Greetings, readers. Parker here, ready to start the week.
This morning, I saw a really smart piece over at
’ Substack about media narratives and the editorial decisions that go into creating them. It’s worth reading in full:
It was Karakatsanis’ opening anecdote that hooked me. In it, he describes the challenge he faced a few years back trying to get editors to run stories about what he refers to as “the rise of modern debtors’ prisons across the U.S.”
This was a huge story for many reasons, I said, including because it was illegal, because it was separating families and killing people, and because it revealed widespread racist and predatory behavior by local police, prosecutors, judges, and private debt-collection and probation companies in several thousand cities. I asked the editor to do a story on it. The editor declined. Why? According to the news outlet, another reporter who I had worked with had “already covered the debtors’ prison story a few months ago.”
I have had many dozens of conversations like this since then, but that was the first time in my career I had been forced viscerally to confront questions about what is considered “newsworthy” and what isn’t.
The editor’s explanation also raised for me several important questions about the nature of news. What does it mean to have “already covered” a massive social problem that continues happening unabated to new people each day? Whenever there is a plane crash, news editors do not decline to cover it on account of having covered a previous crash. Why are some issues easily conceptualized as a single news story—“the debtors’ prison story”—while other stories are seen as continuously plentiful sources of daily news to be covered from the same and different angles each night, such as the “surge in shoplifting”? One might just as easily think that there are thousands of great, urgent stories (and many different angles to each) when so many families are being illegally separated because of their poverty in the wealthiest country in the world. What does the editor’s use of the phrase “a few months ago” suggest about how reporters and editors are making difficult subjective evaluations about the urgency and importance of each of the many millions of things they could choose to tell us about or that they could choose to ignore?
“Why are some issues easily conceptualized as a single news story — ‘the debtors’ prison story’ — while other stories are seen as continuously plentiful sources of daily news to be covered from the same and different angles each night, such as the ‘surge in shoplifting’?”
This! This has been one of my biggest frustrations with the news world. The papers pick and choose which topics get relentless and disproportionate coverage, and which topics are printed and immediately forgotten, never allowed to truly become "stories.” He details the process of pitching a recent story about “the more than 400,000 human beings jailed across the U.S. for the holidays because their families cannot pay cash bail” only to hear back from an editor that the outlet was passing because “there have been other good stories on the bail system this year.” He followed this up by highlighting the New York Times’ decision to publish three articles about the supposed “police shortage,” just weeks later.
His takeaway: “You can tell which stories elites care about by their volume.” He’s right.
One of the most overlooked aspects of contemporary news analysis is an examination of how the sheer volume of certain news stories distorts our understanding of what is important.
Some stories are just stories. Others are narratives. Stories are fleeting, but narratives linger, burning up the editorial oxygen, as it were.
It’s easy to see this when places like Fox News spend months leading up to every election hyping up some new “Foxtober” scandal (“Caravans!” “Antifa!” “Ebola!”), but places like the Times are just as guilty of this. For years, the Times and other news outlets breathlessly covered retail theft in articles headlined things like “San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge,” “Walgreens to Close 5 Stores in San Francisco, Citing ‘Organized’ Shoplifting,” “California Leaders Vow to Crack Down After High-Profile Burglaries,” and “Thefts, Always an Issue for Retailers, Become More Brazen.” (Those examples were all from May to December 2021; the stories continued through September 2022 under the paper’s “Shoplifting and Employee Theft (Retail)” “Times Topic.”)
It turned out that Walgreens, one of the chains that cried the loudest about retail theft, was mostly exaggerating for effect. Oops!
Last week, as I sat down to write my piece about the Times’ decision to hire anti-trans columnist David French, I read back through the long list of my rejected Times op-ed submissions.
In January 2015, I pitched the Times a piece about the need for a national ban on conversion therapy. It was just days after a 17-year-old trans girl named Leelah Alcorn died by suicide, and I hadn’t seen anything in any of the big national newspapers about what role conversion therapy (also known as “reparative therapy”) may have played in her death. My pitch:
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