There’s a new progressive media outlet launching in Texas, ready to shovel feed us with the same slanted tripe half a dozen other organizations already do.
The Barbed Wire announced its inception on Monday, led by Editor in Chief Olivia Messer, a longtime journalist in Texas who has previously written for Texas Monthly, the Texas Observer, the Austin Chronicle, the 19th News, and half a dozen other liberal media outlets already in the same space competing for the same institutional pats on the back.
Sounds like market saturation to me!
It’s not surprising that yet another liberal outlet has cropped up. That’s one thing the media environment seems to constantly provide, a ready and willing base of influence goading on another project, the same as most that came before it.
I’ll give this new outlet credit for one thing, at least they’re honest about their worldview: outwardly and overtly progressive. Most of the legacy outlets are liberal but pretend otherwise, and worse yet, do nothing to provide an objective product.
But what caught my attention in this is not just that the Texas Observer or Texas Monthly by a kitschier name now exists. It’s the message relayed by Messer in her opening letter from the editor.
“But for all the good that we [in the media] have done and can do, for all the public service journalism and groundbreaking investigations, we have also made a lot of mistakes,” she wrote.
Mistakes? You don’t say! But first-off, the premise is flawed. “Public service journalism” sounds great and is really good at drawing a seal-like applause from other journalists; it’s often described as “accountability journalism.”
But that’s not the purpose of journalism.
Journalism is the conveyance of information about actions, events, and, in our political world, policy. Exacting change is the job of activists, not reporters.
“Accountability” is a byproduct of the job, not its feature.
Media outlets have fallen into this trap of believing they’re providing a public service, not a product created by a business. (Maybe that can explain some of the problems so many have with staying afloat.)
But I digress. Messer adds, “Many of us have even pretended not to have a viewpoint — a bizarre task that requires the person doing the writing and information-gathering to imagine they weren’t born in a body, didn’t live in a place, and never experienced hardship.”
“In the name of objectivity, many legacy institutions have asked us to continue that charade, demanding that women who’ve survived sexual assault or harassment remove themselves from those coverage areas. Some have asked Black journalists not to publicly support movements advocating for inalienable rights, like breathing. Pretending you don’t have a uterus or a romantic partner or a skin color is an impossible task. Pretending you’re not a voter or a constituent is ridiculous.”
What in tarnation?!
It’s too much to ask reporters to be as objective as they can be? You know, actual reporters and not activists. No, the problem with legacy media outlets isn’t that reporters are being asked to be too objective, it’s that they don’t ask their reporters to be objective enough.
How they act in their personal life is their business — though it can certainly affect their professional life. Vote for whomever they want. Donate to whomever they want. But a reporter’s job is to convey information, as much of the necessary information as possible to understand the issue being written about.
It’s not to pick a side based on their life experiences, nor is it to persuade readers to a particular outcome. Journalists, even if they didn’t succeed at it all the time, used to understand that fact. But now that outlets are riddled with cage-rattling activists LARPing as journalists, is it any surprise we see the old fashioned kind of reporters run out of town like Frankenstein’s monster?
At The Texan, we do things differently. We provide the who, what, when, where, and why with important contextual analysis (here’s the important part) — without the overt opinions and picking sides. And it’s working.
If you want to be an activist, go be an activist. Don’t start a news outlet.
In Liberty,