COUNTY BUDGETS $618.7M IN UPGRADES
Infrastructure, climate change mitigation planned
San Diego County is considering investments to improve street safety, address climate change, reduce stormwater pollution and protect natural lands and species, through a $618.7 million budget for its Land Use and Environment Department.
The department presented its spending plan to the board Friday as part of a series of hearings on the county’s proposed $7.15 billion budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year.
Under the plan, the department would see a slight increase of $3.3 million over last year’s budget, and add 171 new staff members.
Out of the total, $214 million would go to infrastructure, said General Manager Sarah Aghassi. More than
That idea is also one of the the reasons I found myself especially frustrated over the weekend after seeing a snippet of author Batya Ungar-Sargon’s appearance on Fox News from earlier in the week.
Appearing alongside Jesse Waters in a segment dubbed “Biden’s America: Open Borders, Violent Streets, Baby Formula,” Ungar-Sargon went on a riff complaining about how journalists don’t care about everyday people or their issues.
“The reason they don’t care about these issues is because they aren’t struggling with these issues,” she claimed. “American journalists are part of the elites. They aren’t out there struggling to pay for gas, they are not living in crime-ridden cities. Those are their neighbors who they don’t care about, who they abandon.”
I found that comment infuriating because it’s not only simply untrue, but it greatly undermines the ability of reporters to most effectively do their jobs and better
reflect the many layers of their communities.
The vast majority of journalists are not that well off financially. The claim that most journalists are elites is laughable.
Most journalists are not national reporters or commentators. They work in local newsrooms or as freelancers. The folks who you see most frequently on TV — the national broadcasters for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News and the like — are incredible outliers.
News analysts, reporters and journalists working in newspapers had a median salary in 2021 of $38,210, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while those working in broadcast radio and television had a median income of $49,720.
They are by no means wealthy and certainly are not part of the “elites.” In fact, many reporters work additional gigs because a reporter’s salary is not enough to account for the cost of living, student loans, supporting a family, etc.
Aside from the brazen falsehood of it all, though, the reason I found that comment so annoying is that
kind of nonsense makes it more difficult for journalists to fully cover our communities and better ref lect a diversity of perspectives.
Comments like this perpetuate the rubbish that journalists are enemies of the public rather than part of the community.
Most journalists live in the community they cover and care about their neighbors and towns. Their goal is to provide the public information and hold local government accountable. But that becomes significantly more difficult if people think they are the enemy.
Pushing this notion that journalists are enemies also exacerbates danger for journalists during a time when physical attacks on the press have become far too common in the United States. In 2018 and 2019 the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented 41 and 42 assaults, respectively, against journalists nationwide. In 2020 and 2021, though, those figures skyrocketed to 626 assaults in 2020 and 144 assaults in 2021.
And that doesn’t even touch on the number of journalists who have been killed for doing their jobs, such as the five Capital Gazette employees who were murdered in Annapolis, Md., in 2018 and the 11 journalists who have been killed in Mexico since the start of 2022.
Yes, as journalists, we have work to do to improve our relationships with the public — making sure we’re more accessible, casting a wider net when reaching out to sources; being transparent in reporting, explaining how we reported a story and recognizing its value to the community; ensuring our newsrooms are diverse in race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels.
But the distortions parroted on Fox News make a bad situation worse, weakening both journalistic enterprise and our government system all together.
So to those of you choose to respectfully communicate with reporters and provide story ideas and perspectives on problems in our community, thank you. We are able to do our jobs much better and with greater effect because of folks like you.