Dog whistle Herald banner headline is a classic example of the kind of news practice that has divided our nation
Having written thousands of headlines in my decades as a journalist, I understand the importance of attracting eyeballs to pages. So, it’s hardly surprising to me that the editors of the Boston Herald, a tabloid newspaper with a particular front page design for both its print and pdf editions built for huge screaming headlines and graphics to get a strong emotional reaction from anyone who encounters it, should frequently play fast and loose with concepts and language on their covers if it helps sell subscriptions.
But sometimes even I find myself pausing to question a Herald cover story title, as was the case on Tuesday. The big headline? “SOCIALIST SHOPPING: Government-run grocery store raised.”
Which I suppose was meant to induce a jump scare in the paper’s generally conservative audience and certainly garnered frantic reactions on the Herald’s X thread featuring the cover in question.
Reactions like:
- “Boston City Council is a laughing stock. Abolish it…its a waste of tax-payer dollars!” (Big Cannoli_21),
- “Thanks because idiots follow idiots. None of them can think for themselves.” (CLOCKWORK ANGELS),
- and my personal favorite “We will be Venezuela in 6 months, was funny when president trump talked about dogs cats being eaten, Boston these will be your main sources of food make no mistake about it, after you will be breaking into Franklin Park zoo , pet stores just to eat, people will lose 50-75 lbs” (Jeanne).
Yet the article the cover title was referring to had a much more subdued headline, “Two Boston city councilors pitch government-run grocery stores championed by NYC socialist mayoral candidate.” The Herald’s right-leaning editors still provided red (ha!) meat for their audience with trigger terms like “government-run” and “socialist.”
I would agree that the article headline was technically accurate compared to the banner headline on the cover. But editors, as journalists, are always supposed to strive to be both fair and accurate in all their coverage. So, was it fair? I think not.
Why? Because upon reading the article, readers discover that the idea of Boston city government bankrolling a grocery store is a serious proposal from Councilor Liz Breadon and Council President Ruthzee Louijeune. A proposal based, its exponents say, on the experience of other municipalities that are thinking along similar lines.
And it’s true that the front runner in the New York City mayor race who also happens to be the Democratic Party candidate, Zohran Mamdani—someone who is not yet mayor and does not yet run a municipality—has been proposing getting five public grocery stores funded in the vast metropolis if he wins the November final election. It’s also true that he’s a socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—a political organization that is not a political party, mind you.
Such details, I think, matter if you’re the editor of any kind of news organization serving audiences of any size—from the population of the smallest hamlet to that of an entire nation like the US.
And the most critical detail that got lightly skipped over by the Herald editors: The idea of a publicly-owned grocery store isn’t socialist; so framing it that way is neither fair nor accurate. Oh, it’s absolutely the kind of idea that socialists like myself will get behind in a very capitalist society like America. For several reasons, first among them the fact that we believe that the great disparities of wealth created by capitalism are inherently unfair and undemocratic. So we’ll back any policy proposal that is likely to reduce those disparities and fight policy proposals that increase them.
However, a conservative like Pres. Donald Trump could just as easily push such a policy, if he thought it might shore up support among the impoverished part of his base at a critical moment. This is the guy that dumped money on COVID-19 vaccine development in 2020 and the guy whose first administration cut stimulus checks to millions of people early in the pandemic, after all. Right-wingers the world over frequently pursue similar populist policies when it suits them that they’d attack as “socialist” if their political opponents on the center or left did the same thing.
Socialism, though, refers to a political economic system in which working people own the “means of production.” A public grocery store, therefore, would have to be co-owned and democratically managed by its workers to be considered a socialist project. Because, again, just getting government operating funds doesn’t make it socialist. Any more than the US Post Office is socialist.
If a worker-owned enterprise sounds like a worker co-operative to those readers in the know, that’s absolutely correct. Does that mean that worker co-operatives are socialist? That’s a longstanding debate, but I think the answer is that they can be, depending on how they are run and to what end.
But notice what Breadon’s and Louijeune’s hearing order was quoted as saying in the quite serviceable Herald article, “Publicly-owned grocery stores can be structured to prioritize community benefit over profit, enabling lower prices, better food access, and stronger local sourcing, and may operate independently or in partnership with nonprofits, cooperatives, or private operators.”
The councilors talk about public grocery stores working with co-ops since it’s quite common for a variety of food-related businesses, small and large, to be co-ops. And we must remember here that in addition to worker co-ops, there are many other types of co-ops involved in the business of food provision, including: producer co-ops like farmer co-ops that were founded to sell a resource, food, at the best possible price for participating farmers, and consumer co-ops like food co-ops that are businesses (grocery stores in this case) owned by their customers.
What they don’t talk about is public (and notice they say publicly-owned) groceries being co-ops of any kind, worker co-ops least of all. Because America is as capitalist a nation as they come and there are many ways publicly-owned grocery stores could be organized. Sure, the money would come from city (and perhaps state) government in the current political climate. But the city could go contract some big grocery chain to manage it.
Nothing like this kind of discussion appears anywhere in any of the Boston Herald’s coverage of the particular Boston City Council policy proposal under deliberation.
And I understand that the politics of the people that run the Herald and news outlets like it around the country mean that most of them don’t actually know much of anything about the issues at hand. Even if they did, they’d be unlikely to mention most of it as that would be the fair, accurate, and reasonable thing to do.
This particular case of an inaccurate cover headline is not the biggest deal, I know, nor is it the worst example of the practice of “not letting facts get in the way of a good story” in the American press today.
Still, it bothers me because it is this kind of pandering to the worst instincts of an audience with a specific political bent that helped create the yawning and growing divide between partisans of the broad right and partisans of the broad left. Not that I’m saying that I or any of the many news outlets I’ve worked with, including the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, have always been perfect in this regard—though all of us at BINJ take such matters far more seriously than most.
But I can’t shake the feeling that if more journalists stuck to the basic rules of professional conduct in our much beleaguered profession, our democracy wouldn’t be in the terrible state it is today.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.