Stevenson: The fall of mainstream reporting in Mississippi
Note: The following is an opinion-editorial article on issues regarding the election campaign and its media coverage, offered and written by Jon Stevenson, a DeSoto County resident, businessman, and concerned citizen. The article reflects Stevenson’s opinion and not necessarily that of this publication.
By Jon Stevenson
One of the most dramatic changes in media over the last decade, and at least since Donald Trump began his campaigns for the Presidency, has been the shedding of news organizations neutrality. During my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow was held up as the gold standard for journalism. Reporters who, while having their personal biases, would strive to set them aside and try to report the news. They would report the news without fear or favor so that an informed citizenry could make decisions about the direction of their country.
The advent of Donald Trump on the national political scene peeled the veneer of objectivity that national news organizations attempted to project. He became an excuse for news organizations to advocate for their personal political choices. They started to advocate false narratives against their opponents using selective facts to create impressions that fit their personal political choices. If above the table, open advocacy might be acceptable. Unfortunately, the use of selective facts, half truths and out of context information to create false narratives harkens to the worst excesses of political propaganda.
Donald Trump however unleashed something dark in the media mainstream. Not by his behavior or verbiage, but members of the media used his unorthodox style as an excuse to engage in their own form of inexcusable behavior. Instead of simply slanting coverage, reporters have taken to censoring opposition, creating false hoods to slander political opponents, and creating false narratives that label conservatives and Republicans as authoritarian, Nazis or worse.
Perhaps one of the worst local examples that I have seen of this phenomenon was a series of stories by Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance in Mississippi Today directed toward State Representative Trey Lamar, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the State House of Representatives. In their stories they used objective facts, and a lack of context, to paint a false narrative of a politician enriching himself and his small rural community at the expense of the rest of the State.
Amongst a litany of accusations, perhaps the most damming of them, according to the reporters, was that the “evil” Rep. Lamar obtained State funding for a road improvement and drainage project for a golf course in Senatobia where he lives and funding for the City of Senatobia to purchase the local water and sewer company. If you read the articles you would come away thinking that Rep. Lamar created a road project in order to get the State to pay for a private road for himself, and a bunch of rich near-do wells while he allowed the rest of the State to suffer.
When I read the article I was flabbergasted. I live in DeSoto just north of Tate County where Senatobia is located. I have friends who live there and they completely disputed the narrative that these reporters have attempted to create. The road project they accused Rep. Lamar of concocting was started by a County Supervisor named Cam Walker in 2006 to address safety concerns, while Rep. Lamar was still in Law School and didn’t live in the neighborhood.
The road project had numerous public hearings, donations of private land to help with the right-of-way, was reviewed and approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, MDEQ, and a unanimous vote of the Tate County Board of Supervisors. If this objective review was not enough the project was also reviewed by the State House of Representatives, the State Senate and the Governor. All of this was an important context that the reporters left out. Also left out was how the community had begun to use this road as a major connector to reach I-55, thereby dramatically increasing traffic and creating unsafe conditions. The fact that the road happened to run though a golf course was incidental to this. This context, however, didn’t fit the narrative that Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance wanted to create.
The Mississippi Today reporters, in their stories, also attempted to suggest that the money that Rep. Lamar obtained for Senatobia to purchase the local water and sewer system, somehow benefited him personally in their articles. Of course this discounts the fact that the Representative’s house is on a private well and septic system and he could not benefit from it. They also left out the fact that the creation of a unified sewer and water district for Senatobia would be an economic development driver for the community, or that this was a part of a bill that sent tens of millions of dollars to rural water and sewer districts all over the state of which this project was one small part. Of course this didn’t fit their narrative either.
Finally these two paragons of journalistic virtue (sarcasm) found a Republican State Representative, Dan Eubanks, of such upstanding moral virtue, who was willing to criticize a member of his own party and suffer the consequences in order to complete the narrative.
They fail to mention that Representative Eubanks’ father lives in Tate County and has an ax to grind with Rep. Lamar due to numerous political battles or that this “Republican” is really a Libertarian/Anarchist with a history of obstructionism in the State House and a penchant for grandstanding in order to further his own career. Like running a quixotic campaign for US Senate in the past Republican primary where he only could muster less than 20% of the vote in his home county.
The media in our country has a decision to make. Do they want to attempt to fulfill the standard of Edward R. Murrow and try to bring objective reporting to the masses, or will they continue the popular smear campaigns of the recent past? Will reporting forever be dominated by the MSNBCs, Fox News, and CNN’s of the world or will we finally be able to get reasonable reporting that attempts to frame an issue considering all viewpoints? Oh if only we could! One thing is for certain, smear campaigns like this one from Mississippi Today cannot be trusted. If only because they have hidden motives. Like trying to damage a State Representative who is known for his desire to eliminate the State Income Tax.
