Not news.
But when I saw the headline “Chocolate Milk Under Attack! Should it Be Banned From School Cafeterias?” I simply had to find out what the deal was. I was actually a little concerned that PETA had gotten to someone at WSPA, but it turns out it was just Pet Milk and the Got Milk campaign doing everything they can to keep customers by talking up chocolate milk as an alternative to sugary drinks.
Here, take a look at this …
My gripe here is pretty basic: This is not news. It’s basically WSPA riffing on the recent USA Today story, itself pretty much non-news, which reported that some people think chocolate milk has too much sugar to be included in school menus.
While I do appreciate the fact that WSPA is trying to take a national story and bring it to a local level — I applaud that — they completely missed the real battle that’s happening here. Instead of asking what kids think about chocolate milk, they could have reported on the clandestine little trade war that is being fought over the access to student meals.
You see, the dairy industry makes a lot of money selling their products to schools. And since there are only a limited number of things that more-or-less everyone agrees are OK for kids to be drinking in the first place, and also a limited amount of space for options in most school cafeterias, the milk-sellers are desperate to make sure that as many of their products stay on the shelves as possible.
The battle isn’t really about whether or not chocolate milk is to too sugary — at that serving size, the caloric difference between chocolate and white milk is basically negligible — and it’s also only tangentially about whether or not milk in general is a good thing to have on the menu. Rather, this whole controversy is because other segments of the beverage industry want a bigger piece of the action. And since milk has been the dominant beverage in school cafeterias for 60-plus years, having a virtual monopoly for much of that time, they’re not exactly going to give it up without a fight. We’re talking about lucrative government contracts on a massive scale here.
And what WPSA doesn’t bother to mention is that this is why Pet Milk hosted the event at Beck Academy in Greenville in the first place. It was PR, plain and simple. It’s not about health, it’s about market share. And WSPA doesn’t even give a nod to this in their story, instead settling for not-even-two-minute non-story about whether or not chocolate milk has too many calories, and whether or not white milk tastes too nasty for kids to drink.
As a result, no one was really informed of anything here, and what little information we do get comes more-or-less from the milk industry’s talking points list. We hear that “some educators and obesity experts [think that] kids get too much sugar,” but we’re not really told who they are or what the context is. (The USA Today story cited Marlene Schwartz, deputy directory of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, as being one of the more high-profile critics of chocolate milk.) Instead, WSPA — and their viewers — just kind of get sucked into the dairy industry’s party line.
Instead of investigative journalism and a questioning of why this controversy is happening, whether or not school officials are aware of the bigger issues at hand, or giving the non-milk advocates (some of whom do have legitimate concerns about dairy products playing such a huge role in school menus in general) a chance to present their side of the story, we have a shallow, forgettable, non-researched story that’s doesn’t tell us anything other than some kids prefer chocolate milk and a school nurse doesn’t see what the fuss is about.
That’s not news; it’s filler.
Sure, it’s a harmless enough story. It’s not even two minutes long, and it just kind of ends with a conclusionless shrug at the end, but it also doesn’t really give you any kind of meaningful information. In case you were wondering, this is exactly why I stopped watching TV news years ago.
WSPA is perfectly capable of doing decent news stories when they want to, and it’s saddening to think of the missed opportunities here. The could have talked about how trade groups are battling with questionable science to get exclusive access to kids diets, and how the decision-making process at the administrative level is being influenced by money at least as much as it is the best interests of the students.
But we don’t get that. Instead, we learn that “Byrnes High School student Brittany Reese isn’t a big fan milk.” That’s not really useful information to me, and it doesn’t give anyone a clue what to do if they want to influence the debate. It’s filler, and a missed opportunity.
Steve Shanafelt
What I find to be quite consistent with news around town is that issues are covered superficially; reporters find out just enough to satisfy their implicit perspective on the matter, report on it and ask viewers to comment in and waste time under the veil of informing us about the status quo. You’re right, it’s filler.
What’s there to do about it, is the question I’m tripping over.
Well, if you run a small, hyperlocal website, you can totally blog about how frustrating it is. Beyond that, your only other immediate option is to not watch the TV news.
If enough people start complaining loudly enough, and even more stop watching the show because there are better options available, I’d like to think that they’d step up their game a little. I seriously doubt that WSPA is running this kind of stuff because they’re incapable of more — clearly they can do good work when they’re properly motivated — but rather that they have a certain number of stories of a certain length they have to run, and it’s simply not worth their time and money to delve too deeply into this stuff.
I mean, it’s no accident that cops news — literally the easiest kind of news to get, since it all comes in from police reports and over the scanners — is the kind that tends to get the most play in the local media. None of it is very deep, and very little of it is very meaningful to the community as a whole. But it’s easy to report on and titillating enough that people can rubberneck online about car crashes and crimes. It also doesn’t require much in the way of research (the cops have done most of the research for you, and it’s all in the police report), so the stories can be churned out in short order.
I completely understand why they run this kind of stuff, but it’s hard for me not to see it as lazy and not really serving the community. I mean, if WSPA really wanted to, the could cover every City and County Council meeting, upload the full videos online and give an edited synopsis to each on a weekly basis. That would actually empower the community in a real way, but it would require them to actually learn about the issues and find a way to make it interesting to the viewer. That’s much harder than pointing a camera at a car crash or talking about a crime.
So, when this milk (non)story went up, I really couldn’t let it go. I mean, here’s a story that’s not even as marginally interesting as a crime story. No one is even proposing — at least as far as I can tell — that local schools remove chocolate milk. There is a story if you start looking at why this is suddenly becoming a controversial topic (and it’s actually quite interesting, and surprisingly political), but WSPA couldn’t be bothered to even mention that part. So, instead, we have a story that spends almost two minutes giving us information we can’t use about something that’s not even happening locally.
So, I’m doing what I can by griping.
I do think it’s news. childhood nutrition is important to me…and my pediatrician tells me to make sure my kids (ages 5 and 7) are getting the nutrition they need via milk. I’m not in school to see what they choose – but my 7 year old will only drink chocolate milk. If you take that out of schools – he’s going to pick something more sugary or water (which is great but no nutrients). Thank you WSPA for covering. It is news — taking it out of schools will lead to kids seriously missing out on nutrition. And frankly — it’s schools, I can’t see the industry making a whole lot of money there.
Childhood nutrition and the role of dairy products in that a the school meal level is a perfectly legitimate topic for news. But, again, this story doesn’t really address that, nor does it give you any context about the nutrition in other beverage options, or in school meals in general. It also doesn’t address why this topic is being brought up in the first place, as I roughly outlined above.
Instead of a real story with research, context and facts, WSPA gave you a shallow story that only gave the perspective of the dairy industry, who spend an awful lot of money trying to keep that view in the public consciousness. Wouldn’t you have preferred, say, a seven-minute story that explained why this was suddenly a hot topic, and which talked about the alternatives? Or are you just fine with only hearing one side of the story?
Also, the dairy industry makes a mint selling to schools. Depending on which statistics you find credible, schools buy more than 460 million gallons of milk each year, or about 7% of total milk sales. And a little more than half of all chocolate milk on the market is sold in schools. So, we’re talking about billions — maybe tens of billions — of dollars here.
Gone are the days of the little lunch ladies making school meals on the spot. And many of those women could really cook healthy nutritious meals, with variety and in quantity.
When they started letting soda machines in resturaunt brand pizza options in the lunch rooms, the die was cast. Now most districts, including, if I remember correctly all of Spartanburg county, have their school meals contracted out to commercial vendors, and all the food is mass produced off site. They have to follow federal guidelines for nutrition, yet the quality of the food served our children has suffered.
School districts have to stretch budget dollars further and further every year so it makes fiscal sense to have one entity provide food, especially if the contractor can keep things within certain cost ranges, but we lose something in the bargain. And yeah school food is a huge money maker to contractors and suppliers. It is sad, and why it may be a good idea for parents to go bad to the day of peanut butter or bologna sandwiches and an apple in their child’s backpack.