Abstract
This study analyzes the New York Times self-censorship of tacitly condoning an attempted cover-up of crucial mistakes made especially by leaders of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue (MFDR) and Miami Dade County that resulted in the avoidable death of at least one initial survivor of the Surfside Condominium collapse in June 2021. It exposes the curtailment of the Times’s exceptional investigative reporting capabilities as a media business decision executed by news management to appease Miami’s entrenched political powers. The Times’s neglect of due diligence when reporting on the April 2022 whitewash memo that MFDR strategically made public only after the criticism by relatives of the 98 victims had been silenced with an unexpected one billion dollar settlement, is also emblematic for the paper’s shift from primarily providing its readers with the information they need as public citizens engaged in democratic self-governance to prioritizing their attention as private consumers of life-style news, which increasingly spreads on the Times’s page one even above the fold. While this C-section turn started already in 1976, it was completed only when the hegemony of social media transformed the public sphere into a digital shopping mall where private property rights trump free speech and the public good.
Presenters
Michael HofmannProfessor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA, Florida, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
News Management, Citizen Readers, News Consumers, Public Sphere, Social Media
