See for yourself

The media should talk with people outside their own studios.

Today my friend Leila Fadel has an astonishing story from inside a Syrian prison. Leila, who is traveling with two of NPR’s best, Arezou Rezvani and Taylor Haney, follows along with a Syrian-American man in Damascus. He is an activist, searching abandoned intelligence agency buildings and prisons for signs of missing Americans.

The activist, Mouaz Mustapha, leads the way into an air force intelligence building. He shuffles papers in abandoned rooms, knocks on the doors of empty cells, and finally encounters this:

Leila: In the basement there are two rooms. Both have stairs that disappear into brown liquid.

Mouaz: It’s a pool of acid. That’s where they threw people.

Leila: We don’t know for sure if it’s acid, but a strong chemical smell fills the air.

What makes me remember this moment, besides the horror of the image (what might be in that liquid?) is the correspondent’s precise description of what she sees, what she knows, and what she doesn’t know. She went to witness for herself, and doesn’t overstate what she encounters.

I’d like to say this story is extraordinary, though in truth it’s common for my colleagues. Just yesterday on Morning Edition, Ruth Sherlock stood at the spot where Syrians discovered an American wandering barefoot, having apparently escaped from custody. In the same program, Chiara Eisner went up in a Customs and Border Protection helicopter over the U.S.-Mexico border to watch the effort to slow the flow of unauthorized migrants. The pilot tells her the advantage of the overhead view.

STRICKLER: So whether that be for people who are making drug deals or whether it be people that have crossed the border illegally, it helps not being seen, not being heard, right? And then if they run, well then now I see them and, like, they're never going to get away from me.

A change in policies, by both the U.S. and Mexico, seems to have had an effect.

EISNER: There are far fewer migrants crossing the border today. Around this time last year, about 200,000 people were tracked crossing over the southern border in one month. Now that number is down to about 50,000.

My colleague also had occasion to push back a bit on what she was told by a CBP official.

EISNER: I asked him whether the lower number crossing these days was more manageable.

SCRUGGS: It's not so much a manageable number, but what is the correct number by law. And that number is actually zero.

EISNER: Well, people are allowed to cross and ask for asylum.

SCRUGGS: Well, correct.

This leans toward a complexity of the border story we’ve reported in detail over the past year and beforehand—the flow of asylum seekers, some of whom may well have a case to stay in the United States. It’s thought that most do not have a case, but the courts are so clogged that many can stay for years waiting on a hearing. The Biden administration was slow to respond to the increasing flow of people. Blocked in Congress from adding resources to adjudicate their cases, the Biden administration finally imposed new rules to limit the number of people allowed to cross.

I think of reports like these when considering the media in the year ahead. It seems to me that one major distinction between news sources is between those that engage with the world and those that don’t.

I was home in Indiana the other morning and one of the TV news channels was on. During a little less than an hour that I watched, the program certainly had news—coverage of the Trump transition, a brief update on the shooting of a health care CEO, and some talk of UFO’s. What that particular section of the program lacked was any contrary opinion, or inconvenient fact, that did not match the network’s point of view. Each story had only one side. Most of the words were spoken by the hosts talking to each other, and they agreed. The only report from outside the studio was given from the White House lawn.

I’m not here to criticize or praise that channel. It called attention to stories of interest, and if I’d seen a different hour there would have been more reporting and some diversity of thought. I don’t know that it’s completely different from other news channels.

But it’s a different experience than getting a look inside a Syrian prison.

It’s often misleading to define media sources based on the outdated ideological spectrum (left, center, right). Even if you properly label them, which people often don’t, news organizations of any “slant” can be useful if they engage with the world and with people of differing opinions. I read a lot of good stories in conservative or liberal publications!

It’s also misleading to define media sources based on whether they are (pick your label: mainstream, corporate, traditional, legacy) media or whether they are new media or social media. There’s nothing wrong with new platforms; here I am on Substack.

The real question is what the people at your news source do. Do they engage with the world outside their studio? Do they question people with differing views? Do they read documents, give a fair assessment, and show their work? Do they go to the scene of the news to look around? Do they give you enough information that you can understand why they are telling you the story that they are? Do they have the integrity to disclose facts that don’t fit their narrative as well as ones that do?

This amounts to an answer to the question of trust in the media. Lots of people have lost trust in institutions, including their news sources. Well, you shouldn’t trust a news source without question. And if your news source does their job, you shouldn’t have to. Because they should give you enough information that you can see for yourself.