GRIID end of the year in Review: Part I – Monitoring the local news media

The function of journalism should be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!

It’s time for our annual year in review, where we look at GRIID reporting on the far right in West Michigan, the Grand Rapids Power Structure, and our reporting on social movements in Grand Rapids. However, let’s begin with a review of our stories where we dissect the local news media, which has been part of the work of GRIID when it was founded in 1998.

Monitoring the local news media

We begin with a story from early January that had to do with the political shake up in Ottawa County and how the local news media reported on it. The GRIID article was entitled, What the commercial news media isn’t telling us about the group behind the firing of several Ottawa County officials. The article primarily points out that the local news failed to adequately report on the group Ottawa Impact. GRIID also did a follow up story on the coverage of Ottawa Impact on January 11th, which pointed out the failure of local news media to provide sufficient information on what policy changes this far right group was making.

Another issue that GRIID has been monitoring is the ongoing legal case against the GRPD cop who killed Patrick Lyoya and how the local news media has been reporting on it. The first story GRIID wrote in 2023 about how the local news media was reporting on this case was on January 12, where I wrote that the local media primarily framed the issue from the perspective of the the lawyers representing the cop who killed Lyoya. There were three other stories I wrote about how the local news media reported on the Patrick Lyoya case: on January 31st, regarding the County Prosecutor’s commitment to this case; the terrible narrative crafted by the local mews media on the 1 year anniversary of when a cop killed Patrick Lyoya; and one final article about the ongoing biased coverage of this case from early September. 

On the issue of the GRPD, there were a few other articles I posted that critiqued the local news media, particularly around the issue of the police proposal to purchase drones. The first article I wrote had to do with the MLive coverage of this issue, back on February 22nd. There was a second article, which had to do with an interview that WZZM 13 did with Police Chief Winstrom, where they didn’t even bother to question or challenge the top cop. I also wrote 2 critiques of how the local news media reported on City meetings/hearings on the GRPD proposal to use drones, where in both cases the commercial news media coverage was awful on March 29 and April 27.

Another critical issue in 2023, was the proposed ordinances from the City of Grand Rapids ordinances that many believed would further criminalize the unhoused. One example was from the business press, Crain’s Grand Rapids, which essentially relied on the perspectives of those in the Capitalist Class when it came to the proposed ordinances.

One last major issue that the local news media did a poor job on was the local responses to the Hamas attack on Israel in early October and the ongoing organizing since then. I deconstructed a story from channel 8 regarding a pro-Palestine rally and then another critique of how channel 8 reported on a pro-Israel rally the following week.

Of course, there were many more articles I wrote that dissected local news media from 2023, all of which you can check out at this link.