Frank Read (not his real name) is 51 years old, approximately, and has spent much of his adult life as a journalist reporting for the mainstream media. His professors taught him lessons that most journalists still follow. The main one being always make the story personal by involving an affected person. The feeling widely-accepted in the profession was that reporting should be kept simple so that people with very little education could relate to it and continue to buy the publication or watch the news program. Simple people need short sentences and human drama that is sensational enough to grab their attention and they might get confused by statistics, data, comparisons or in depth investigation. One editor put it more clearly: “keep it simple, stupid.”
But Frank has had a change of heart. He no longer believes what he was taught and what his fellow journalists still practice on a daily, routine and thoughtless basis.
He recently watched a news segment on his favorite news hour about the effects of the low minimum wage that is currently just over $7 an hour. Instead of showing us what that means to an average full time worker and how it compares to the rest of the work force in dollars and cents, it showed us a woman who was a supervisor at a fast food chain in New York City. She made more than the minimum, but still only about $9 an hour. We learned that after taxes are taken out, she must use the little she has left to buy food and pay rent for her recently laid off husband, two aged parents and two children as well as herself. We see that it takes only a few days to use up her earnings. Frank notices that there is no mention of food stamps and wonders why this woman would not be eligible. The reporter caught that too and asked the woman about. She explained it lapsed for some reason. The reporter had her go and reapply, and she got food stamps for her family of six.
Frank noticed that no mention was made of the husband’s unemployment insurance checks which could be as high as $600 a week. The report forgot to mention that the two elders were eligible to either Social Security retirement, if they ever worked, or SSI if they never did. This would add $1500 to $3000 a month. The report also did not mention the rent subsidy that reduces the rental cost of her apartment. It did not mention that she would owe and pay no federal or state income taxes and would receive earned income credit that could be as high as $4000 from the government.
Frank realized how much more accurate and effective it might have been had they not used this person’s example, flawed as it was and as it usually is for a variety of reasons including confidentiality, not wanting to embarrass, not knowing enough to ask and wanting to make it sensational. They could have told us that a full time worker is paid for about 2000 hours a year. At $7.50 an hour, that comes to $15,000 a year. The report could have shown this to be below the poverty level for a family of four. It could have tracked how much a minimum wage worker earns for his employer. It could have compared the worker’s wages with that of the CEO and show the latter to be thousands percent more - $15,000 versus $300,000 or more. The report could have shown how much the government spends to subsidize these low wage earners and how the government is actually also subsidizing the employer by making up for what he doesn’t pay. But Frank saw that none of this was done. The report could have shown how much food stamp and other transfer payment costs would decline if the wage rate were raised significantly.
Frank started noticing this everywhere. Fellow reporters were trying to personalize every disaster by interviewing as many victims as possible for as long as possible. The victims could never tell the whole story but the part they did say was always similar: “We have been here for a long time and have lost everything. We are grateful that none of us died and we will rebuild knowing this will happen again. There is nowhere we would rather live.”
Frank noticed his colleagues doing the same with news stories by asking people on the street what they think. The answers range from admission of total ignorance as in “I didn’t know it happened” to “I think it is a good idea as long as it works,” to some limited comment reflecting a minimum of thought.
It has dawned on Frank that his professors and colleagues have been wrong. The public needs to know as much as possible that is relevant to each story. He realizes that he is not a stenographer just quoting what people said and he is not a salesman trying to make the story interesting enough, while not necessarily accurate.
He has reformed and promises to no longer condescend to his reading public with heart wrenching stories of personal tragedies. He won’t use an individual to generalize a situation.
He even objects to my using him as an example of this overused and lazy form of journalism. I apologize. I don’t know what I was thinking.
