The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.
This is a good article, but of course, it stirred a thought upon a soapbox.
Putting aside that fact that Mounk does nothing to differentiate between television-journalism and journalism-journalism, I sympathize, and largely agree. But once again, as with so many other things, it’s worth asking the question: Was there ever a time of humdrum stenography, “just the facts” journalism? Many people keep referring to a time when journalists were primarily or largely objective and from which they have found some excuse to move on.
When was this time?
No one seems to know. But everyone seems to feel certain that journalism is worse and it definitely yousta be better.
That could be true to some extent. But my assumption is that the search for good journalists has always been about finding those whose reporting — their facts as well as their take and their spin — is something you can find truthful, something you gain from and that you value or simply find humorous, and something that you can feel comfortable disagreeing with from time to time. This seems perfectly normal to me, and it seems no more or less true now than at any other time.
I know a lot of people who say they don’t trust the left-wing media. If I had a dollar for every time someone said “The Left won’t tell you this…,” I wouldn’t be driving 5 to 10 hours a week to find work to pay the mortgage on my 200-year-old house. But here’s the catch: If I only counted the number of times I heard this sentiment from someone who actual reads any of the left-wing sources they have in mind, I would have… the exact same amount of money. The Left may in fact be batshit biased, but all those around me — that is, the physical people in my life — who insist that it is simply cannot know this in any meaningful sense; they have been told it for 30 years by their own batshit biased sources (and now, of course, by their own essentially self-curated algorithms) and have repeated it so many times that they are hardly even conscious of the fact that they say it.
While I’m fairly certain that I have never been told something on a subject that I could not find written about in the pages of The New York Times (they have 1,700 staff writers, ffs), I have nothing but sympathy for those annoyed by the overwhelming net bias that so many rightly accuse them of. But that’s not the point. It’s not even the point to ask the most basic question: Why on earth should NYT stretch itself out toward you who neither subscribe nor read at all? Granted I’d like to see more grace and understanding toward “outsiders” everywhere, but if the Jesus-following church members I know can’t be bothered to reach passed Fox News, why would they expect the Times to reach passed its left-wing subscribers? It is not, after all, The New York Times or CNN who claims to have been given a mandate from God to love their enemies or whose favorite apostle boasted that he “became all things to all people.”
But again, that’s not the point. What I have tried to argue with so many friends and family members is really nothing more than what most of them taught me growing up.
Here’s John Stuart Mill, in what I assume is one of his most famous statements on the reason for free speech:
[E]ven if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but … the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
I am no idealist when it comes to human raaationalism, but I have generally hoped that this approach to truth and/in politics was at least mildly attainable background noise for our truth seeking endeavors. Yet it is very hard to argue that the deeply rooted claim of bias in The Media, whether true or not in itself, is anything more than a dogma at this point, “a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good.” When an entire group of people — people who have essentially moved to Abilene — believe so strongly in something so universally unexperienced and unchallenged, how could it be otherwise? In other words: the truth can’t live here, even if it happens to stop by.
Again, true or not, the point is to ask why you believe it is true. And if you believe it for bullshit reasons, then what good is your approach to truth? It continues to amaze me that so many spend so little effort actually seeking the truth but think that somehow whatever happens to float in through the same old easy sources is good enough.
(This is by no means restricted to any one political party, but I try really hard to both criticize primarily my own house and to base most of my criticisms on real-life contact.)
When it comes to journalism, we can keep unwittingly referring to some Platonic ideal-that-never-was, or we can, as I said above, admit what has always been the truth: journalism is complicated because humans are complicated. The search has never been easy, but it is critical — and can be a lot of fun.