Some thoughts on media coverage of the past few weeks — and looking forward

I was working at The Cornell Daily Sun during an unfortunate wave of suicides on campus. Needless to say, it was an incredibly difficult thing to cover. We were students learning how to report real news and tragedy with no adult supervision. We were the independent press. But we were also members of the community we were covering. The victims of the news stories we wrote were our classmates, our roommates, our peers.

One lesson that really stuck out to me was something the health services center told us: News coverage of suicides can increase the likelihood of more suicides. We interpreted this to mean we had to be very deliberate about the stories we told and how we told them. How large should a photo of the gorge be on the front page? Does that headline really need to be in all caps? What information could we include in the story to help members of the community who may be at risk?

I've thought about these questions a lot lately. In the same way we had to think long and hard about what merited news coverage back at Cornell, journalists today need to be more deliberate than ever when it comes to covering the news.

As journalists, we are going to serve as one of the strongest checks against the power of a Trump White House, which has indicated at every step of the way that it doesn’t respect the media. In order to stay impartial and influential, we need to be careful about how we cover a government that is deceitful and manipulating. We also need to think hard about how we cover the people who are looking to take advantage of a Trump presidency at the media’s expense.

Here are some conclusions I've come to:

Firstly, everything Donald Trump says isn't news.

We didn't cover everything Obama tweeted or said, so we shouldn't do the same for Trump. A lot of what Trump says is untrue. So if we are going to give him media attention, we must do our due diligence and fact check what he says.

When Trump says things that are misleading or inaccurate, it is propaganda and should be treated as such.

What he says isn't newsworthy purely because he said it. We must contextualize his comments and independently judge whether or not his statements merit news coverage.

And second, we need to be extremely careful about how we cover hate groups.

Anti-Semitism has been alive and well in America since the country's founding. It isn't news that there are Americans who are anti-Semitic. What is new is that they feel that Trump's administration will help their cause and the new administration isn't doing much to dispel that sentiment.

Whereas neo-Nazis have been in the shadows for decades, they are now thriving off a swell of media attention. While their rise is certainly something to watch, not every single thing they do warrants media coverage.

Take, for instance, a recent story that was covered by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and countless other news organizations, about a neo-Nazi who proclaimed that New Balance makes the “Official Shoes of White People.”

The statement was shocking and was sure to get a ton of clicks. But was it worth writing?

In my opinion, no. The website that ran the rant is a self-proclaimed “neo-Nazi and white supremacist news and commentary website.” It wasn’t a site me or any of my colleagues had ever heard of. And the author, who happens to be the site’s publisher, wasn’t a prominent thought leader who had significant influence. He was just a guy who wanted attention for saying something extremely offensive. To me, that didn’t merit news coverage.

In a similar vein, earlier this week, a number of outlets wrote about the former reality TV star Tila Tequila after she posted a picture on social media of her saluting Hitler at a white nationalist function in Washington DC. The media’s response was incredibly disturbing to me. Tila Tequila is no longer famous. She so clearly saw an opportunity to exploit the media by being offensive and she got exactly what she wanted: A few more short minutes of fame. Meanwhile, the media arguably glorified anti-Semitism by putting Nazis and Nazi symbols all over the news.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it is incredibly important to cover white nationalist anti-Semites, especially as they try to leverage a Trump presidency to further their own agenda. But simply gawking at photos of people saluting Hitler isn’t newsworthy and it is arguably incredibly harmful. In the same way that headlines about suicide increased the risk of more suicides at Cornell, I fear that headlines about and photos of the people promoting a neo-Nazi agenda send a message that this is the new normal.

It’s important for us be sensible about when to sound the alarm. Consider the tale, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” There will always be people who are racist, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-women, etc. If we cover every single display of hate out there, we risk numbing people to the news. And if people start to tune these stories out, who will pay attention when things get really bad?

As journalists, we need to see these hate groups for what they are. First and foremost, we need to acknowledge that their agenda is to make themselves relevant again. So before we give them airtime, column inches, or words on a screen, we need to think about the repercussions of our actions. We can’t only be judging news by whether or not it will garner clicks.

Of course, this isn’t a black and white issue and it’s hard to lay firm ground rules for how to cover this stuff. The bottom line is we need to think hard about why we are writing what we are writing and what value it serves to readers.

Our jobs are more serious and important than ever before.