Local media: stenographers of government propaganda

(Greensboro, NC) It takes little effort to repeat what government officials say about their actions. It takes more thought and effort to put official pronouncements into a larger context that incorporates relevant facts. The former is stenography. The later is reporting. Local media continue to propose their value is as stenographers.

In covering the new state law that would allow North Carolina law enforcement to collect and share the D.N.A. of innocent and guilty people alike, local media fell down and resorted to simply regurgitating what other people in favor of the law thought of it.

I'm talking to you News 14 Carolina, WFMY and WGHP. I reserve a special mention for the amazingly insipid WFMY story that manages to conflate the bill with a cold case, neither having anything to do with the other.

Only Mark Binker at the News & Record quoted anyone opposed to the law in his coverage of its debate in the General Assembly. (As far as I can tell, the N&R has not, at the time of this post, covered the bill being signed into law at all).

All coverage, including Binker's, failed to report the factual yet negative measures of the legislation. The law allows the state to share D.N.A. with other jurisdictions but provides no means, indeed cannot provide any means, for innocent people to have their D.N.A. removed from the databases of other jurisdictions. It provides no prohibitions or penalties for private contractors, authorized to perform D.N.A. analysis on behalf of the state, who may expropriate a person's D.N.A. sample for commercial research or profiling purposes. These facts are not reported.

Instead, what we got from local reporters was not reporting at all. It was regurgitation -- from WFMY, a summary of the Governor's Tweets -- all uncritical repetition of the official line, each failing to report any derogatory facts about this law.