Last post, I showed you how being so hyper-focused on word usage is a HUGE sign that much of what’s being passed off as journalism these days is actually propaganda (remember? “the dissemination of information - facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies - to influence public opinion,” per Brittanica.com).
But how exactly does propaganda work its way into newsrooms in the first place?
One major method I have found is through press releases. I wish I could show you how many press releases people in media get every single day from organizations trying to get us to write stories about them. Every year, even I – a one woman show – get tons of press releases about any number of disparate things: car shows, medical breakthroughs, the death penalty, real estate agents, homeless pet neutering programs, political organizations – you name it. Multiply that times the dozens of people who work in a newsroom and you’ll get a general idea of how many press releases an entire news organization receives on any given day.
I know a lot of nice people who work in PR and marketing. Their job is to help companies and organizations get their products and messages in front of people who might be interested in knowing about them. But the fact of the matter is, people in marketing and PR are paid to “sell” information that their clients or employers want other people to know. Sometimes the information they share is 100% factual. Sometimes, though, they omit certain information, or skew it a bit, so it fits their narratives and objectives better. Either way, I think everyone – even people who work in PR and marketing – can agree that neither PR nor marketing is the same thing as journalism.
Keeping that in mind, the example I want to show you today (of how press releases negatively impact journalism) comes from one of the stories I touched on in that last post - a piece titled: “What words we use – and avoid – when covering people and incarceration.” The story itself was broadcast out to hundreds if not thousands of journalists nationwide, who – like me - subscribe to the daily American Press Institute (API) newsletter. But do you remember where it came from before that? It came from an organization called The Marshall Project, which describes itself as “nonprofit journalism about criminal justice.”
The first thing you need to know is that “nonprofit journalism” isn’t really journalism. The whole point of journalism is that “the press” is not supposed to be beholden to anyone; they are just supposed to be able to share facts and information with the world without worrying about repercussions. Anyone working for a nonprofit, though, can tell you that the opposite is true for them; nonprofit workers ARE beholden to other people – namely, their donors. So… the term “nonprofit journalists?” It’s pretty much an oxymoron.
The second thing I want you to know is that, even if the Marshall Project does have former journalists working on staff, the “stories” they write are not news stories at all. Because they have been produced by a non-profit for the purpose of promoting that non-profit’s agenda, any “stories” the Marshall Project publishes are actually press releases.
With both of those things in mind, I spent a few minutes looking into The Marshall Project today and its pretty long list of funders. Among them, I found some interesting names and organizations:
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg & his wife’s “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” a philanthropy which describes its goal online as providing “A Future for Everyone Leveraging technology, community-driven solutions and collaboration to accelerate progress in Education, Justice & Opportunity and Science.”
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which funds “liberal” political campaigns nationwide, per this 2018 L.A. Times story, plus tons of non-profits worldwide, including BLM, an organization whose founders are “trained Marxists” (*if you didn’t know that, read this post from HotAir, a blog The Flip Side often features, or this NY Post article, which includes links to several other articles and videos; don’t, however, read this Politifact article, which was strangely simultaneously published in the Tampa Bay Times, because – surprise! – Mr. Soros funds Politifact, too ; )
A $170 million “donor advised fund” called Solidarity Giving, which sponsors defund the police movements and a group called “Movement for Black Lives,” which notes on its homepage that “it’s time to defund and abolish the police,” and which also advocates for “abolish[ing] prisons,” as well as a “radical realignment of power” in general and “global power” in specific.
So … when a place like the Marshall Project sends out a press release full of “facts” to a place like the API, it’s imperative for journalists at the API to put those facts in context. It’s also crucial for them remember that the Marshall Project is beholden – like any nonprofit – to its funders, in this case a group containing some pretty controversial Americans who have definite hard-left opinions.
It's totally fine, by the way, for this hard-left group of people to have opinions on things and to want to share them via press releases. What’s not OK is when journalists turn around and pass those press release opinions off as fact to news consumers without:
taking the time to verify them, and
informing their consumers about the agendas of the groups who are providing this information
Why?
I found a fantastic example in the Marshall Project press release itself. It was hidden in this harmless-looking line:
“Language about incarceration places an undue burden on people of color and poor people.”
It’s a broad generalization to be sure – something that is unfortunately pretty commonplace in media of all kinds today (Remember! Real journalists always include supporting facts after they make broad general statements; otherwise, those statements are merely opinions!). But here’s my question: Is this particular broad statement actually true? Or is it just the opinion of the people at the Marshall Project?
Since I work on borrowed time in this blog (!), I decided to check out just one half of this broad assertion – the part about how negative incarceration language places an undue burden on people of color. The implication, of course, is that people of color make up the majority of incarcerated people. But is that true?
I did a quick online search using the words “prison inmates nationwide by race;” here’s what turned up:
The first pertinent listing that came up was #1 in the above image, from the Federal Bureau of Prisons website (which seems to be updated each week). As soon as I clicked on it (and I am not making this up), here is what I saw:
Unless I am missing something, this chart, published by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, shows that nearly 58% of current Federal inmates are White and nearly 39% of them are Black. I’m also not sure why they don’t mention Hispanic people, but as it stands, this chart seems to directly contradict the implication that there are more incarcerated people of color than incarcerated white people.
I didn’t want to get too far down a rabbit hole here but I wanted to see if there was any other data about this, so I clicked on the fourth search result (#2 in the search results image above). Here’s what I found:
THIS graph quite clearly shows that prisons are more full of black people than white people. But unless you’re paying close attention you will miss two important things to help you put this data in context:
the data is from 11 years ago – 2010.
this data is not raw data, like the data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons Website; it’s data that has been “calculated by the Prison Policy Initiative” (whatever that means), which is based on 2010 Census info.
Here’s what else is interesting about this data. As noted above, it comes from a group called the Prison Policy Initiative. What’s that, you ask? Turns out that the “non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.” So, yeah – this is another non-profit with an agenda.
I couldn’t find info about who exactly funds this nonprofit activist group, but we can gather from their own description of their mission that their agenda is about being against “mass criminalization.” I’m not saying this agenda is right or wrong. I am, however, saying that it exists. And if they have a stated agenda, we unfortunately cannot trust that they are a reliable source of information about factual things. They are a non-profit and the information they are sharing came via a press release, same as with the Marshall Project.
I could keep going for days, digging around to see what the truth actually is about Blacks vs. Whites in prison …
(for instance, there is a difference between state and federal prisons; I randomly did a quick search on inmate numbers for Ohio, Georgia and California and found that Ohio has more White inmates than Black, but that CA & GA both have more Black inmates than White. *FYI - all of this data is available, below*
I also know experts like to talk about incarceration rates by race vs. percentage of total population by race. Either way, as with so much happening in the world today, the real answer about Blacks and Whites in prison seems a lot more complex than the media wants it to be.)
… but that’s not the point of this post.
The point of this post is to show you that propaganda – in this case, information which serves the interests of multiple non-profits and which may or may not be completely true – most definitely makes its way into journalists’s worlds every day via press release and often, in turn, gets presented to news consumers (or general internet search users) as uncontested “fact.”
Next time you see someone making a broad generalization without supporting evidence, or even just discussing some data or facts on TV, online or in print, look to see if the writer cites any sources for that information. If they don’t, chances are high that what you’re reading is not settled “fact” at all, but actually someone’s – or some organization with a major agenda’s – opinion, provided courtesy of a press release.
DATA FROM STATE PRISON RESEARCH:
Ohio prison info: Ohio Department of Rehabilitation & Correction page.
Georgia prison info: (http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/sites/all/themes/gdc/pdf/Profile_all_inmates_2021_03.pdf - page 5)
California prison info: (https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/174/2020/10/201906-DataPoints.pdf - page 18)