On a lesser part of the Internet, the term was thrown out. I was wondering if we could make a list.
In the past, stories like FDR’s paralysis or JFK’s lovelife were suppressed. More recently pedophiles in public life and sexual abuse by powerful people.
But what are the stories that are not reported on nowadays by some sort of silent agreement?
How would we know? Nobody is reporting on them.
That’s what they want you to think.
I can’t think of a single topic that’s suppressed by some silent agreement.
There are plenty of stories that are ignored because, in the judgement of editors, they are an enormous snooze and the American people would break their collective arm clicking to the next story/changing the channel/throwing away the magazine when it appears.
The decline in international news coverage is an obvious example. And it’s not limited to just American journalism, either. In Britain, the national newspapers reduced their coverage of international news by 40% over three decades, and the stories that did appear were pushed further back in the papers.
Treason among American politicians. It is hinted at, but not addressed directly.
Pedophilia is kind of addressed. It was a big issue for Roy Moore.
That’s because it prospers.
The OP’s use of the term “third rail” does not express what he seems to be asking, which may be why he’s not getting as many responses as it deserves. In subways and other electrically powered train systems, the third rail is the power source, and being at ground level it is potentially very dangerous to anyone walking on the tracks. (It is usually partially covered by a non-conducting cover.)
For decades the common use of the term has been, “Social Security is the third rail of American politics: touch it and you’ll die.”
However, the OP seems to be asking about things that journalists agree to keep secret, which is not really the same thing. FDR’s disability and JFK’s affairs were kept out of the papers by a sort of" gentleman’s agreement among reporters that there were certain things the public didn’t need to know. They weren’t things that might harm a journalist’s career, which would be the apt analogy for “third rail.”
To answer the OP’s question, today there is virtually nothing that most professional journalists would refrain from publishing out of respect for the subject’s privacy. And even if they did, there are plenty of non-pros who would reveal it.
The “third rails” in journalism, things that will kill you professionally, are malpractices like plagiarism and confabulation.
There’s an advocacy group called “Project Censored” that annually issues a list of its top “censored” news stories.
It turns out that all of these stories were reported, but it’s sexier to call them “censored” rather than “stories that didn’t get the overwhelming coverage we think they deserved”.
Case in point: one such story was alleged “corporate media” censorship of the Root Cause of the “opioid epidemic” - i.e. to protect their supposed Big Pharma masters. There actually has been abundant coverage of this angle (you could hardly miss it, seeing that some state governments have brought legal action to get health care monies from pharmaceutical firms that sell these drugs).
Unless the subject is another journalist. Nobody ever combed through Walter Kronkite’s trash cans, counting the liquor bottles and condoms. Joan Lunden had to get sued by her ex-husband before anyone even mentioned that she had gotten divorced. Stephen Glass had to get caught red-handed, peddling bald-faced lies, before anyone looked into his life. Dan Rather got caught peddling a bald-faced lie, and he is still treated with kid gloves.
Journalists protect each other with an omerta that would make the mafia proud.
Right, just google “sackler family oxycontin” and you’ll see a LOT of coverage about how a specific pharmaceutical company (Purdue Pharma) developed Oxycontin, and then effectively lied about its addictive potential and recommended it for a lot of inappropriate uses, thereby kickstarting the opioid epidemic.
It’s just that lawsuits about actions that were done 30 years ago aren’t sexy news in the way that a lot of more current-affairs stuff is.
Just ask Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, among others.:dubious:
O’Reilly and Lauer were protected for decades, before their political opponents found an opportunity to attack them. Rose was protected for decades, before the MeToo movement circumvented the mainstream media.
People in every group tend to protect one another, but I contend that journalists are less likely on average to do this than other groups. Most reputable news organizations investigate and publicly report on charges of malfeasance in order to protect their reputations. And in this age of partisanship, no journalist with a big bad secret can count on rivals at competing news outlets protecting him.
Do you have any serious allegations about Walter Cronkite (note spelling) or are you just asserting that there might have been some dirt if anyone had looked? (In the news business, that’s called libel.)
I don’t know anything about Joan Lunden, but why would her marital status be a matter of interest or concern to the public?
Stephen Glass was a serial liar who wasn’t caught for about three years, but once he was, he was drummed out of the journalism business. His editors at The New Republic were blind to his fabrications for too long because he produced compelling stories, but I haven’t heard that there was a conspiracy of silence among journalists to protect him. And he hasn’t worked as a journalist since he was fired by TNR in 1998.
The 2004 60 Minutes “Memogate” report was a clusterfuck on the part of CBS news, and Dan Rather certainly bore some responsibility for it, as did his producer, Mary Mapes. In the end, she was fired, and he retired a year earlier than he had originally intended. But that was one (relatively serious) mistake in a 44-year career that I would otherwise consider exemplary. I don’t know what you mean by being “treated with kid gloves.” He has gone on to other work, and is still widely respected for his experience and insight, despite this incident. But he was not protected from revelations of persistent professional malfeasance by some long-running conspiracy of silence among his colleagues.
Of course, that sort of thing has long gone on with respect to sexual harassment and abuse in many organizations, and only in the past few years have those patterns of secrecy and protection begun to fall. But that behavior is hardly exclusive to journalists (or in the case of Fox News employees, “journalists”).
It is entirely appropriate for the press and comedians to leave Barron Trump alone. No one can stop them of course, but he is a minor child with no role in the politics of his father or elder siblings.
Chelsea Clinton knows whereof she speaks–Rush Limbaugh compared her to a dog when she was 12.
I am a big fan of Project Censored’s books; one thing you have to keep in mind is that they were started in the late 1980s before everyone had access to the Internet and multiple cable news channels. Now it’s a lot easier for news stories to get disseminated among the masses so the idea that the media is censoring stories is a lot less effective. A bigger problem now are that news stories being crafted and slanted to fit the political agenda of who is circulating them.
Thank you all.
Anything race related where it can’t be neatly categorized or given an easy solution too.
Last year on video a woman viciously beat a 91 year old Hispanic man with a cinder block and told him to “Go Back to Mexico”. You would think this hate crime would have gotten as much coverage as the non-violent MAGA hat thing of this week. But since the person who did this was black instead the national news kind of ignored it (with some like CNN not even giving the race of the attacker, you had to watch the video to find that out) and the woman wasn’t charged with a hate crime despite the clear racist language she used against him.
Last Week Tonight seems to find a lot of topics that seem very important to a majority of people but don’t get coverage elsewhere.
Two examples off the top of my head are gerrymandering and civil forfeiture.
Saying anything pro-Palestinian.