My friend Jeff called me soon after we finished Town Meeting on Saturday, telling me that a reporter from one of the Portland TV stations wanted to do a story about the effects of poor internet on small businesses and small communities. They wanted to interview him and a community member or two in about an hour. I agreed to do it as I’m the VP of our nonprofit broadband utility district (which has yet to get off the ground because we have no funding). I called Bob Kurek, our utility district president, to see if he wanted to participate as well. Bob rushed back from a day in Augusta with his wife, and we all waited at Lake St. George Brewing, where Jeff is a co-owner, for the reporter to arrive.
She was pleasant, but seemed rushed and distracted. She was also very young (about a year or two out of school, we discovered, in what seems to be her first job as a reporter). She interviewed Jeff, then me, then Bob, for 2-5 minutes each, spending the most time with Bob. I don’t think we could have been more polite, helpful, or informative. I don’t think we could have offered more to connect here with facts and data about the state of broadband in Maine, or community ownership of broadband. I don’t think we could have been more fair in our comments about the need for communities to have protections from outsized price increases or poor levels of service from commercial providers. She wasn’t interested in any of that – she just wanted to interview us with a few top-level questions, and get back on the road. We understood, as she said the story would appear later that same day!
Well, about five hours after our interview, it was online. And it was awful. It turns out the real story was about how Charter Spectrum, the state’s largest commercial internet service provider (ISP) had promised to invest about $82 million into broadband in Maine. That seems like a very large sum, but given their existing footprint and the fact that much of this will likely be spent on upgrades to existing, aging infrastructure, it’s a lot less impressive than it initially sounds. Of that, they’re promising just $12 million for rural broadband – less than 2/3 the amount we need to run fiber throughout just our five towns in the utility district. The worst part of the story, though, was that the reporter made it sound as if the head of the state’s largest broadband non-profit disagreed with our opinion that community ownership is an important part of the solution for Maine’s future, and that it was a good way to ensure price and service protections for communities. That’s the exact opposite of his opinion! I’ve spent hours over the past month speaking with that individual, and co-led a community meeting with him just over a week ago, in which he voiced the exact opposite of what the poor reporting and editing done by this reporter and the TV station’s staff made it sound like to their audience. She also got my first name wrong, but I could easily forgive that if she got almost anything else right, about community broadband.
I’ve long been a very strong supporter of what I have always described as the “press”., thinking of it as the “fourth estate” or “fourth pillar” of democracy. I’ve pushed back on people who cynically call it “the media”, and speak as if it has an agenda. Well, my stance certainly took a bruising with this reporter’s work. I don’t think she has an agenda, per se, other than to file a story and get another byline (or whatever they call it in TV journalism). But having direct knowledge of the people interviewed and the facts of the situation, I can certainly say that this young reporter didn’t do journalism, or Maine communities, any favors yesterday. She published a quick “news” story, but that’s about the only thing positive she accomplished. It was anything but quality journalism, and significantly less accurate than an extreme version of whisper-down-the-lane.
