Category: Media

As recent personnel changes indicate, the nation’s journalism reviews are no more immune to musical chairs and fiscal hard times than are the rest of the news media.

The press doesn’t cover nuance very well, especially when it is covering itself – or when a reporter is more of an advocate than an impartial observer. The recent NSA stories and those about leaks of top-secret information are good examples. Both are important stories raising serious questions about the right balance between liberty and security. But the failure to provide nuanced, balanced information has left Americans with a distorted idea of what is at stake.

Richard Nixon once said, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Not many fellow Americans bought into his claim. What U.S. intelligence agencies (the NSA, CIA and FBI) are doing together with a huge number of American companies is perfectly legal, but some Americans are troubled by how they’re doing it.

Beef Products Inc., makers of the infamous lean finely textured beef, a.k.a. “pink slime,” is keeping its legal team hard at work. The South Dakota-based ground beef processor made the news recently because of two separate settlements, as well as a ruling in a major defamation suit. A U.S. District Court judge ruled June 12 that BPI’s $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit against ABC News and others should be moved back to state court, where the suit initially was filed last September.

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $1.25 billion settlement in the discrimination lawsuit by African-American agriculture producers. The case, commonly known as Pigford I or II, represents the largest civil rights settlement in the history of the United States. Yet very few media outlets provided original or continued coverage of the case. The two media outlets that most frequently gave the settlement attention were National Public Radio and the Washington Post. Both are based in the D.C. area and are known for covering the national political scene. The Associated Press had a handful of articles and briefs related to the case. The NPR reports and AP articles then were recycled through media outlets across the United States. Granted, limited attention is better than no attention – but why, in a region in which agriculture is a leading industry, did we not see more original reporting by Midwest media?