If you caught This American Life over the weekend, you’d have heard Killer Mike and El-P give coming-of-age advice to teen girls, and then you’d have heard Dallas Morning News editor Mike Wilson on his crusade to determine why people were turning against the city’s only daily.
The segment was recorded in the months following the editorial board’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president over Donald Trump, the paper’s first endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate in more than 75 years. It begins with Wilson meeting the small cluster of protestors who gathered on Young Street with their Trump signs in the days after. It continues through his writing of this editorial, which defended his journalists against Trump’s declaration that the media is an ignominious enemy of the people.
Then it’s off into his email inbox, which had a few complaints from peeved readers: “Please pass the tissues so I can wipe away the tears for the media,” one read. And it finishes with Wilson inviting them to the newsroom to hash out their complaints, revealing through the drab boredom of a daily editorial meeting that there is no overarching secret scheme to imbue fake news into its pages or skew one way or the other. One of the two readers still lets off some frustration about the framing of its headlines. Can’t win ‘em all.
