In jest

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review. As a local journalist, I occasionally come up against assumptions about how my colleagues and I actually perform our jobs, so I thought I’d use this note to walk our readers through a day at the RN&R.

Each morning, the editors and I crowd the small parking lot at our office on Margrave Drive with our imported sports cars—Dennis Myers’ Porsche is especially auspicious. We clock in and receive the day’s talking points from the cabal of faceless, liberal overseers who control the news. We also check the Undesirables List for any local figures who might have incurred our wrath by daring to question our reporting.

After a long morning of inventing sources and photo-shopping our subjects into compromising situations, we typically order lunch from a chain restaurant so as not to support local businesses who haven’t bought our coverage.

Our afternoons are usually spent glad-handing politicians and CEOs (“Why certainly, Mr. Musk, 8 a.m. would be a splendid tee time”) and carefully crafting narratives to subvert the general civil rights of our readership. Then we burn an American flag before knocking off for the evening—and I always kiss the portrait of Obama that hangs by my desk on the way out.

This is, of course, an exercise in sarcasm. But based on the immediate air of suspicion I’m often treated to when I tell people my job, I have to wonder how many readers might have just had their worst fears about the media “confirmed.” As a local paper, we reporters are as much members of the community as we are observers of it, and we try to operate with its best interests in mind. All I can say is, if the sinister operators of the “Mainstream Media” were orchestrating our coverage—they could probably pay us a little better.