Mainstream Media’s Election-Coverage Failure; Good News From Election Day–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Nov. 10, 2022

Indy Digest: Nov. 10, 2022

Perhaps it’s time for the mainstream media to change the way they cover elections. That’s one of the lessons that can be taken away from what happened—or, rather, what didn’t happen—on Election Day.

Let’s do a thought exercise here for a moment: How much of the pre-election news you consumed had to do with predictions, projections. polls and punditry? Now, think of how much pre-election news actually covered the issues—candidates’ records and positions, etc.?

If you’re like me, you saw a LOT of the predictions/projections news—ESPECIALLY on TV—and probably not as much issue coverage as you should have.

Capital and Main, a Los Angeles based publication that “reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time,” just published an interview with Dorian Warren. He serves as the co-president of Community Change and Community Change Action, nonprofits that have been on the ground “engaging mostly Black and brown voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada and Wisconsin,” as Capital and Main puts it.

He is not too thrilled with the mainstream media right now:

I am angry at the chorus of armchair pundits who created a dominant media narrative around the red wave with little evidence of it. I’m furious about that because for those of us who do the work on the ground to persuade [people] to vote, it was actually a challenging narrative environment when voters and all of us are being told, “This is going to be a red wave or a red tsunami,” as if, for instance, women voters had amnesia from the summer around the overturning of Roe v. Wade and were just focused on the economy and inflation. Not true, it turns out. Or Black voters, yet again, basically the conscience of America, turning out and showing up and really voting our values around racial justice and freedom and resilience.

I was worried, but still really hopeful because we knew in terms of enthusiasm and turnout, especially in early voting, that what we were hearing, especially from national media, was very different from what we were hearing and experiencing on the ground.

There’s a popular sports adage: “That’s why they play the games.” You can speculate on how any particular sports contest will go, but it’s just speculation; what happens in the game matters. The same goes for political punditry and narrative-building: It’s just speculation.

We need news and context from our media sources; we don’t need speculation.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• To say this Rolling Stone headline and subhead got my attention would be a HUGE understatement: “Trump Keeps Musing About Journalists Being Raped in Prison — He’s Not Joking. A knowledgeable source tells Rolling Stone that the former president has wondered how he might be able to jail reporters if he retakes the White House.” After sharing several anecdotes about Trump “joking” about reporters being raped in prison, Rolling Stone says: “This year, as Trump has privately strategized about what a second term, potentially starting in 2025, could look like, he’s begun occasionally soliciting ideas from conservative allies for how the U.S. government and Justice Department could go about turning his desires—for brutally imprisoning significant numbers of reporters—into reality. Several months ago, the former president briefly asked a small gathering of his allies and at least one of his attorneys about what would have to be done to make that authoritarian, First Amendment-shredding vision a norm, according to a source who was present. ‘He said other countries do it—the implication being: Well, why not here?’ the source recounts.”

• Let’s now turn to two pieces of what I think are very good news from the election. The first comes from a Victory Fund press release, issued yesterday: “At least 340 out LGBTQ candidates running in the 2022 midterms have won their elections as of 2 a.m., the most in U.S. history and surpassing the previous record of 336 set in 2020. More victories are expected in the coming days. At least 1,065 out LGBTQ people ran for office this year—a historic number.”

• Second: Two law professors, writing for The Conversation, note that six states had abortion-related initiatives on their ballots this year (seven, if we count Kansas earlier this year)—and in every case, voters selected more freedom, and fewer restrictions: “Results following the close of polls on Nov. 8 revealed that voters in Kentucky had followed (Kansas’) suit and rejected a similar constitutional amendment. And in three other states—California, Michigan and Vermont—voters approved constitutional amendments to safeguard abortion access as part of a broader protection of personal reproductive autonomy, including contraception. … In Montana, where restrictive abortion laws already prohibit post-viability abortions—that is, those after 24 weeks of pregnancy—voters rejected a referendum that threatened doctors with criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison if they did not try to sustain the life of a fetus ‘born alive’ after an abortion. All told, the outcome of the initiatives underscores the crucial role of state law after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling returned the issue of abortion access back to ‘the people’ and the states.”

• Twitter continues to melt down under the “leadership” of Elon Musk. The New York Times says: “Two weeks after buying Twitter, Elon Musk painted an increasingly bleak financial picture for the company and outlined changes in a meeting with staff on Thursday and in his first companywide emails, amid an exodus of executives including the officials who oversaw content moderation and security. At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy. … Twitter, whose communication department has been laid off, did not respond to a request for comment.” Who needs content moderation, security or communication?

• On the same topic, PC Mag reports: “Not a fan of Twitter’s plan to charge $8 per month for a verified blue checkmark? Then expect your tweets to lose some exposure. In a Q&A with advertisers on Wednesday, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk signaled that Twitter will eventually treat tweets involving mentions or replies from nonpaying, unverified users as a bit like email spam. ‘Over time—maybe not that long of time—when you look at mentions, replies, whatnot, the default will be to look at verified [accounts]. You can still look at unverified, just as in your Gmail or whatever you can still look at the probable spam folder,’ he said.”

• Buzzfeed, in their own unique way, chronicles the mistreatment of a transgender YouTube star who was arrested in Florida: “The next day, Nikita (Dragun) appeared virtually before Judge Mindy Glazer in bond court. Footage from the hearing immediately surfaced online and revealed that Nikita, a trans woman, was being held in the men’s unit of the correctional center.” Sigh.

• And finally … if you like meat, but avoid it due to climate or cruelty concerns, you may want to take note of this Time magazine article, looking at an Israeli company growing meat in labs: “Israeli startup Aleph Farms says it would be better to eat steak. Its steak, that is—a rich slab of meat grown from stem cells, in a bioreactor, no cows or slaughter required. Its ‘cultivated meat,’ which is the industry’s preferred term, is not yet available on the market—no cultivated meat product has passed regulatory approval outside of Singapore—but the company invited me to try its signature cut at its facility in Rehovot, half an hour south of Tel Aviv. There, company co-founder Didier Toubia promised me a taste of the future, in which a beautiful steak, seared to perfection, is no longer served on a bed of methane emissions with a side of biodiversity loss in Amazonian rainforests.” Read the piece to find out what the writer thought of the steak!

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