This About That

One of the things that I find interesting about the media, as an institution, is the apparent power dynamic between specific media outlets and programs, and the guests that are invited to appear and/or speak on them. For all that many media outlets portray themselves as being in the business of informing the public, a number of them seem to be more in the business of providing their guests a platform to lay out their talking points.

Consider the following exchange, between National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and Ashley Bryant, from the left-leaning activist group Win Black/Pa'lante.

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro: You call yourselves a progressive group. People on the right might hear this and say your aim is to discredit legitimate political speech on the right. How do you distinguish between disinformation and totally fair partisan speech?

Ashley Bryant: This isn't a partisan issue. What we're actually fighting is voter suppression. The right to vote shouldn't be a partisan issue. We should have people on both sides that want every single eligible voter to be able to show up and participate in this democracy. Anyone that is against that is against our country, is against the very values and the thread of our country. And so my response to that is it's quite insane to think that progressive issues are bad because we want folks to vote, right? That's more - you know, I beg to say put a mirror in front of any of those people that think it's a problem that we want everyone to be able to be civically engaged in this process.

Progressive Group Combats Disinformation Campaigns Aimed At Latino Voters

While I do think that Ms. Garcia-Navarro teed up the question poorly by opening with a comment about a partisan dispute, the thrust of the question was pretty clear: How does Win Black/Pa'lante separate "disinformation aimed at people of color" from partisan speech that they may find disagreeable or oppositional, but is legitimate political messaging? And, at least on the face of it, that doesn't seem to be particularly sensitive information.

But not only did Ms. Bryant completely sidestep the question in favor of a virtue-signalling talking point, but there was no follow-up or attempt at clarification. This may have been because it was at the end of what was intended to be a five-minute piece, but I suspect that with the magic of audio editing, something could have been done. While it's possible that Ms. Garcia-Navarro simply isn't that adept an interviewer and NPR was straitjacketed by their program timing, the impression that I was left with was that everyone involved realized that the target audience simply didn't care.

Because the pattern of a reporter asking a serious question and the guest responding with a talking point seems very common. Even the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates seem to suffer from this, with the moderators lacking the will and/or the authority to interrupt a candidate and steer them back to the question being asked, or even enforce the supposedly-agreed-upon rules of the program.

Because who cares? More than likely, any given listener had already made up their mind as to whether they supported Win Black/Pa'lante or the political candidates before they even tuned in. Nothing is riding on any one specific answer to a question. And this insulates the media organizations in question from consequences, too. People who are not tuning in to be informed aren't really going to mind if there's little in the way of informational content.

So journalists ask questions that they understand may or may not be answered and guests understand that if they'd rather respond with a talking point, it's okay and the audience understands that they're getting more or less what they signed up for.