How To Report Responsibly
It's Not as Easy as You Think
This isn’t a new or localized issue but after today I’m sick and tired of it. There’s an epidemic happening under our noses that digital and print media have latched onto for clicks and views to rile up average citizens and it needs to stop.
Writing articles about ridiculous legislation introduced by a single lawmaker, with no hope of ever getting as much as even a committee hearing, needs to end.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look at some of the media coverage of Ohio State Rep. Josh Williams (R-Sixth Circle of Hell) newly introduced legislation:
Sports Illustrated, Columbus Dispatch, Associated Press, New York Post (lol), and on and on.
This is an absolutely ridiculous bill, to make flag planting at sports games a felony, that has no hope of ever becoming law. But that’s not the point, he laid an obvious trap and all of our vaunted news media took the bait.
This “legislation,” if you can even call it that, was most likely drafted up in mere hours by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. They exist to draft any legislation that Ohio Legislators want whipped up at their command. LSC is a good bipartisan service but are frequently abused by attention-craved State Reps who want their name in the headlines.
This is easy work if you know how it’s done, Williams (or his Legislative Aide) most likely emailed LSC last week asking for flag planting banning draft language. They probably had a quick meeting, fleshed it out, and the language was brought back to him and introduced today. Nothing to it.
As I mentioned, this isn’t new or special, but it’s particularly bothersome when it paints my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes football team in a bad light.
In fact, this happens all the time. It’s the game that these legislators play with an attention-wanting media that is mutually beneficial.
Williams knows that this ridiculous legislation will instantly garner headlines, the media knows that in this clicks-for-cash world these headlines will get hits, and they quickly ship out these stories.
The problem being, again, that these things have absolutely no-shot of ever becoming law, and the general public largely isn’t savvy enough to know that. Sure, at the bottom of the article it mentions it, “probably won’t become law,” but most folks will never even click into the article. To a lot of people, “[Blank Bill] is introduced,” is analogous to it becoming a law. That’s dangerous!
Let alone that the legislative session is basically over, a bill like this will never have a hearing, yet it’s covered around the country intently.
We saw this play-out exactly the same last week too, Rep. Bill DeMora (D-ODP Tailgate) introduced a stupid bill to ban whiskey re-sale and it went all over the news. This bill has a lower chance of passage than I have being elected to the legislature next year, but it made headlines across the state. Maybe we should look around and start asking ourselves why these ridiculous bills keep getting exactly the attention that the sponsors are practically begging to get.
Of course, this isn’t limited to Ohio it’s a national issue as well. Congressman wanting their time in the spotlight introduce things like the “TRUMP Act” to get Donald Trump on a $500 bill. Obviously this will never pass, but Rep. Paul Gosar (R-It’s Really Hot Down Here) gets to make national headlines.
As long as reporters and representatives have their dance of introducing bullshit legislation and writing about it we’re always going to be in this merry-go-round of nothing.
It’s far from our biggest issue, but if anything, it’s stupid and makes us look all the dumber for talking about it in the first place. Maybe one of these days the media will learn that if they just stop reporting on it perhaps (although unlikely) legislators will take their jobs slightly more seriously. I won’t bet on it, I’ll just write angrily to my wonderful readers instead.
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