farmers.

The article’s authors were Andrew Wilson, a resident fellow and senior writer for the Show-Me Institute, and James Seeser, a retired physics professor.  

In their commentary, they suggest the Green New Deal goals of using green, renewable energy won’t supply the energy farmers need to grow and harvest crops.

“First of all, there are no Tesla-like, battery-powered farm vehicles on the market today that could begin to replace today’s machines in doing the heavy-duty, energy-intensive work of ploughing, seeding, weed control, and harvesting,” the authors write. “Electric-powered substitutes for today’s diesel-power machines do not exist — and even if they did, other problems would prevent instant and widespread use.”

Amelia Blakely reported from Carbondale, Illinois, where she is a student at Southern Illinois University. You can find her on Twitter @AmeilaBlakely

Shrinking newspapers: How staff shakeups jolted two Missouri papers

Media News, Midwest, News and Opinion

In 2012, University of Missouri journalism professor Mike Jenner was making a presentation to students in a “Journalism and Democracy” seminar about how the tough economy had affected newspapers and what challenges reporters would face in the future.

At one point a woman said, “Mike, we’ve been here four years, and this has been going on since we got here and we’re still here,” Jenner recalled. “And I just thought wow, their careers are about to start, and they’re looking forward to their careers and engaging with the world and making a mark and doing good journalism.”

Illustration by Steve Edwards

With all the troubles facing the news business, Jenner was encouraged by the fact there were students with a passion and a belief that they could make a difference.

Can that passion last? Can it survive what happened recently at Missouri’s two biggest newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star?

On March 5, the Post-Dispatch agreed to buy out 14 employees who work in news, advertising, online publication and production. These departures come on top of the loss of nine people who will be let go in early May when Lee Enterprises moves the Post-Dispatch’s copy-editing functions to a plant in Munster, Indiana, where Lee’s 50 other daily newspapers are designed.

Across Missouri at the McClatchy-owned Star, two dozen employees recently accepted buyouts, including veteran reporters and photographers. More than 200 years’ worth of experience walked out the door, including Steve Kraske, the newspaper’s seasoned political reporter and editorial writer.

Both papers have lost print subscriptions. And while both report boosts in the number of digital subscribers, Internet advertising income and online subscription revenue have not kept the parent companies from cutting staffs to save money.

“Of course it’s not easy to go,” said Doug Moore, a 19-year veteran Post-Dispatch reporter who accepted a buyout offer. “My plan was to sort of ride this out and finish my career here, but that’s harder and harder to do these days.”

Lee offered what a spokeswoman called “voluntary separation packages” to employees 50 and older with at least ten years of experience. Those eligible included United Media Guild members as well as employees who were not represented. Union members were offered a severance payment of up to six months’ salary.

Three editors accepted: Jean Buchanan, projects editor; Christopher Ave, political and national editor, and Lisa Eisenhauer, night metro editor.

Moore, 55, had an enterprise beat covering diversity and demographics. Since 2005, when Lee bought the Pulitzer-owned Post-Dispatch and 13 other papers for $1.46 billion, he has witnessed the steady departure of staff through buyouts and layoffs.

He said the early buyouts were understandable but the first layoffs were “really jolting.” The staff suffered through job furloughs, wage reductions and higher health insurance premiums. The company-paid pension was frozen in 2010.

“Then, there was no more fat and they went for the bone and the limbs and the non-essential organs,” Moore said. “Now we’re at the point where we wonder if we’re going to have people in the newsroom to produce a quality product.”

It’s hard to see how a newspaper can increase the demand for its editions if they’ve diminished in size, quality and illumination. How can subscription prices be increased for a shrinking amount of information?

Lee has sold the newspaper’s headquarters building at 900 N. Tucker Blvd. for $3.5 million, and there are plans to move operations to a smaller, rented space nearby. But there’s no sign that money from the building sale is going into newspaper improvements. Staffers wonder if it’s being applied to Lee’s debt from the Pulitzer purchase or to award executives with more bonuses.

And according to Moore, there is no sign from management that the departing editors will be replaced. He said he had asked Gilbert Bailon, editor in chief, about the future because “people need to feel there is hope.

“I don’t have a lot of faith that the product can be sustained,” Moore said. “I don’t care how talented my colleagues are. They can only juggle so many balls before they start dropping.”

Bailon declined a reporter’s request to be interviewed for this story.

Jeff Gordon, a Post-Dispatch sports writer and Guild president, said the newspaper industry had evolved under chain ownership to the point where printing, design and distribution functions are centralized, and the news-collection operations operate like bureaus.

“This is the world they’ve created,” he said.

But there may be more to the story of the deep cuts at the Post-Dispatch.

While the newspaper remains profitable, the dramatic staff reductions may be designed to fend off a hostile takeover by the bottom feeders of the industry.

A dissident Lee shareholder, Carlo Cannell of Wyoming-based Cannell Capital, has urged shareholders to oppose incumbent board members, including chairman Mary Junck. Among his complaints is that Junck has earned more than $40 million in compensation since 2002 despite Lee’s troubles.

“It’s conceivable one of the vulture companies could see this guy as a wedge to come in an make a play for Lee,” said Gordon, who in February attended a Lee’s stockholder meeting in Davenport, Iowa. “They (Lee’s managers) are trying to protect themselves from a hostile takeover.”

As difficult as things have been, there are far worse companies than Lee when it comes to bleeding newspapers dry. Digital First and GateHouse are notorious for stripping assets and firing people from newspaper properties.

“I believe Lee is earnest when it says it wants to stay in the business,” Gordon said. “I will give them credit; they are trying. The Union would rather see Lee own the paper, if it has to be a chain.”

According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the average Sunday circulation of the Post-Dispatch as of the last quarter of 2018 was 130,405 in print and about 20,000 in digital subscribers–151,341 combined. The average daily circulation, digital and print subscribers combined, was 103,773. These numbers are subject to an audit. In 2015, the average daily print circulation was 124,712 and the Sunday circulation was 191,297.

Across the state, the situation at the Kansas City Star was much the same. The unaudited figures shared by the Alliance for Audited Media show the Star’s average Sunday circulation–print and digital media combined–was 136,055. The average daily combined circulation was 103,406, about 37 percent lower than five years ago.

Kraske, who has spent 40 years in newspapers, has worked part time for the Star since 2013, dividing his other time between hosting a talk show on a public radio station and teaching journalism at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“There’s no question that a lot of colleagues and good friends have been looking over their shoulder for the grim reaper,” said Kraske, 61. “It’s draining and demoralizing, a constant worry.”

Among those mourning the departure of Kraske and others is David Adkins, a Republican from Leawood, Kansas and a member of the Kansas Legislature from 1993 to 2005.

“The fate of the daily newspaper is gut wrenching for those of us who love the way only a newspaper can connect you to your community,” Adkins said. “When there aren’t reporters in the room, rest assured the better angels are often ignored. Civic life and our government institutions work best with a vibrant, inquisitive and smart, free press.”

Newspapers continue to produce good work, covering developments in the state capital of Jefferson City and in the halls of government in the state’s two big metropolitan areas.

The Post-Dispatch, for example, has been all over a plan to merge St. Louis with St. Louis County. It has disclosed how Missouri courts funneled defendants into debtors’ prisons. And the bizarre tale of how a “Russian roulette” event led to the shooting death of an off-duty St. Louis police officer allegedly by an on-duty colleague has been detailed.

But we don’t know what we’re missing. For example, the newspaper has no reporters now dedicated to the coverage of education.

Jenner, the Houston Harte endowed chair at the MU journalism school, said many newspapers remain profitable at the local operating level. But because they have to prove themselves to their shareholders and because chain ownership may have incurred a lot of debt everyone is feeling the pain of cuts.

“The important thing for readers to understand is there is a cost to this,” Jenner said. “People may not like the mainstream media, or they are angry at newspapers, or may claim fake news and may be celebrating their demise, but there is a cost to our democracy in the reduction of news coverage.

“Studies show when newspapers go away political participation drops in terms of voting and people running for office,” Jenner said. “People are less willing to engage in the political process and less willing to run against incumbents. And government corruption increases. We will pay a penalty for this and it’s not a pretty thought to me.”

Terry Ganey formerly covered Missouri state government and politics for the Associated Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Editor’s Note: The story was the cover article of the Spring 2019 print edition of Gateway Journalism Review’s magazine.

Yamiche Alcindor’s Haitian heritage shapes her journalism

Midwest, News and Opinion

Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for the PBS Newshour, was enjoying her day off from a grueling beat last year when her aunt called in tears. President Donald Trump had called her ancestral homeland of Haiti a “shithole.”

“It reminded me, I don’t have the luxury to check out sometimes,” said the Miami-born Alcindor whose parents immigrated from Haiti. “There will be people who will remind me that, ‘hey we sent you to the White House to ask questions for everybody.’”

Later that night Alcindor broke the story that the Haitian government was looking to the U.S. government for an explanation of Trump’s comments.

PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, greets friends before making her remarks at the Gateway Journalism Review Awards in Des Peres, Missouri on April 25, 2019. (Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI)

“My purpose at my core comes from people loving me before I had a name and even more the foundation of who I am is one of immigrants who believed in America when it said to give up your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Alcindor said told an audience at Gateway Journalism Review’s 8th annual First Amendment dinner. The celebration drew about 100 people to Edward Jones Headquarters in Des Peres, Missouri. GJR also honored two journalists with its Freedom Fighter award.

That wasn’t the only day Alcindor found her personal life upended by Trump. She recalled she got engaged the day the Access Hollywood tape was released. And she has her Apple Watch set to flash every Trump tweet. That means she wakes up to a presidential tweet about four mornings a week.

Beginnings in Miami

Alcindor said before she was a reporter, she worked at McDonald’s, as a telemarketer and as a helper at class reunions in south Florida. She referred to her first jobs as a reminder of the humble beginnings people come from and how their stories play into their job.

The story of Emmett Till and his mother’s openness to journalists telling the story of her murdered son was Alcindor’s introduction to journalism, she said.

“This mother said, ‘I’m going to use journalism and I’m going to use photojournalism to show people what they did to my child,” Alcindor said.

She said once she began researching the transformative effects of the photos of Emmett Till in his open casket had on the country, she knew she wanted to become a journalist to share the hard truths of America with its people.

Ferguson was transformational

In 2014 Alcindor was working for USA Today during the unrest in Ferguson. For almost a year she was living off and on in St. Louis reporting on Ferguson story–a story that changed her as a journalist, she said.

One lesson Ferguson taught Alcindor was the importance of newsroom diversity, she said. In her reporting, she was sharing stories of “lived experience” that she valued because of her background.

“Martin Luther King said, ‘At times rioting can be the language of the unheard,’” Alcindor said.

She said it’s easy as a journalist to take the position that riots lack value or meaning, but St. Louis taught Alcindor that what was happening in Ferguson required a deeper explanation. A protester told her that throwing a rock at a police officer relieved his sense of powerlessness.

Following Ferguson, Alcindor began reporting for the New York Times on Bernie Sanders’s presidential run. She felt compelled to report on his “rockstar status,” his primarily white crowd, and the fact his campaign wasn’t spending money to attract African Americans, a large swath of the Democratic party.

“Long before you saw me smiling on national television at Donald Trump, I was smiling at Bernie Sanders,” Alcindor said.

The Trump campaign

From Sanders, Alcindor began reporting on then-candidate Trump.

While interviewing his supporters she learned journalism is about letting people have the space to say their opinions without her interfering with personal reactions – even when it meant letting a Trump supporter say over and over he wasn’t racist but didn’t think black people worked.

“The journalist’s job is to think about it not in a personal way, but to be as professional as you can be in the circumstances that you’re working under,” Alcindor said.

Alcindor gets comments from listeners about her natural hair, her race and her weight. One suggested she change her hair and go with a more Hispanic look.  

Trump didn’t come out of nowhere

One of Alcindor’s favorite things to write or talk about is how Trump and his racial rhetoric was always apart of American culture, she said.

“There’s a lot of reporting that needs to go on to make the case that President Trump did not come out of nowhere,” she said.

Journalists in the current political time owe their readers, viewers, and listeners to do their job and not take comments personally, she said. Reporters shouldn’t be biased but they should be realistic in what they bring to the table, which includes their background.

“My journalism hopefully challenges people to not think they’re right about every single thing but rather they have a lot to learn,” Alcindor said.

Alcindor said she didn’t anticipate Trump would turn the tables on her during his post-midterms press conference last November. When she asked about white nationalism he interrupted and said her question was “so racist.” She said she just concentrated on finishing the question so that the record would be clear what she was asking.

Protecting Journalism

Alcindor said as the president denies honest and independent reporting about his administration and the presidential campaign she realizes it is not enough to simply report; journalists must protect their profession too.

“As someone who started in south Florida, it makes me very nervous if you have a weakened St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” Alcindor said. “What I realized as a local reporter is just writing about city council meetings or school boards, you can catch so much corruption and so much drama.”

Alcindor said if local news continues to shrink, she thinks the lacking investment chips away at democracy almost as fast as the president’s denial of real news does.

In the upcoming 2020 election, national and local journalism will be critical, she said.

Alcindor said she thinks this time is strengthening journalism as more students are enrolling in journalism schools and more people are tuning into national news. She hopes that interest trickles down to the local level because local journalism will be the first place where impactful stories about people’s lives will be broken.

“There are going to be so many stories we have to look at and take seriously,” Alcindor said. “If I have a message, it’s to support local journalism as much as you can.”  

Amelia Blakely reported from Carbondale, Illinois, where she is a student at Southern Illinois University. You can find her on Twitter @AmeilaBlakely

Gateway Journalism Review awards Freedom Fighter honors

Media, News and Opinion

Gateway Journalism Review honored two St. Louis journalists at its eighth annual First Amendment Celebration on April 25.

Tony Messenger, a metro columnist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Lauren Trager, an investigative reporter for KMOV, were awarded the Freedom Fighter Award for their work.

Tony Messenger and Alcindor share an animated conversation. Messenger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist who recently won a Pulitzer Prize, received the Freedom Fighter award.

Earlier this month Messenger won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of columns on debtors prisons in Missouri.

“These people showed tremendous courage to share their stories with me at a time in which we didn’t know what the supreme court was going to do, and we didn’t know what the Missouri legislature was going to do,” Messenger said in his acceptance speech. “Thank goodness the Missouri Supreme Court ruled this human tragedy has got to stop.”  

Trager is the reporter who led the investigation and broke the story in January 2018 about former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens’ extramarital affair. The story eventually led Greitens to resign.

“As a wise person recently said to me, it is not our job to just cover the news, we must uncover it too. My commitment to that is now as steadfast as ever,” Trager said in her acceptance speech.

New editor Jackie Spinner brings GJR into the future

Media, News and Opinion

In an issue where the cover is about the death spiral of print journalism at two of Missouri’s great newspapers, it may seem contradictory to say we are living through the most exciting time in journalism since the advent of the printing press. But we are.

Jackie Spinner, who is promoted to editor of GJR with this issue, understands the paradox. At the same time some local news organizations are losing muscle, today’s journalists have more ways than ever to tell a story.

Spinner, who operates as if powered by nuclear fission, has instituted important improvements that have modernized GJR. She has overseen redesign of the website, redesign of the newsletter, an emphasis on local stories in every newsletter, a greater focus on media stories from the Midwest and broader distribution of GJR stories on social media.

Jackie Spinner (Photo by Jerianne Bruce)

News organizations with budgets many times ours haven’t had the kind of professional retooling that Spinner has brought to GJR in the past year.

Spinner was editor of the Daily Egyptian student newspaper at SIU in the 1990s. After graduating from SIU, she earned her masters at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to the Washington Post. At the Post she covered the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story and later headed the Baghdad Bureau. She was briefly captured by al-Qaida at Abu Ghraib and quickly grabbed back by Marines. She wrote “Tell Them I Didn’t Cry” based on her experience in Iraq.

Spinner is now associate professor at Columbia College. She recently screened a documentary, “Don’t Forget Me,” on the importance of educating children with autism in Morocco. Spinner adopted two children from Morocco who were later diagnosed with autism.

Spinner knows the importance of local news to cities and towns. And she knows how to use the wonderful new technologies for telling stories. She will be bringing those insights to GJR readers.