Spent this weekend thinking about the press this weekend, given the news that the embattled former Cambridge professor Jason Arday had been found dead at home, just a few days after resigning from his position. And my thoughts on the press and its responsibilities were intensified as I watched some coverage and debate about the White House's executive order about MMR vaccines for children.
In the first case, I have to admit that I wasn't paying much attention until Arday resigned from Cambridge. But when I woke up yesterday to read that he'd died, it felt sadly inevitable, given that his story had dominated the Guardian's webpage for a while. Obviously it became a lightning rod for bad-faith culture warriors, and accusations of plagiarism are not to be taken lightly... but also, he was a vulnerable person, and I can't imagine that there weren't other things happening in the world that might have been more important than whether a professor actually ran all those marathons?
Cambridge feels like it should bear more of the blame, but the Guardian and other UK media outlets that covered this story should probably consider whether they'd do it the same way again.
And then we come to the vaccines thing. I wasn't paying full attention, because it was on a TV at the gym, but I saw enough - it was CNN's show The Arena, and it had some Democrats and Republicans debating stuff, among which was the recent executive order to space out vaccinations for kids.
My problem with this was how much coverage the show gave the order, including showing footage of Donald Trump lying about how doctors have been putting "needles the size of soda bottles" into kids. I agree that stuff like this needs to be covered, and perhaps even debated (though I dispute that debate shows are "news", or that they do anything but provide exposure for the same round of pundits). But running Trump's comments like that felt irresponsible - the claim is simply not true, for one thing, and the debate format means that the focus isn't on informing and correcting, but on scoring rhetorical points.
Talking about it with my dad, he brought up some primetime address that the "president" made earlier this year, where he waffled on about some grievance or other. The upshot was that a couple of the major networks didn't carry the speech, simply because they wouldn't have been able to verify or check his claims - which feels like a responsible move, unlike CNN's coverage yesterday.
What CNN did feels too much like the quote-tweet feature on Twitter, before That Other Guy took it over: too many otherwise progressive voices would QT shitty comments from right-wingers, thinking they were dunking on the original poster, when in fact they'd just be amplifying their reach.
Does CNN running that footage of Trump saying that patent BS mean more people are going to avoid vaccinating their kids? The problem is that there are so many uninformed people out there that probably swallow that line uncritically, without checking it - and with Trump, it's not about the things he says, so much as the fact that he can muddy the waters and piss people off with his claims.
And let's be real here: uninformed people with no sense of discernment is why we got Trump a second time (as well as the first). Don't give me any guff about voter anger: we knew what we were getting in 2024.
So yeah, I wish news organizations would be more careful about how they cover stories like these, especially since both are tied into the culture wars in different ways. In one case a vulnerable person died because of what amounted to a media witch hunt, and in the other, mendacious comments were given a platform and consideration that they don't deserve. Outlets need to consider what they're saying when they choose how to cover a specific story.
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