In some ways this is not new. News outlets of all ideological bents have run articles by the Associated Press (AP), sometimes with their own added content, sometimes not. If you think about that for a minute, and/or if you read across outlets, you’ll notice one more thing: the content, even to the headline itself, is not always the same from outlet to outlet.
Focusing in locally, it’s common to see The Colorado Sun running articles by Chalkbeat, the Durango Herald running articles by the Sun, Colorado Public Radio (CPR) running articles by the Aurora Sentinel, and so on. In contrast to AP content, it’s more common to see these articles posted either in full or in brief, unchanged, and with attribution to the original outlet.
Why is this noteworthy? Papers sign up for services like the AP so that they can get news on, say, Washington DC without having to muster the cash to pay a DC reporter of their own. Local papers help each other out. Sharing articles with each other matters for the same reasons that any sort of market concentration matters: less flexibility locally, fewer voices are heard, and responsibility (and thus accountability) become diffuse.
Editorializing via headline
You don’t have to go far to see examples either. You see them show up right at the very top, A recent AP article reprinted in the Gazette carried the headline “Donald Trump Falsely Suggests Kamala Harris Misled Voters About Her Race,” and a recent Aurora Sentinel article reprinted in CPR news carried the headline “Aurora Lawmakers Insist, Without Evidence, Venezuelan Gang Responsible for Apartment Closure”.
These headlines quite clearly editorialize. What Trump said or didn’t say, what Harris has said or not said, and what others have said about it are all complicated, and go beyond the idea of someone misleading voters. Did the Sentinel seek what evidence the Aurora lawmakers have or don’t have? A quick survey of their headlines also clearly shows that some politicians’ claims merit the modifier “without evidence,” while some don’t. Given the old joke about how to tell when a politician is lying, I don’t imagine it’s only Aurora lawmakers that claim things without evidence.
It’s natural to ask (all the more so given that AP materials can be changed by the outlets that use them) whether any of the news outlets that use outside journalism do more than simply repost what they get. From informal correspondence with some outlets, I get the sense that the only checking going on is to see whether the sending agency has the right kind of policy. Good as a first pass, but as this veteran teacher can tell you, there’s a wide gulf between stated rules/policy and reality. My guess is that there’s more trusting than checking.
Given that, is it reasonable to assume shared content would be the same quality as if it were done in house? Is it reasonable to assume that the sender is sneaking their own editorial comments and bias into shared material? I think so. As things stand, the door is wide open to problems like I describe above. And none of this touches on honest mistakes. They happen too. They happen when reporters write for their own outlets, they happen when reporters write an article for others. If material gets copied and pasted over, those mistakes get forwarded along.
Diffused accountability
This brings us to diffuse responsibility and accountability. When a mistake happens in a reprinted article, who owns it? Which outlet needs to do a correction? Who gets to make sure that happens at all the downstream media outlets? If there is editorializing that sneaks through, who owns that? Who gets to fix it (assuming someone objects)?
Further, for you the reader, this leaves a lot unanswered. Who do you write to? What do you do if you write or call and are told “that’s not us, you need to contact [fill in the blank]”? This came into relief for me personally when I was trying to follow up on an AP article I saw reprinted in CPR (about the man who killed himself instead of blowing up an amusement park in the mountains last year).
The reporter lives in faraway Montana, so I wondered at how a Montanan could report credibly about something in Colorado. It was a wash. The only contact info for this gentleman was a general customer service form on AP’s site. I sent in more than one query and heard from no one. I didn’t, but if I had a mind to try and go up the chain with my query, good luck. The form is what you get.
The promise of the AP was that it would extend the reach of smaller outlets. The stated reason of, say, the Colorado Sun sharing its reporting is similar though they hold themselves up as altruists (their material is shared without any money changing hands). For profit or not, however, the effect has been that the shared stories carry the values of the creators with them, and seemingly without check by the publishing outlets. Compounding the problem is the fact that there is no infrastructure (or desire to have one?) on the part of either outlet to manage the inevitable mistakes, problems and questions.
There is nothing inevitable about the way things happen now. News outlets could choose to do this differently if they wanted. It might take time, it might mean less daily content (and page clicks), but they could share content and provide us a wider range of material without sacrificing quality or accountability.
Cory Gaines is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.
