About 10 days ago, a local Twitter user answered this question from Dan Froomkin of Press Watch:
There are so many wonderful journalists out there. Why don't they ever get to run the most wonderful newsrooms?
She said:
I quit journalism for a number of reasons, including threats/abuse from right-wing dudes and also....because I had one editor who called all stories "products" and another editor who tried to recruit me who wanted me to write "sexier." News organizations hire editors who want "sexy products."
News organizations don't want editors who will challenge the status quo. They want editors who will help them use "products" to sell more ads. Sex up those "products" for them.
Yesterday, as you may have heard, the Department of Justice announced the results of its pattern and practice inquiry of the Minneapolis Police Department. They will be developing a consent decree with the City of Minneapolis. (Full report here.)
As I listened to the DOJ's press conference on Friday and the coverage afterward, I kept thinking that it sounded correct in its finding of extensive systemic problems, but I wondered how it would be possible to make any change with the existing police union and other structures that are in place.
In the 2021 city election, the voters of Minneapolis were asked to address the structures that would have begun to take on the level of change needed, but scare campaigns from monied interests — aligned with the mayor and centrist to right-leaning Democrats — fought back and those initiatives were defeated. The mayor was also reelected, and given even more power.
Now here we are with the DOJ report, which follows an even more scathing report from the state's Department of Human Rights. So of course the New York Times swooped in for a story on why "efforts to defund the police" failed in Minneapolis.
And what did they do? They talked to, but did not quote or even seem to understand, one of the abolitionists they talked to. According to D.A. Bullock, he talked to the reporter for a half hour, who had a preset idea of the framing:
His questions went like "why did it fail?" "what did you all do wrong?" "what would you change if you had to do it over" - I presented a more accurate story of community rising to meet the moment, organizing and doing something extraordinary... 44,000 Minneapolis neighbors voted to remove the Minneapolis Police from the city charter, something a scant few of them had even considered or would have voted for just a year prior. An incredible testament to the voice of the community.
That 44,000 votes was more than [Mayor] Jacob Frey's 1st ballot top ranked votes. I don't know if it was the journalist or the editor in charge who decided on the frame of failure before the story was written, it is just sad that kind of slop would come from the NY Times.
I don't know that Bullock's critique coheres perfectly with that of the former journalist I started this post with, but I see them as related. Both are aspects of media and editors seeing their jobs as something other than trying to speak truth to power.
The lack of thorough national attention to what happened in Minneapolis after 2020, given the city's role in the upheaval across the country, is disappointing but all too typical of our coastally biased media landscape.
Because the owner of our preeminent local newspaper, the Star Tribune, is part of the monied interests I mentioned, that paper is not much help in getting at the nuance of what happened. Our small independents, like the Minnesota Reformer and Sahan Journal, have done great work, but they're not read but as much of the public, and have almost no national profile.
It's odd living somewhere and knowing what happened on a topic of national interest when just about no one outside the area knows because it hasn't been covered in an accurate or meaningful way.
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