Journalism is imperfect. Trust us… it’s why we’re here.

Media: Flawed Journalism

The Spider-Man theme song played on my alarm clock to wake me up for school. It was Friday, which meant that as soon as I got home from school, my mom and I would get ready to watch my favorite show, 

, together. We didn’t have cable, but luckily it came through on local channels. I didn’t care that we didn’t have fancy channels. I got to watch a young Superman go about his life every week. That was enough for me.

I look back at moments like those fondly. I didn’t know at the time what my mom was dealing with or how badly we were actually doing. I existed in a bubble protected by the characters who I looked up to. But it was in that same apartment that the veil started lifting, and it became clear what kind of life we had.

It started when my mom pawned my PlayStation 2. Then, after a few weeks of watching my mom hide our car, it vanished one day, repossessed by authorities. About a month later, we were evicted from the apartment. Essentially homeless at that point, my mom and I jumped from place to place, sometimes with family members or friends, wherever we could find some stability. Even as we jumped around, I still had my superhero idols. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make a difference.

Eventually, I’d find the way that I could make a difference.

I Saw Journalism as a Way to Improve the World

I knew about the talking heads on TV, the ones my grandparents always watched but seemed like boring, old-people fare. I was more focused on my superheroes, their stories and video games.

It wasn’t until middle school that I had my first exposure to journalism that I enjoyed—soon, I became the editor-in-chief of my middle school yearbook. The seed was planted, and even though I didn’t know it as a hyper-hormonal 12-year-old, that’s when my passion for journalism began.

This is a soft background for a conclusion that I came to, which was that the best way for me to make the world a better place was through journalism. I started looking at the industry in the same way that I saw the superheroes of my childhood, who, ironically, were journalists. But as I got older and deeper into the industry, I started seeing the barriers in place for someone from my background.

A Lack of Connections Hindered My Progress

I started working when I was 15. By the time I was 18, I had already been through three different companies. By the time I was in college, I was working three jobs while attending classes full-time.

College itself was something that I was always looking forward to. From the time I was a kid, I was told over and over again that education was the best way to make a life for myself, so I always took my schooling seriously. But my expectations were tempered very quickly.

I spent my whole life expecting big and beautiful colleges, Ivy League-types with the best programs. In reality, I was the first person in my family to go to college, had little support for applications and when the time came around to actually go to college, the only school I could afford to go to was a decent local university. Many of my journalism classmates lived with their families and didn’t worry about finances; I was working two jobs and finding writing gigs where I could.

The media, as a whole, is seemingly impenetrable for those without connections. Those you do form—often while working an unpaid internship or at a school paper—are limited to students who can afford to not work and make extra money.

Journalism Gigs Just Weren't Paying the Bills

Ultimately, I couldn’t afford to spend my time in ways that could have excelled my career in journalism. There were a handful of jobs I turned down after graduating due to the pay. I was bartending at the time, making decent money, but couldn't afford the pay cut that I’d take with a journalism gig.

My expenses were around $2,000 a month around the time I graduated, but the best paying journalism jobs with my experience paid just over $1,600 a month before taxes. That’s the reality of journalism in America.

Generally speaking, journalists are cut from a relatively homogenous cloth, whether it be class or race. This also shows in reporting. 

 found that less than one percent of the coverage from 2007 to 2012 in 52 different newsrooms centered on poverty. Journalists are covering what they know and what they’re familiar with, and in the process, they’ve become less representative of populations as a whole. 

The media is built on piles of cash. The people who have the money to break in are the ones who get to claim it.

A Media Career Is Inaccessible Without Money

Some people remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. Some remember what they were doing when Nixon resigned. Some remember where they were when they first realized COVID was a thing.

I remember when I first learned who John Anderson was.

I was 8 years old and waiting in a doctor’s office. That was something I did way too often because I had asthma and allergies and generally didn’t work right. I was bored, and so I picked up whatever was there, which in this case was 

In either case, the cover was an editorial cartoon either predicting or autopsying the 1980 election results. It showed the candidates on a racetrack—an incredibly hoary cliche which I thought was kind of nifty because I was 8 and everything’s new when you’re 8. There they were: Ronald Reagan, his enormous, wrinkly face attached to a spindly, tiny runner’s body, breaking the tape first. Carter, giant, earnest brow furrowed, ran along behind him. And way back in the distance, the man himself: John Anderson.

Decades Later, I Can Still Picture That Political Cartoon

Most people don’t remember John Anderson at all, and who can blame them?

He was a moderate Republican Illinois congressman who criticized Nixon and the Vietnam War and wanted to raise gas taxes and slash Social Security. He got thumped in the 1980 Republican primary trying to oppose the GOP’s hard right turn into the Reagan juggernaut. Then, he ran as an independent and got thumped in the general too. He received 6.6 percent of the vote. If his campaign did anything at all, it probably just solidified Reagan’s dominance and put the final bullet in the head of the vaguely non-rabid Rockefeller Republicanism that Anderson was trying to promote.

I looked most of that up on Wikipedia. But even if I didn’t know the John Anderson details by heart, I’ve known the general outline for more than 40 years. Per that 

 cover, John Anderson was a bland centrist Republican white-haired guy with big glasses who was more of a losing loser in 1980 than even Jimmy Carter. Which is saying something.

It’s tempting to make my lifelong love affair—or, you know, lifelong mild acquaintance—with John Anderson into an origin story. There I was, an asthmatic kid trying to distract myself, and politics came running at me out of 

. Cartoon John Anderson’s clumsy stumble down the cartoon track carried me along to an adulthood of reading political science books for fun, staying up to all hours feverishly following election analysis on Twitter and writing freelance political columns begging the American people not to embrace fascism…oh, fuck, too late.

I don’t think I can really claim to have been pulled along in Anderson’s wheezing, futile wake, though. Finding that cover wasn’t some watershed moment in my awakening political consciousness, which led inevitably to my byline on analyses of congressional dysfunction in moderately well-known publications 40 years later. It was just a brain blip that has irritatingly and pointlessly echoed in my head from childhood to youth to exasperated middle age. John Anderson wanted to run the country and, instead, he ran into some weird fold in my mind, where he stumbles around still, a symbol of shortness of breath, or of dawning political consciousness, or of irrelevance. The fact that I remember an, in retrospect, not very memorable cover is just coincidence.

Or not exactly a coincidence, since the whole point of the cover was to be remembered. The media is in the business of capturing your attention, after all. I’ve had editors assign stories based on SEO trending topics. At least one editor told me they were going to write a headline that made my essay feel more controversial and clickable (and more likely to drive people to yell at me). People talk about left and right media bias, but the real pervasive bias is the desire to get in your head and make you think about whatever it is the media is talking about right that instant.

That sounds transitory and shallow. And it is! But human consciousness is as much a function of the transitory and shallow as of the permanent and meaningful. The media’s job is to report and inform. But its job is also to capture your eye in the doctor’s office and connect you to a collective experience. The news doesn’t just tell you what’s happening. It tells you that these events over here, running at you out of the magazine, are happening to you.

You expect the news to happen to you when it’s big enough. I can still see the bland office in which I heard about 9/11, for example, just like most people remember where they were when the planes hit. And you expect random personal details to be important to you or stay with you through time. Like the rug at some relatives’ which I was lying on during an asthma attack, the fuzz brushing my cheek, while somewhere above, adults murmured, a distant counterpoint of worry to my wheezing.

The disconnect is when the personal and the political get mixed up, so you’re not sure which is you and which is the world. Did that cover cartoon even exist? I don’t know that I could have made up the details—the sweatbands around Reagan and Carter’s giant heads, for example, or John Anderson himself back there in the cartoon dust of obscurity. But my online searches for the image have been futile. If 

 had a cartoon presidential footrace cover back in November of 1980, it hasn’t been digitized in a way that search engines can turn it up.

The media is an institution. The media is people who report on current events, like me, at least sometimes. And the media is broadcasts, newspapers, magazine covers, internet bytes. But the media is also us. Not profoundly us, but us in the way that what you ate last night or saw on television while flipping channels is you. I breathe and look deep inside myself, and John Anderson looks back for some reason, or no reason. The media in the form of a presidential footnote has corrupted me. And you too, now.

My introduction to politics—and the power of the media—happened through an '80s magazine cover.

The Media Shapes Us, Even When We Don’t Realize It

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a journalist. I imagined journalists had the most exciting jobs and lives in the world—they read about everything, talked to interesting people, traveled and wrote about this infinitely fascinating world we live in. It promised a career full of opportunities to be creative and do impactful work by exposing wrongdoings, holding people and organizations accountable, breaking down complex topics, communicating them in ways people could understand and inspiring action leading to societal improvements. Information is extremely powerful; it forms public opinion and generates important changes.

In a scary career transition after years working in the comforts of the corporate world, I decided to take a risk and study journalism. I started out as a freelance journalist, pitching stories left and right and working for free for local publications to build a portfolio. Despite my journey being an unexpected zigzag, I somehow ended up working as a journalist at a large international media organization in the U.K. I still get chills every time I see the newsroom, but experiencing the industry from the inside has shown me a different view. I fully believe that journalists provide a crucial service to others, but it’s no longer the glamorous idea I had.

Here are the top 10 reasons why I hate the news.

It’s my job to be informed. But there are so many different sources, so many articles, videos, tweets, etc. that I get overwhelmed. I try my best to keep up with what happens domestically and in other countries, but it sometimes feels like I am constantly swimming against the current and getting nowhere. I want to consume a variety of media and publications to get a wide range of views, but it’s time-consuming and feels endless. My family sends me random shady articles and videos about current affairs explained through a conspiracy theory lens, hoping I will fact-check it for them. But the truth is, the internet has democratized information and anyone can publish anything, including fake news. Anyone can share opinions, theories and analyses to persuade others, but official sources can’t always be trusted either. So how do we navigate this ever-increasing volume of information? How do we know what to believe and what to completely dismiss? This can be tricky, even for a journalist.

There is no denying that a lot of bad things happen every day. And there is no point hiding that. Newsrooms certainly don’t. But only focusing on the horrible—shootings, devastating natural disasters, economic crises, violations of human rights, etc.—gets depressing very quickly. You start to accept these things as normal and inevitable. But that’s not the full picture. I often turn to positive books to lift my spirits and restore my hope in humanity. And then, I discovered a movement called “solutions journalism,” a network of journalists who believe the negativity bias in the media is counterproductive. The aim is to zoom out and shine some light on the good too. It means finding stories of progress, innovation and responses to social problems to show a more complete view of the world. This has become my own source of renewable energy to keep going.

A few months ago, a fellow journalist noted some very controversial edits in a story about Palestine, pointing out that the editor had studied and lived in Israel raised questions about the neutrality of the reporting. It was a crucial observation. News reporting should be unbiased, focused on gathering information about what happened that leaves out personal views. The challenge is when news and opinion mix and facts get tangled with judgments. The journalist's voice becomes louder, and the audience doesn’t always notice it. There is nothing wrong with expressing your thoughts, but it's annoying when this is packaged as impartial reporting.

The increase in information supply has also decreased its value. Before, people used to buy a physical newspaper, which kept the industry stable. Many no longer want to pay for information because they can get it online for free, regardless of the quality. What bothers me is that a great deal of work goes into good journalism. Research, interviews, transcription, translation, edits, etc. Someone is spending time and resources to produce it. Why should it be free? Why don’t we value this work? And yet, I am guilty of this too: When I see a paywall, I simply look for an alternative that will give me what I want to read for free. As the cost of living keeps rising and myriad other social challenges occur, quality information becomes a luxury, one many can’t afford.

Audience data grants me access to page views and reader engagement (the amount of time people actually spend reading an article online). Knowing how much time and effort goes into one individual piece, it can be demoralizing to see it perform poorly. When you work hard on something and are proud of it, you want it to get the biggest reach possible, but there are so many factors involved, and sometimes, it just flops. You can’t take it personally; you just need to move on.

As much as I wish journalism could exist in a utopian world where we somehow get paid to produce work that has value in and of itself, I have to remember that we’re selling a product; we're a business. And this often means that editorial decisions respond to this. So if Google Trends says people are searching for celebrity gossip, there is a temptation to offer what people want. This means that if something I want to write about isn’t commercially justified, I can’t do it, unless it’s for my own blog or social media, which doesn’t have the same weight (and doesn’t earn me income).

Being constantly bombarded with information, particularly when it’s negative, can make people pessimistic, which often means you don’t believe things can change, and then what’s the point of doing anything? For example, if all you hear is your government is corrupt, you internalize it and stop becoming outraged. And when so much is going on, you can’t just drop everything and become a full-time activist. So you let things slide and get distracted with the next thing.

I still continue to freelance on the side and have come to feel the burn of it. It can be amazing because it gives you the freedom to propose ideas and choose what to work on, but then you have to fight to find a home for your work, someone to publish you. A lot of time goes into logistics, and you need to build a thick skin because of the frustration. More times than not, my pitches are ignored, after putting in a lot of effort and work, only to find out that nobody wants to pick up what I offer.

If you’re not a famous TV personality or a senior editor, salaries in this industry are shockingly low. The hours are long, the work is stressful, and it can take a psychological toll; yet, the pay doesn’t reflect this. The industry in general is struggling to make a profit because competition is fierce and revenue models are unstable.

Depending on where you live or work, being a journalist can be extremely risky, especially under despotic regimes that control their media. Journalists around the world face censorship, threats and violence. According to Reporters Without Borders, nearly 500 journalists or media workers are currently imprisoned. The organization has identified at least 548 journalists who have disappeared or been killed since 2016 due to their journalistic activity. I can’t help but think about how insanely brave (or also just insane?) these people are risking their lives to expose inconvenient truths.

It makes me feel privileged to live somewhere I can feel safe doing my job. Even so, I still worry about the risks. I'm currently debating whether to publish a story that would expose a large-scale scam I discovered—I’m worried about the potential consequences, and being paranoid affects my sleep and mental health.

Ironically, despite my hate for the news, I’m passionate about journalism and don’t want to be doing anything else. This hate is the fuel that drives me forward, thinking about how I can contribute to see the changes I think are needed. I will push for more constructive journalism, which is informative and reports on solutions to social problems. This is where I see the most potential for me to leave a mark.

For all of its service, today's journalism is littered with a wide range of issues.