The AP and Reuters -
how just two news wire services shape most national news coverage and headlines
One thing that drives me crazy about what passes for “news” today is how, even though we have thousands of newspapers, news radio programs and television news shows throughout the country, they collectively only cover a very small handful of the same national news stories each day.
How and why does this happen?
I know I’ve said things like this before but I need to say it again - in a nation of 330 million incredibly diverse people all living in equally diverse places (both socioeconomically and geographically), it makes no sense to pretend like only 5, 10 or even 20 things happening here are nationally newsworthy every single day. Yes, of course, we have local news outlets to help cover our local stories (although these are disappearing faster than you think – read about “news deserts” in this 2017 Columbia Journalism Review article). But still, the problem persists. Who decides which stories are important enough to make national news headlines?
Most times I don’t know the answers to the questions I ask in this blog but this time I know a big part of it. It’s something that has really bothered me about news from the start of my very first job as a TV news producer, back when I had no idea what a mess the whole industry really was. There is some well researched, original reporting happening in news outlets today. And certainly all news outlets can and should read and / or watch their competitors to see what they’re covering. But one major reason every news outlet in the nation ends up covering the same, small group of stories has to do with something called news wire services.
Here in the U.S., the two main news wire services that feed the vast majority of newspapers and news stations (radio and TV) nationwide are the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters (*UPI used to have a news wire service; near as I can tell they are just a regular news service for consumers now).
You as a consumer probably know both the AP and Reuters as sources you can access yourself online, but consumer news is actually a relatively new endeavor for both – something they apparently started doing to help boost revenue, because of those thousands of local news stations and papers that keep closing up shop nationwide. Either way, these two news wire services are each well over 100 years old, and for the vast majority of their existences, their main reason for being has been to supply virtually every newsroom in the nation – print, radio, television and now online - with news.
I first encountered the AP newswire when I worked in a TV newsroom. Basically, all day, every day, stories would be fed in to us from the AP, which I assume had a team of staff writers just writing news stories all day. In addition, when something major happened nationally (a plane crash or a major weather event, for example), those same staff writers quickly gathered the facts, wrote up stories and sent them out “over the wires” (now – the internet) to all the newsrooms who subscribed to the AP or Reuters services (*Note: local news station affiliates also share stories with and get fed stories from their network parents; ditto for newspaper, magazine and online news sources owned or operated by media conglomerates).
In theory, this arrangement seems like a great idea to local news outlets. For instance, if my little midwestern newsroom has neither the money nor the manpower to have one person dedicated to following national news all day (which few newsrooms do), my news director can pay the AP and have a barrage of national news at his or her disposal daily, to use (or not) as my writers want. Another theoretical benefit is that, when breaking national news happens really close to air or print time, and producers or writers do not have the time or ability to research it themselves, stories from the news wire can keep them informed and give them information to put in print or on air right away. Basically, these wire services give small news outlets the ability to seem more nimble and informed than they really are.
There are, of course, several MAJOR problems with having the vast majority of newsrooms in the nation receiving information from the same two or three sources. In practice, what horrified me when I had to use AP news stories for air was that no one ever questioned, researched or vetted what came across the news wires; everything that appeared on your AP News feed was accepted as gospel truth. We were never encouraged to verify the stories ourselves (to be fair, we weren’t discouraged, either. It just wasn’t something anyone really did).
If news directors wanted to, they could assign reporters to pursue local stories that had the same angle (so if, for instance, a story came across the wire about how there was a terrible illness killing kittens nationwide, a reporter might find and interview local people with cats to see if it was affecting them). But more often than not the reality was that we just didn’t have the time or resources to dig deep into these stories. Limited by time and human ability, we used those news wire stories as patches to help fill in holes for our half hour or hour-long news programs.
(Another thing that bothered me A LOT was that we never got a tour of the AP facility, or meet or even talk by phone to any of the writers doing the research for the stories we received and were expected to run from the AP news wire. I had no idea if the AP had a massive newsroom full of hundreds of people all sharing story ideas and checking each other’s work every day, or if it was just an organization made up of a few dozen people all working remotely, independent of one another and covering different beats. All I knew was that someone, somewhere was feeding me stories. Call me crazy, but I found that pretty scary (*It’s been a while since I’ve worked in a newsroom but I can’t imagine things have changed too much, given the news industry’s shift toward technology and long time tendency to underpay and undervalue the human beings who procure, write and edit the news for them).
But the bigger problem with having just two wire services supplying so many news outlets is, of course, that those two organizations essentially control what stories the entire nationwide viewing and reading audience sees and hears reported as news. Think about that for a minute, and remember my favorite thing to say – there are 330 million people in this very diverse nation.
Even if everyone working at the AP and Reuters is imminently fair and open-minded, there are a limited number of them, they are all only human, and they – like the rest of us - are all limited by time and the constraints of their own life experiences (*another interesting tangent to this column which I’ll explore some day is the strikingly odd lack of diversity – of thought, of socioeconomic backgrounds, and of race - in newsrooms nationwide; click here to read more about that).
Weirdest of all, though, is what’s happened over time. These two wire services, Reuters and the AP - which theoretically are competing – have started both omitting and reporting some of the exact same stories in almost the exact same way. Sometimes they can and should be covering the same stories – some stories really are big news and everyone needs to cover them. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about something a little more nefarious-feeling than that.
I want to show you a fantastic example of this right now. Unfortunately, the day I was preparing this post was the first day after the Presidential debate, so that’s the topic we have to cover (I know, I know - that was a nerve-wracking spectacle to watch for so many different reasons. But I think if we can set aside the emotion from that night and and tackle this topic together, in a level-headed manner, you’ll see what I mean).
Let’s look at the two home pages for both the AP and Reuters on this past Wednesday night at 10 pm, when I was doing the bulk of the research for this column. I just took a quick screenshot of the tops of both pages, so – full disclosure – both sites had lots more stories beneath these. But, presumably, since these are at the top of the page, they are what editors feel are most important – the virtual headlines. Here’s the AP (note the highlighted story for later):
Now here’s Reuters (again, note that highlighted story for later):
There are three news topics these two screenshots have in common with each other. One is airline furloughs. One is COVID relief. And the third is the Presidential debates.
Each news wire covers two topics from the debate. Reuters has the story: “Fears of voter intimidation follow Trump’s call for his backers to monitor polls,” and the AP has the story: “Getting warmer: Trump concedes human role in climate change.”
*interesting aside here – they both have headlines about things Trump said during the debate but neither news wire has a headline about anything Biden said. Why?
But the second debate story for both is the same (these are the stories marked with the pink arrows in the screenshots above). It has to do with a group called the Proud Boys. (*disclaimer – I know nothing about this group) This group was one that former Vice President Biden asked Trump to denounce as white supremacists. There has been a lot of argument about whether Trump went on to do that or not, but let’s set that aside for a moment and think about this instead:
If you watched the debate, you know that it was a painful 90 minutes long. In those 90 minutes, Chris Wallace, Joe Biden and Donald Trump touched on a LOT of REALLY MAJOR topics – Supreme Court Justices, Roe v. Wade, mail-in-ballots, manufacturing jobs, universal health care, pre-existing medical conditions, COVID, mask-wearing, the economy, corruption allegations, African Americans, the Green New Deal / climate change – and that’s just off the top of my head.
Considering all those many major topics, I have two questions:
Are the three stories the two news wires chose to focus on an accurate representation of everything that was covered during the debate? And –
Why did both Reuters and the AP choose to include the “Proud Boys” story as one of just two they covered from the debates? (Reuters even took it a step further and included two additional stories about this group)
Taking the questions a step further, I have to ask two more:
Was a significant chunk of the debate focused on this “Proud Boys” group? And -
Is this group, the “Proud Boys,” really one of the two most important issues facing the nation right now?
Maybe the biggest problem facing America today really is a group I’ve never heard of before called the “Proud Boys.” Lord knows, ever since Woodward and Bernstein, reporters in this nation have been trying really hard to be the ones to break the next big bombshell story. They’ve tried it so much, in fact, it’s kind of a boy-who-cried-wolf tactic at this point, not to mention that it has become a huge means of them avoiding reporting the actual news.
Either way, ask yourself - is it possible that Reuters and the AP – the mass feeders of news to the vast majority of newsrooms in this nation – are using the idea of white supremacy to get you upset and distract you from thinking about something else from the debates? If so, what do you think that is?
Maybe the biggest problem with this particular story being covered on both news wire sites is that both Reuters and the AP are feeding thousands of other news outlets this very same information. Now, the consumer feed is probably different from the paid access feed for newsrooms (theirs should theoretically be more comprehensive). But one thing I do know is that the biggest “news” story across almost every news platform I saw yesterday involved allegations that President Trump refused to call out the “Proud Boys.” Where do you think they got that idea?
This, in essence, is how one pretty small detail – and nothing else - from a very long and complicated event becomes “news.” Everything else that was said during the entire rest of the 90 minute debate is pretty much never discussed again, and news consumers kind of forget about that when they are barraged the very next hour or day with more news on different topics.
This, in essence, is the best argument I can ever offer you for watching or reading original source material for yourself.
For those who want to read on, I have two other takeaways to offer from this project:
In trying to find out if UPI still had an active wire service or not, I spent some time on their web site. I could end up eating my words (can you tell I’ve become something of a news cynic?!) but for today, I have to say that I found their news stories refreshingly straightforward and unbiased – all very short, to-the-point and not at all sensationalist. Using the debate as a case-in-point, there were only two stories about it on the whole site Wednesday night – including one about how the debate committee is reforming its rules - and both were totally unbiased. UPI also has sections dedicated to science, defense and health news (and the health section isn’t only about COVID). Imagine that – according to this news website, there is stuff happening in the world besides the U.S. Presidential debate! In all seriousness - it’s well worth a look for anyone looking for an unbiased news source –
For those who were as confused and disoriented by the course of that Presidential debate as I was, I offer two things that might help (note, though, you have to have a cool head and a REALLY open mind to consider these two things objectively; this is an exercise for advanced, and un-emotional, News Navigators!):
The first is the raw transcript of the whole debate, which I found on USA Today (a left-leaning outlet) and which I think is really cool of them to publish. Though it was definitely helpful seeing the style of both candidates in real time (albeit painful, as I’ve mentioned before!), I liked having this as a follow up tool. It took every ounce of emotion out of the event and just let me see the answers both men chose to give – or not - to the questions asked. As a follow up to watching the actual debate itself, reading this transcript helped me understand better what matters to each candidate – information I personally had a hard time processing in real time.
The second is an opinion piece published in the Federalist (a conservative outlet), and the only article I saw bringing up concerns about the way the debate questions were worded. I personally didn’t notice any of this as I watched in real time, but the author makes some interesting points about Wallace’s use of leading questions (questions “that prompt or encourage the desired answer,” per a quick Bing search) - a not-nice technique that reporters often use to trick people into a response that fits a desired narrative. The question I have after reading this piece (to which I do not have an answer) is: Why would Chris Wallace have asked leading questions? What was he trying to accomplish?