Nazis coming to Little Rock (via KARK)

‘Shiny Things Syndrome’, hyperpartisan Facebook groups, and the problem with news coverage of Nazis

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edited by Marco Nurra

• Journalism has a focus problem: How to combat Shiny Things Syndrome. Journalism has become too obsessed with technology-led innovation and must refocus on strategic approaches to storytelling, audience engagement and business development, according to a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
• Disrupting Fox News narrative, Geraldo Rivera blasts inhumane treatment of migrants at border. “I am ashamed. This tear gas choked me,” Rivera said. “We treat these people, these economic refugees as if they’re zombies from the ‘The Walking Dead.’ We have to deal with this problem humanely and with compassion. These are not invaders. Stop using these military analogies. This is absolutely painful to watch. We are a nation of immigrants. These are desperate people, they walk 2,000 miles, why? Because they want to rape your daughter and steal your lunch? No!”
• Fighting misinformation by sending journalists to secondary schools. UK charity The Student View brings journalists and underperforming pupils together to help teenagers understand news and develop their leadership potential.
• New data suggests African audiences see significantly more misinformation than Americans do. More than a quarter of Kenyans and Nigerians surveyed said they had shared stories that they knew were made up.
• CrossCheck launches in Nigeria, with 16 newsrooms working together to fight misinformation. CrossCheck Nigeria builds on what First Draft and its partners learned about misinformation on WhatsApp from the Comprova project in Brazil.
• Hyperpartisan Facebook groups are the next big challenge for fact-checkers. Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, spent months digging into the analytics of Facebook posts, political ads and private groups to determine how the platform was influencing the election. The result is a three-part analysis of misinformation on the social media platform, which was published days before the United States midterms earlier this month.
• A Little Rock TV station and news coverage of Nazis. The newscast said that viewers who wanted to know more about the newsroom’s reasoning could go to the website, where News director Austin Kellerman wrote in part: “The last thing I want to do is censor the news from you. We’re telling you about it so that you’re aware — and we’ll let you know if anything major happens. However, we won’t give them what they’re looking for. They won’t get that ‘attention grab’ and extended camera time.”
• How to report on poverty. “Low wages, unpaid internships and the often exorbitant living costs of media capitals — such as New York City or London — are making it increasingly difficult for anyone from a working-class or disadvantaged background to launch a career in journalism. Poverty is frequently covered and debated in the news by people who are disconnected from the communities and issues. When combined with decades of entrenched and inaccurate beliefs and the pressing deadlines of 24-hour newsrooms, the quality of the work produced on the topic is affected”, writes Cristiana Bedei.
• Philippines piles on legal threats against critical news site Rappler. Philippine prosecutors have in recent days filed five separate tax cases against critical news site Rappler, including criminal charges that may allow for the arrest of the site’s founder and editor Maria Ressa. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the escalated campaign of legal harassment against Rappler.
• Why we need to stop perpetuating the good immigrant myth. “When I moved to the US from Pakistan seven years ago, and started consuming American news and culture writing, I noticed that important stories were often left out of mainstream narratives. This was true for Muslims in particular. Pervasive negative stereotyping had led to the rise of another kind of storytelling, that of the good immigrant. Stories of ‘moderate’ Muslims who were just like us; who were assimilated, and contributed to society through entrepreneurship, or by sending their children to fight in the military. Some were even hipsters. As if the value of immigrants lay in their contributions to society, and their fashion choices, and not in their humanness. It was, and is, very clear that what that accepted narrative was saying is this: whether or not you deserve to be in America depends on what you do for this country. This contributes to the false hierarchy of citizenship; if you’re not from here (whatever that means) you have to prove why you deserve to be here,” writes Zainab Shah.
• 35 prototypes, one year, and lots learned: The BBC puts its mobile storytelling plan in action. In the BBC’s final two experimental rounds, the R&D team focused on 1) tweaking the stories based on each reader’s information needs and 2) breaking down the news into more digestible bits.
• SciLine matches reporters on deadline with scientists to produce evidence-based journalism. “Our hope is that by providing nuggets of scientifically grounded evidence and quick access to experts… reason and rationality may ultimately prevail.”
• The internet doesn’t need civility, it needs ethics. The trap of civility, the ideal of ethics, and how biomass pyramids show what happens when “harm” is framed as something someone else does on purpose.
• The beginning of the end of Facebook’s grip on News. “2018 will be remembered as the year the news industry changed its tune about platforms,” writes Matt McAlister.
• Google and the press: The difficult path towards a balanced cooperation. European publishers want subsidies from Google, while the search giant looks for a more enduring cooperation with the industry that could work worldwide.

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