Recently I received an angry email from a viewer in response to our new promo.
Warning, there are some vulgarities below:
I reached out to Mike to see what specifically he could point to in our reporting that has him riled up.
I want to know what was “propagandist” in the recent investigative reports I’ve done or what he considers “fake news” to come out of our 9Wants to Know unit.
Mike couldn’t provide any specific examples and hung up.
I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect Mike actually has issues with national media and confuses us local news journalists with “the media” in general.
Mike isn’t the only one who’s angry at “the media.”
We get irate emails, Tweets, Facebook messages and phone calls daily from people who are angry with the media.
There is some justification for that anger.
The concept of news has been hijacked by national personalities who claim to be journalists. Pundits who yell at each other in video boxes have screamed over the truth. National media cable shows can be narcotic for audiences who are seeking to have their deeply held political beliefs validated. Pandering brings profits for networks who look to the left and to the right for your attention.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this post is that local media outlets that report on city council affairs, county commission meetings, public works, school boards, etc. are not in congruence with the behavior national media. We may be affiliates of national networks, but we are not controlled by them.
We are not out to get President Trump when we are filing records requests about local water quality nor are local political reporters working for Fox News when they question state democratic candidates.
Because the term “the media” is a mantra used by politicians to lambast coverage they don’t like, the concept of American journalism has been reduced to one singular, monolithic entity seemingly controlled by a handful of corporations and billionaires.
“The media” is not one group. It’s fragmented, complex and made up of thousands of local journalists from different backgrounds who go to your churches, have kids in your kids’ classrooms and drive on the same freeways and bus routes you do to get to work.
American journalism, in its most sacred forms, can be found in small town papers that are struggling to survive and through local television and radio reports about community affairs.
It’s getting exhausting trying to justify my job on Twitter and in Facebook fights, which is why I’ve recently logged off social media indefinitely. I’ve got work to do. And sometimes this work makes people angry.
Such is the nature of truth. But it’s my job to find it. It’s what I do. The truth is important which is why I’m still doing this gig 20 years later.
I believe you deserve a truthful local government, even if you don’t like hearing bad news about the school board candidate you support.
Google came up with 1,590,000,000 results in 1.24 seconds when I put the word “truth” in the search bar. That’s where, like you, I go to first when I try to find the truth in something. I did that when I first started writing this piece.
Mark this result number 1,590,000,001.
So much has been written about the truth over millennia, it’s clear it matters. But the truth often remains elusive, hidden and very often impossible to find or even understand when there is so much noise out there.
Truth is often hard to hear -- it’s necessary to understand the hard truths behind local issues like homelessness, gun violence and drug addiction so we can find ways together to try and mitigate these problems.
Because, as I say in the above spot, without the truth, we lose the best of Colorado.
