(January 10) As the nation braces for another Trump administration and its likely emotional turmoil, please allow some thoughts on the civic duties both of the media and of the American citizenry.
The media’s duty “informs” the citizenry’s, in both meanings of that word.
Early in the 20th century, journalism developed an unwritten code of conduct that separated news from opinion; demanded standards of objectivity, context, and fairness for the former; and expected the latter to be fact-based and to apply principles equally across the board even as it argued a particular position. Even though plenty of journalism regularly fell short of those ideals, the ideals still were recognized as at least aspirational guideposts by every honest journalist.
The Watergate scandal caused a large fissure in that template, as it made “straight news” reporters into celebrities and introduced the idea of reporters as crusaders for their own sense of righteousness rather than mere recorders of events. The advent of cable news turned those fissures into chasms, first as the networks abandoned the practice of clearly labeling opinion distinctly from “news” and next as written-word outlets badly blurred whatever lines they didn’t entirely erase.
Now, even worse, most of the supposedly elite legacy media is dominated by young reporters who, sometimes egged on by editors who should know better, believe it is the right and duty of journalists to “move beyond objectivity” because some “higher truth,” to which they are mysteriously privy, supposedly demands it.
Meanwhile, even where outlets still formally claimed to maintain the lines, they stopped treating opinion forums either as an earned reward for years of solid “straight reporting” or as a privilege afforded to those with demonstrated expertise. Suddenly, in almost every media forum, writers or talking heads sprang up as opinion-mongers straight out of college, with little or no professional reporting experience and no substantive record of subject-matter expertise. And in both print or cyber-print and on the airwaves, the rewards all accrued to those who pick a political side and relentlessly promote it, rather than those who begin with empiricism and then apply consistent principles to the empirical evidence regardless of whose ox is gored….. [The full column is here.]
