As each day unfolds, the AJC’s journalists make a million decisions.
Reporters and editors, the ultimate experts, decide what stories to pursue. Photographers and videographers add their talents as required.
We decide what and when to post online, which posts need fuller context and reporting and which to leave in the ephemeral world of breaking news.
As things progress, editors and producers decide where things go – on free and paid sites, on home pages and section fronts – and finally set the hierarchy for the printed newspaper, beginning with the precious space on front page. For the newspaper, editors blend important news from other sources, which include news services such as Associated Press, The New York Times and Washington Post.
When our many deadlines come — print and digital — we provide the best verifiable account of the truth possible.
All these decisions rest on a myriad of factors; among them, our own sense of what’s important based on our experience and understanding of everything that led up to this moment in the news cycle. We study the arcs of stories such as the decades-long battle over health care and then apply a local lens account for the way these political wars touch the lives of our readers.
Why am I telling you this? Because way too many of you spend way too much time watching way too much cable news and wondering whether we’re doing the same thing. After hours of soaking in the endless cycle of expert panels, opinionated anchors and the hysteria of nonstop breaking news, you open your AJC and wonder if we’re on the same planet.
After being rendered numb in front of Fox, CNN or MSNBC, a good many readers awaken expecting the printed AJC to be thorough recap of what they had been watching the night before. Some seemed shocked when our coverage doesn’t track what they had seen or neglects to include some wild story told by a guest or news personality.
Meanwhile, some readers seem to believe we take our queues from cable and simply need to switch channels to gain more balance in our news coverage.
“I strongly suggest that you watch more of the balanced news reports from Fox News and/or Fox Business channels, where you will find some of the best reporters,” one reader wrote me the other day. “Fox has interviews of the people who are the newsmakers telling it like it is.”
This reader complained that we only “follow” the New York Times, and the Washington Post, “and only the enemies of President Trump.”
We hear from the other side as well. “Your attempt to straddle the fence between the left and the right is not working well,” one reader wrote. “Stories that are embarrassing to Trump, or the White House, are buried if they are published at all. The (New Yorker’s obscenity laced interview with White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci) was all over the news yesterday, but you chose to ignore it.”
To be honest, most of the unhappy email comes from readers who feel aggrieved by the national coverage of President Trump’s, um, frenetic early months in office. I also hear from liberals who wonder why we didn’t pay much attention to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s big reveal that she had copies of the president’s tax returns. In fact she had a few pages of his 2005 return that told us basically nothing – despite a huge boost to her viewership.
To be sure, the disconnect between us and cable news is real; but the disconnect, in a way, is the point.
You pay us (thanks!) for our independent judgment. Our greatest value is that we understand metro Atlanta and Georgia better than anyone. No one else knows what’s really going on around here. This knowledge informs how we see news that comes from everywhere else.
This has been the basic value proposition of our journalism for 100 years.
But we also live in 2017. These days about 30 percent of you get most of your news from cable news, a 2016 Pew Research study showed. While the trend in reading printed newspapers continues its long decline, about 35 percent of news consumers still prefer to read the news – in print and online. Fortunately, we serve a big and growing digital audience.
The study also confirms what I know from many years of receiving letters, phone calls and emails from readers – the news media are seen as biased. Nearly 75 percent of those polled by Pew believe news organizations tilt one way or the other. A huge majority of conservatives – 87 percent – believe news coverage is biased.
This is a national problem as people flee to polarized news sources to have their own biases gently stroked by like-minded presenters. The middle shrinks as two great, opposing narratives take hold: Trump as hero; and Trump as villain.
It’s our job to steer between those narratives with truth as North Star. Easy to say, hard to do.
This is all complicated by the reality that our readers live in a place that is both red and blue without being purple – we are a Republican state dominated by a metropolis that in 2016 voted for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Knowing all this, we work hard to play it as straight down the line as possible. We are careful about the stories we choose, the headlines we write and the balance we present in each story. It’s not easy – having all these human beings involved is problematic – but I believe that on most days we present a pretty balanced report.
So, it makes some sense that the segment of our readers that stay glued to cable news would be jolted some by our constant attempt to strike a balance. The fact that we aren’t making partisan decisions, strikes many as biased.
An example: Earlier this week, a messy story about Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz exploded in conservative media. Rep. Schultz, the former head of the Democratic National Committee was ousted last year over allegations that she was undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign. She has become a bete noire of conservatives. On Monday, a former aide was arrested on bank fraud charges; she fired him Tuesday. While the story is more complicated, the congresswoman so far is accused of nothing more than bad judgment for standing by her former aide longer than she probably should have. Nevertheless, conservatives — fueled by a presidential tweet — implied that Schultz is guilty of some higher crime and the MSM (the mainstream media, including us) were covering up. “Where is the intense coverage of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her staff member who was just arrested trying to flee the USA?,” a loyal reader asked.
Answer: Inside our national news section. To us, she’s a Floridian and a formerly important Democrat accused of nothing by anyone but her political opponents. If more surfaces, we’ll cover it. For now, it’s not front page news.
It was one of the million judgments we made Tuesday, each of which is open to second-guessing by our faithful readers. But, just like the other 999,999, it was not particularly informed by the relentless spectacle that is cable news.
Instead, we used news judgment. This is what you paid us for.
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