By Ellen Clegg
Print, digital and broadcast media outlets in Memphis fanned out on Friday, Oct. 10, as Tennessee National Guard troops showed up in visible numbers for an operation dubbed the Memphis Safe Task Force. The mission for Memphis media was clear, but sorting out the local impact will likely pose a long-term challenge.
Dan and I reported on the state of the media landscape in Memphis in a chapter of our book, “What Works in Community News,” in 2024, and the ambitions of hyperlocal startups and nonprofit outlets have continued to grow since then.
Some of the most important reporting includes a story in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis and The Tennessean of Nashville by Tennessean reporter Angele Latham spotlighting a saber-rattling threat to the First Amendment. As Latham reports, a coalition of Republican state legislators wrote a letter to Fox13 (WHBQ-TV) blasting the station’s reporting, claiming it “undermined public safety and put officers’ lives at risk.” (The Commercial Appeal, the Gannett legacy paper, has suffered severe cutbacks and co-published Latham’s story from The Tennessean, a sister paper based in the capital city of Nashville that supplies state government news.)
A Fox13 web page early in October was titled “Federal Crime Crackdown Task Force Tips” and contained a link for sending tips on the location of federal law enforcement officers, Latham reported. That page has since been taken down, according to Latham, and the station did not respond to her request for comment.
Given the broad sweep of law enforcement descending on Memphis, a city of more than 600,000 people across some 300 square miles, getting to an overall number of arrests by each agency and assessing the impact of those arrests is likely to take some time. In just the first day, estimates of arrests reported on Fox13 varied from 300 to 600.
Here are snapshots of how some other local media outlets are covering the impact on the ground.”
The Daily Memphian
Launched in 2018 with a robust, well-funded digital newsroom and soaring ambitions to offer readers a full bundle, the nonprofit is deploying its core team of five news and enterprise reporters. The Memphian home page features a running tick-tock stream of events and a newsy story by enterprise reporter Laura Testino, who has covered the Tennessee General Assembly and written for The Commercial Appeal and Chalkbeat, the powerhouse education outlet.
Testino has on-the-ground detail: A few guardsmen in what seems like an initial deployment were spotted at the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid in downtown Memphis buying sports drinks. There is also an article by government and politics reporter Samuel Hardiman that outlines the potential scope of the operation, quoting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as saying the deployment could last well into next year.
The Memphian aims to add context through data. “We’re really trying to mine the data right now,” editorial director Mary Cashiola told me in a telephone interview. “We are getting a very high level view from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s tweets. But that doesn’t really drill down to all the questions that we have as a community.”
She added: “We’re talking to our local people, we’re talking to our state people, we’re talking to federal people. We’re talking to people in the community as well. As the situation has developed, there hasn’t been a ton of clarity. So that has been a challenge.”
The Memphian uses “a very thoughtful approach” in covering public safety issues in general, Cashiola said. “We come at it from the perspective of, we’re digital, we know that crime coverage gets clicks, but we’re really focused on quality over quantity in our work in terms of what we provide to our readers,” she said. “We do not do every crime story. We do not cover every crime. We follow the trends. We have criteria that we go through. Is it an active shooter? OK, then yes. Is it an officer-involved shooting? Yes. Does it involve multiple fatalities, is it in a prominent place, is it a prominent person?… That’s how we approach our daily public safety coverage, and we really have taken a similar approach with this.”
Cashiola and her colleagues also have a smart podcast up that provides some further details on their coverage..
The Tennessee Lookout
Part of the States Newsroom national network of digital sites covering state politics and policy, the Tennessee Lookout in Nashville is up with some noteworthy commentary. In a must-read column, Lookout editor J. Holly McCall skewers Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who welcomed the deployment, writing: “What’s particularly interesting about Lee’s statement is that just weeks earlier — on Aug. 26 — he told more than a dozen journalists at a press conference that he had just that day received a report showing a decline in Memphis crime of 15% and that he had no plans to send military troops to the Bluff City. But his recent behavior isn’t simply hypocritical: it’s outright dishonest.” In a memorable line for the ages, she writes, Lee has “the political spine of a boiled shrimp.”
In a telephone interview, McCall, who has covered Tennessee for years and has a broad network of sources, notes that there is a virtual news desert between Nashville and Memphis, where locally owned papers have been bought up by smaller corporations. “They cannot send people to the capital [in Nashville] to cover state issues. They may only hear from their state representative with a press release.” Her newsroom, which launched in May 2020, has a full-time staff of five, and has a contract with award-winning veteran photographer John Partipilo.
“I grew up here and am really passionate about Tennessee,” McCall said. “We cover the Tennessee General Assembly, government and policies. It is a mission for me and for the newsroom to provide news for outlets across the state. We now have 40 outlets across the state that pick up our stories, including small towns in West Tennessee that don’t have the resources to drill down beneath the surface.”
McCall is also determined to bring some rigor to numbers being touted by federal sources. Reporter Adam Friedman, who just finished a stint at ProPublica, is digging into data. “We’ve got these federal agencies that keep pumping out numbers, but we want to show how this compares to what Memphis police have going on regularly,” McCall said. “We’re going to be trying to find comparisons to what they’re saying they’re doing and what they’re actually doing.”
The bottom line? “I think of it as a dream team, an Ocean’s 11.”
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism
MLK50, a groundbreaking nonprofit outlet launched in 2017 by the nationally recognized investigative journalist Wendi C. Thomas, features a first-person account by a community organizer based in Washington, D.C. Fae X shares her experience with Brittany Brown in an as-told-to format. Fae X, “an abolitionist community organizer in D.C. since 2018,” paints a vivid picture of “what having a military presence in their city feels like.”
The piece is free to republish. MLK50’s home page also features a story by Sam Stockard from the Tennessee Lookout about a state legislator who charges that the National Guard deployment violates the U.S. Constitution. MLK50 makes it a point to go beyond the breaking news cycle. In keeping with its mission to center stories about policy, politics and justice, coverage has been focusing on actionable information with pieces like last month’s “Know your rights with law enforcement, military troops” and ICE-tracking stories.
The Institute for Public Service Reporting
The Institute for Public Service Reporting, housed at the University of Memphis, was founded in 2018 amid the rise of “news deserts” nationwide. Instead of daily news hits, the institute provides investigative and explanatory reporting in a city and region where there has been “crushing generational poverty” and one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime.
As the institute states on its website: “We are a truly independent newsroom working on behalf of Memphis, not subject to increasing financial pressures of an advertising-supported business model or the whims of remote owners and newsroom managers who don’t understand or appreciate Memphis’ unique economic and social challenges.”
An in-depth piece on Sept. 25 by Meghnad Bose, a journalist who is a professor of the practice at the university, and Micaela Watts, who has worked at multiple media outlets in Memphis since 2015, examined the impact of the troop deployment in Washington, D.C., and followed the thread back to Memphis.
Marc Perrusquia, an award-winning journalist in Memphis who is the institute’s director, shared his perspective in an email, and it’s worth reprinting in full:
Our approach to covering the surge of troops and state and federal law enforcement in Memphis in large part so far has been an extension of our broader reporting on the immigration crackdown. We have a very small staff so we have to pick our fights. Since January, we’ve done a variety of print and audio stories focused on how the crackdown is tearing working families apart. The Trump administration contends the crackdown is aimed at the ‘worst of the worst,’ but we’ve identified numbers of instances in which members of hardworking, decent, law-abiding families have been targeted.
A longform narrative by our reporter Erika Konig in May is a prime example. It documented the plight of an undocumented couple from Central America and their sacrifices and struggles in building a life for their three children, all U.S. citizens, and how it all became jeopardized when the father was stopped for a burned-out taillight and then handed over to ICE. No one in the family has a criminal record. The story includes quotes from experts along with data demonstrating that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than is our native population.
Stories like this require a lot of time and resources. We’re not a daily news operation. Since the start of the Memphis Safe Task Force surge on Sept. 29 we haven’t produced a story yet, but we’ve been collecting data, photos and human experiences, and are teeing up some deep-dive stories we believe will shed valuable light on the overreach and abuses of these operations along with some positive aspects of the surge.
The Memphis Flyer
A 30-year-old alternative weekly, published by the local owners of Memphis magazine, the Flyer blends news and entertainment and cheeky commentary. The Flyer is up with a podcast interview between Josh Spickler of Just City Memphis and journalist Chris McCoy, who talk about the deployment, and try to “bring the truth about crime in Memphis.” The paper has also published a conversation with the NAACP on the deployment, and a rumination by columnist Jack Richbourg on the Posse Comitatus Act.
“The Posse Comitatus Act isn’t long. It’s not flashy,” Richbourg writes. “But it’s one of the few laws that draws a hard line between democracy and domestic militarization. Passed in 1878 and expanded in 1956, it says the Army and Air Force can’t be used to enforce civilian laws unless Congress explicitly says so. That’s it. One sentence. But in Memphis, that line is starting to blur.”
Addendum
I interviewed former Daily Memphian opinion columnist Dan Conaway over the phone about his decision to resign over a column he says was censored. His original column, along with an editor’s note, can be found here. Conaway, an advertising and marketing executive who wrote for the Memphis Daily News before joining the Memphian when it launched in 2018, posted an internal email discussion outlining his thinking with his editor, James Overstreet, on Facebook.
I was only able to confirm Conaway’s side of the email exchange; Overstreet did not return a request for comment. Conaway said he quit over proposed edits to “content related to severe criticism of the president of the United States. Which is kind of a fun direction I take. They really don’t want me to write a lot of critical comments about Trump because everybody is doing that, and I understand that. But when it relates directly to this city, when it relates directly to things that are happening here, that throws all of that out the window and it’s a local story. At least in my estimation it’s a local story.”
