Still Agonizing Over Objectivity
The press, that be
Links are at the end, objectifying.
“We need to embrace, even relish, our legacy as malcontents and troublemakers, people who are willing to say the thing that makes everyone else uncomfortable.”
Trust me, I’m a writer. Kyle Pope, the head honcho at Columbia Journalism Review, sent an email out this morning looking at various challenges facing reporters not just here, but many if not most locales abroad. The piece doesn’t seem to be on the periodical’s website, though, so I can’t link to it.
The quote is from Pope writing in 2016, just after Trump’s election. As it happened, the institutional press got the results that Pope prescribed, but not in the manner he had hoped. Our reactionaries were offended by everything anyone reported, and people on the left were uniformly offended by the faux objectivity mandated by editors in the Dean Baquet mode.
Baquet, until recently the executive editor at the New York Times, was a fierce advocate and enforcer of journalism that purported not to take a point of view, which inevitably means eschewing context in favor of caution. Racist murders or other acts become “racially tinged;” lies become “untruths,” so as to avoid presuming the liar’s state of mind.
(The new executive editor has similar views to Baquet’s, along with a taste for boudoir photography.)
Everybody was accordingly infuriated, then, but not because reporters were fiercely adversarial troublemakers and malcontents. Lots of reporters thought that the animosity aimed at them by Trump and his followers at campaign events and elsewhere meant they were doing a good job, and equally so when Trump’s opposition excoriated them. ‘When both sides are angry you’re doing something right.’
This is meant to reflect an absence of partisanship, but in fact it’s partisan in favor of centrism, which assumes an equivalency between positions on the right and the left. Defunding the police is ideologically as radical as open season on Black people, although one is homicidal and the other, protective. Characters on the left and right who want to cut military spending are mildly deranged, where the supermajority who repeatedly vote the war department a blank check, no matter their views on other issues, are comfortably aligned with the press, who routinely adopt militarist framing.
“According to the most recent Gallup polling,” Pope says, “trust in media is near a historic low.” This is true, but what he doesn’t mention is that the measure has been in steep decline since 1976, just post-Watergate. In that year, 72% of respondents held the trust in high or moderate regard; by 2015, 40% had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, and 60% had not much or none.1
The figures reflect a gap twixt Republicans and Democrats, which is to say mostly reactionaries and centrists, but not only that: 29% of Democrats held little or no trust in the press in the 2022 poll, despite the large, mid-Trump leap when much of the press began treating the then-president as an unattractive skin condition.
I’m less guilty than Pope is of imagining a reportorial golden age when the press were implacable malcontents and troublemakers, but I do suffer an autonomic pleasure response to catch phrases like '“without fear or favor” and “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable;” the one from Adolph Ochs when he bought the New York Times in the 1890s, and the other popularized by Gene Kelley’s E. K. Hornbeck character in the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind,” but originating with cartoonist Peter Finley Dunne in the early 1900s.
The thing is, Ochs had a peculiar vision of non-partisanship, and Dunne was poking fun at the press and their image of themselves. Here’s Ochs, from his “fear or favor” statement:
There will be no radical changes in the personnel of the present efficient staff. Mr. Charles R. Miller, who has so ably for many years presided over the editorial pages, will continue to be the editor; nor will there be a departure from the general tone and character and policies pursued with relation to public questions that have distinguished The New-York Times as a non-partisan newspaper -- unless it be, if possible, to intensify its devotion to the cause of sound money and tariff reform, opposition to wastefulness and peculation in administering public affairs, and in its advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with good government, and no more government than is absolutely necessary to protect society, maintain individual and vested rights, and assure the free exercise of a sound conscience.2
Non-partisan, indeed.
Dunne’s famous quote, by way of his cartoon character Mr. Dooley, is excerpted from a more comprehensive description:
“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”3
That the press would come to think both those abbreviated quotes are flattering of themselves while they misunderstand both and do neither, according to their own interpretations, is characteristic. With rare exceptions, the comfortable own the press and don’t want to be afflicted, and reporters know that. And with equally rare exceptions, the owners of the press have a point of view that their properties facilitate, however veiled the transmission.
With another US presidential election in sight, American journalists are now required to hold two jobs: report on a deeply polarized country and defend the role of their profession in a democracy. It is an outsize task, one that will almost certainly strain tensions within newsrooms. Is the best approach to call out antidemocratic movements directly and actively—to embrace the notion of opposition journalism? Or is a more restrained, “objective” approach more apt to engender trust? Journalism is split, often along generational lines. To me, the path forward requires journalists to double down on reporting and lean into their role as adversaries.
Pope again, who holds an appropriate view of how reporters should regard reporting—how could calling out “antidemocratic movements directly and actively” be the wrong approach?—but mistakes the institutional press’s willingness to do that, and either underestimates or is unaware of their distaste for people who demand it of them, and for reporters who do assume that adversarial role.
Or maybe he’s just trying to lead by example.
Reporters are a thin-skinned bunch, generally. Don’t hope for the best.
A smidgen of music
Doctor Capercaillie, I believe you’ll like this one.
Hack-Poets Guild, “Blackletter Garland.”4
That, Comrades, is all there is
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Take care, be well.
I don’t know if I should be sad to be predictable, or glad I have you as some sort of music agent. Pre-ordered the CD, will let you know if the whole thing was as good as the one song.