(Jan. 31) A Jan. 30 opinion piece by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. unintentionally shows why journalism rates among the least trusted trades in the nation.
It also shows why the Washington Post’s news pages, which for years have been less balanced than its liberal but thoughtful opinion section, so long have amounted to molten garbage piles of left-wing agitprop.
he headline accurately captured the oxymoronic depths of Downie’s column: “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust.” Never mind that the major reason so many people do not trust journalists is precisely because so many reporters clearly believe their job is to interpret the “truth” for readers rather than mightily try to provide objective facts and unbiased context.
Downie literally argues that the very notion of “objectivity” is a white, male construct, and, thus by its very nature, is a “distortion of reality.” (Seriously.) In what sounds like an over-the-top parody of woke hokum but which he actually means as earnest advocacy, Downie writes that today’s more enlightened journalists “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
The column then devolves further into the left-wing’s obsessive field of nightmares against which reporters must battle: “persistent racism and white nationalism … the treatment of LGBTQ+ people; income inequality … the causes and effects of climate change; voting rights and election inequality; and even the very survival of our democracy.”
Therefore, today’s crusading avatars of truth, justice, and the nonbinary anti-colonialist planet-saving way, all of them denizens of “increasingly diverse newsrooms,” believe “that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view.”… Please give us all a break!…. [The full column is at this link.]
