UFO coverage and journalism’s limits

Last year, reported sightings of unidentified flying objects increased in the US, Canada, and across the globe. In August, the Pentagon reported the formation of a task force intended to investigate UFO sightings. Recently, The New Yorker printed thirteen thousand words on the history of the US government’s approach to UFOs, in a piece titled “How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously.” The article explored the nature of consensus, taboo, and our collective willingness to suspend disbelief. After the publication of the New Yorker piece, The Ringer asked its author, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, whether he believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial life (he didn’t commit to a simple yes-or-no answer). Forbes wrote, “The Media is taking UFOs seriously. Should we?”

Much of the media coverage since the New Yorker feature has taken the subject more seriously. After former president Barack Obama appeared on The Late Late Show and noted that he was aware of cases in which airborne objects had not been explained or identified, news outlets amplified the exchange. A reporter asked President Joe Biden about Obama’s comments; Biden referred the reporter back to Obama. A forthcoming report from the Pentagon’s task force has prompted a flurry of coverage, from local news updates on UFO sightings to national deep dives into the possible implications of what the panel will reveal. 60 Minutes dedicated an episode to the presence of UFOs in restricted airspace. Last week, the New York Times offered a preview of the Pentagon’s report, based on interviews with anonymous sources, announcing that the “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either.” Earlier this week, the Scientific American asked an astronomer, a nasa researcher, an astrophysicist, and other experts to weigh in on what is known about the report’s initial findings; CNN got Neil deGrasse Tyson’s take.

ICYMI: The lab-leak mess

Yesterday, NPR spoke to former senator Harry Reid, who has been making the media rounds, about the secret Pentagon UFO-investigation program for which he helped allocate funding in 2007. “We are in a moment right now where, all of a sudden, people are taking UFOs seriously,” NPR’s Noel King said to Reid. “I don’t exactly know what happened.”

Journalism tends to style itself as pragmatic, skeptical, rooted in reason. But when a premise that was once considered taboo becomes permissible, the relative subjectivity of our industry is revealed. The recent spate of UFO coverage points toward the difficulty of reporting on things that we, as a society, don’t yet know or understand—or, as Lewis-Kraus’s New Yorker piece examines, things we don’t interrogate because we think we already understand them.

Much of the recent coverage asks whether we should take UFOs seriously. That the answer is no longer considered a foregone conclusion could signal something about journalism’s relationship with uncertainty, or about the codependent and capricious nature of human understanding. “Report it out”—one of journalism’s core obligations—suggests that everything is, at its core, knowable. But knowledge is defined, in part, by its limits—something a year of rapidly evolving scientific guidelines has often reminded us. That doesn’t negate the possibility of good reporting; it just requires good reporters to take more into account. At times, the gap between our knowledge and the truth is wide; humility will keep us honest.

Below, more on marginal ideas going mainstream:

• “Stranger than fiction”: For Vanity Fair, Joe Pompeo wrote about the prevalence of mainstream stories that have migrated from the fringes—including the recent UFO reporting, the “lab leak” theory, and increased attention to the possibility that various spies and diplomats have come down with a targeted neurological condition known as the Havana syndrome. He hypothesizes, among other things, that the news cycle is reeling from the loss of Donald Trump’s antics. “Compared to the headline-making train wreck that preceded him, coverage of Biden’s presidency may feel boring by comparison,” Pompeo wrote. “You know what’s not boring? UFOs. The Wuhan lab. Foreign agents allegedly targeting U.S. officials with microwave-pulse weapons.”
• The lab leak, continued: The resurgence of attention to theories suggesting that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab has led to more journalistic investigation, but “the facts are still thin,” the Washington Post reported. For The Atlantic, Daniel Engber lined up some of the possible pitfalls in reporting out the story: placing too much significance on a lack of evidence, projecting assumed motivations, doubting sources who have demonstrated credibility. The “sudden rush of coverage,” Engber wrote, is “ensnaring readers in semantic quibbles, side points, and distractions.”
• A hero, villainized: Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote about a smear campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggesting that the right-wing media machine, having failed to make President Biden or Vice President Harris strong targets for ire, has made Fauci out to be a substitute villain. “In a right-wing culture so often opposed to verifiable reality,” Sullivan wrote, “who better to target than a person who stands for science and facts?”

Other notable stories:

• This week the New York Times released a special report on the 1970s publication of the Pentagon Papers, a series of classified documents that the Times published in 1971 and that indicated the hidden scope, objectives, and failures of the Vietnam War under the Johnson administration. The special report includes an oral history, guest essays on the merits (or faults) of publishing, and an interview with Linda Amsters, one of the women who helped break the story. When the story was published, none of the women who worked on it were given public credit.
• Last week, a federal judge sentenced former Treasury Department official Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards to six months in prison for leaking confidential financial documents to an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News. Yesterday, Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed News’s editor in chief, wrote a guest essay in the New York Times condemning the government’s punitive conduct toward whistleblowers and leakers like Edwards. “Such actions reveal a fundamental contradiction in how the United States—home of the First Amendment and laws to protect whistle-blowers—treats the sources that make a robust press possible,” Schoofs wrote. “Our criminal justice system must recognize that much of what we know about financial corruption, government surveillance and corporate crime comes not from reporters working in isolation but from journalists working with people who risk their liberty and livelihood to ensure that the truth comes out.”
• Last week, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Winston Smith, a man who was shot and killed by Minneapolis law enforcement, was suspected of murder. The information was sourced from police scanner audio, but it was not verified or attributed. On Wednesday, the Star-Tribune issued a correction and an apology. For more on the troubling symbiosis between police and journalists, read “Officials Say…” by Alexandria Neason for CJR.
• Earlier this week, the Billings Gazette—the largest paper in Montana—published a letter to the editor, written by a former Montana state senator, headlined “Racism isn’t the problem; black culture is.” Soon after, the publication’s Twitter account was temporarily restricted.
• The Toronto Star published an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from a group of Canadian news organizations objecting to the monopolistic practices of Google and Facebook and asking the Canadian government to introduce legislation to combat them before Parliament’s summer recess.
• Ahead of President Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin, a Moscow court has designated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s political movement an “extremist” organization. Last August, following Navalny’s apparent poisoning, Jon Allsop wrote in this newsletter, “Whether or not you class Navalny as a journalist—and it’s an open question—his poisoning looks, in a sense, like yet another assault on press freedom.”
• The Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded and announced this afternoon at 1pm ET. Watch it live at Pulitzer.org.

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