America’s institutions are failing her.
This! This opening sentence is a fun example of said failure: A journalist with the Associated Press would not have been allowed to write it. He would’ve had to rewrite it to omit the use of the word “her,” relying instead on a clunky, sexless alternative.
Since the 1970s, the Associated Press has instructed staffers via its Stylebook to avoid using the pronoun “her” when used in reference to “nations, storms or ships.”
“Use ‘it’ instead,” the Stylebook recommends.
America’s institutions are failing it.
The wording is inelegant. It’s ugly. It fails to do what good, clear writing does best: convey simple ideas coherently. Whom (or what), exactly, does the Associated Press’s style guidance serve? Not the English language — that is for certain. And certainly not the average reader, without whom the Associated Press would have no reason to exist.
This small, and admittedly silly, example points to a larger problem in major media. It’s one example among the hundreds showing corporate media tend to operate with little to no concern for the audience. It’s an industry whose primary concerns appear to be self-aggrandizement and the appeasement of special interest factions, an industry that seems to think very little of its increasingly distrustful public.
The disdain appears to be mutual. Indeed, in terms of institutions in which the public has either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence, newspapers rank very low, just ahead of big business, the criminal justice system, and Congress, according to recent Gallup polling data. Television news, meanwhile, ranks second to last, just ahead of Congress of all things.
In fact, Gallup’s most recent data show confidence in newspapers fell by 5 percentage points between 2020 and 2021. Confidence in television news likewise fell by 5 percentage points in the same time period.
It’s a crisis of credibility, and many at the top of the business just don’t seem to care
Take, for instance, PBS News reporter and NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor and her “some people say” reporting.
Alcindor, whose fame and popularity in the news business is based entirely on her opposition to former President Donald Trump, loves a good anonymously sourced quote, especially when it conforms to her none-too-subtle political positions. She rarely, if ever, provides names. She rarely, if ever, explains how she manages to find the time to interview such a diverse array of individuals despite having a full-time gig that requires her presence in television studios in New York City and Washington, D.C. Alcindor always has the perfect anonymous quote for the right moment, quotes that always prove her preferred political positions are the correct ones and that her preferred political leaders, all Democratic, are on the “right side of history,” as they say.
“I have talked to a number of Republican women voting for the first time in their lives for Democrats” because they’re so enthusiastic about protecting abortion access, Alcindor claimed this week on MSNBC.
Did she, though? Did she really talk to Republican women who say they’re voting for Democrats for the first time because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade? These women plan to vote for Democrats because the Republican Party delivered on a nearly 50-year-old campaign promise? Are these anonymous Republican women unaware of their party’s push to have Roe overturned, an effort dating all the way back to 1973? Do these Republican women even exist?
Earlier, Alcindor said of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, “I had an immigrant tell me, an immigrant mother tell me, ‘I see President Biden more as a father than as a president.’ I had someone else say, ‘I think he has a bigger heart than President Trump. Now is the time to really come.’”
Then, during the White House’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Alcindor said, “This is America’s longest war; this is a 20-year war spanning multiple presidencies. And President Biden didn’t take this decision lightly, sources tell me.”
Elsewhere, after Vice President Kamala Harris told immigrants, “Don’t come [to the United States],” Alcindor marched into the studio with another exclusive scoop: Anonymous sources say the administration didn’t really mean what it clearly said.
“Experts tell me, and lawyers tell me, that even though President Biden is continuously saying, ‘Don’t come,’ his actions are speaking louder than his words,” she said. “He is saying, ‘Welcome, come in. We’re going to put you in facilities. We’ll find something to do.’”
It’s amazing how these anonymous sources keep saying things that line up exactly with the best, most positive pro-Democratic spin!
Likewise, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened its masking guidance in May 2021, Alcindor said, “I talked to some people who are very worried about the idea that we are operating on an honor system in a lot of ways.”
Who? Who said this? And why do these sources keep confirming Alcindor’s positions?
That there doesn’t appear to be a single person at PBS or NBC willing to question the veracity of her conveniently self-affirming anonymous quotes says nearly as much about the institutional failures of this industry as it does about Alcindor’s reliance on too-convenient anonymous quotes.
Becket Adams is the program director of the National Journalism Center.
