Posted on 09/20/2019 10:57:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you were under the impression that the mainstream media is unbiased and committed to reporting “just the facts,” then the media spectacle in recent days should disabuse you of that outdated notion. In fact, it should disabuse all of us of the idea that the news is objective and unbiased, and hasten the day when journalists and publishers can just be honest about their viewpoints, biases, and agendas.
A pair of articles adapted from a new book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh illustrates the point well. The book, written by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, includes a supposedly new misconduct allegation against Kavanaugh. But the excerpt that ran in the Times last week omitted an important detail: the alleged victim never made a claim against Kavanaugh and told friends she had no memory of the incident described by Pogrebin and Kelly.
The Times was forced to make a correction when my colleague Mollie Hemingway pointed out the omission. In several subsequent media interviews, Pogrebin and Kelly blamed their editors, insisting they included the crucial detail in an earlier version of the article but it was taken out by mistake in the editing process—an excuse that strains credulity, especially since any final edits would have required the authors’ approval.
Then, it happened again. An excerpt of the book published this week in The Atlantic, “We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found,” also contains a major error. In a section explaining why they believe the uncorroborated accusation of Deborah Ramirez, Pogrebin and Kelly write, “The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it.”
As Hemingway noted, this isn’t true. In the original New Yorker story about Ramirez’s highly dubious accusation, Kavanaugh’s friends weren’t quiet about it. One male classmate denied any memory of the party in question, and others released a statement disputing Ramirez’s account: “We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not… Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”
Yet Pogrebin and Kelly continue to pretend they’re just reporting the facts. In a recent interview on “The View,” Pogrebin said, “What’s lost in all this discussion is that what we tried to do was kind of what we always do as reporters, which is seek the facts, and put them out there, and let people come to their own conclusions.”
NYT Reporter Robin Pogrebin complains that "people have seized on certain things" but that "it's fine to have Democratic candidates calling for impeachment" pic.twitter.com/o5BFoLedPN
— Madeline Osburn (@madelineorr) September 17, 2019
But they’re not just reporting the facts. In the epilogue of their book, they admit as much, writing that even though they found no evidence—no facts—to support the claims against Kavanaugh, they concluded that his accusers were telling the truth because their “gut” told them so and because the accusers’ stories “ring true.” This is of course precisely the conclusion they’re trying to get their readers to arrive at as well.
Obviously, Pogrebin and Kelly have an agenda, just as their reporting was obviously guided to a large extent by their emotions, not the facts. The problem isn’t necessarily that these two journalists are biased against Kavanaugh. The problem is that they pretend they’re not biased when everyone can see that they are. The entire purpose of their book is to dredge up these horrible accusations—however flimsy, regardless of the credibility of the accusers or the denials of supposed eyewitnesses—and smear Kavanaugh.
If you want to write a book about how you think Kavanaugh was a serial sexual predator in college, and how you believe the accusations against him even though they can’t be corroborated, then fine. Write away! But don’t then go on national TV and claim that you’re just a reporter reporting the facts.
All of this gets to a larger point, which is that journalism would be better off if major media organizations and journalists simply admitted they have biases and embraced viewpoint-specific news coverage.
After all, the notion that journalism should be unbiased or “fair and balanced” is of relatively recent vintage. For much of American history, everyone knew that different newspapers and magazines had their particular biases, sometimes openly partisan ones. If you read Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World you’d get one perspective on the news, and an entirely different perspective if you read William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The advent of “objective” or “fair” journalism was in some ways a marketing ploy by the successors of Pulitzer and Hearst, who hoped to distinguish their papers from “yellow journalism.”
It was good marketing, bolstered by the advent of radio in the late 1920s and television in the 1940s, which brought the New Deal’s Fairness Doctrine to bear on news broadcasting. What emerged in the middle of the last century, then, was a unique set of circumstances in which the idea of “objective” news could thrive. As Telly Davidson argued in an essay for the American Conservative last year, a lot of this rested, as much of American life did in the postwar decades, on a broad cultural consensus:
What today’s controversies illustrate is that a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and ‘objective’ newspaper reporting could only have existed in a conformist Mad Men world where societal norms of what was (and wasn’t) acceptable in the postwar Great Society operated by consensus. That is to say, an America where moderate, respectable, white male centrist Republicans like Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford ‘debated’ moderate, respectable, white male centrist Democrats like Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter.
All of that is gone now, and has been gone for a while. The advent of the digital age has overthrown the postwar consensus of the electric age. Instead of uniting and binding us together, digital has atomized, fragmented, and enervated us. The result, in news media at least, is that everyone’s biases and prejudices are impossible to hide, making a mockery of the idea that the news is “objective” in any meaningful sense.
What we have instead is the advent of a kind of digital yellow journalism. There’s a reason President Trump’s “fake news” epithet has been appropriated by both sides of the political divide. It’s really just another way of saying “I don’t recognize your authority over the facts.”
Consider a strange article NBC News recently ran, asking readers to confess their climate “sins.” “Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week? Share your anonymous confession with NBC News.”
This, from a network news outlet that Americans with fond memories of Tom Brokaw’s reassuring voice still think of as objective and unbiased. The article isn’t just biased in favor of the religio-environmentalist view of carbon offsets being the new indulgences, it unapologetically promotes such a view.
That journalists and editors are overwhelmingly liberal is nothing new. But the imbalance is arguably getting worse. Even financial journalists, once thought to lean conservative, are overwhelmingly liberal. Last year, a survey of financial journalists at places like The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post found that more than 58 percent identified as either “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” Less than 5 percent said they were very or somewhat conservative.
Now more than ever, media outlets should recognize that the myth of objectivity won’t lend them credibility. In fact, a failure to admit bias will eventually undermine their credibility, not least because their reporters and editors will spout off on Twitter, or email and text chains will be leaked, or their readers will notice how errors and omissions always seem to benefit liberals and hurt conservatives.
To the extent that left-leaning journalists grasp this, many only seem to grasp it lightly. A great example is Lauren Duca’s syllabus for a class called “Feminist Journalist” now being offered at New York University. (That Duca, mostly known for posting an offensive tweet upon the death of Billy Graham, is teaching a university-level journalism course is itself an indictment of the idea of unbiased journalism.)
Media coverage of our current political climate has been plagued by the mental Napalm [sic] that I call ‘both sides-ism.’ This is a kind of classic ‘he said, she said’ form of journalism where the reporter tries to give both sides of an issue, even if one side is completely bogus. You’ll also hear it referred to as ‘balance,’ although in many cases it’s ‘false equivalency,’ because attempting to appear balanced just serves to create more distortion.
The truth is not a math equation. In the midst of the ongoing American dumpster fire, there is, I believe, only one side to journalism, and it is motivated by building a truer, more equitable democracy. As this course will establish, not only does this effort allow for feminist journalists, it renders feminist journalism a moral necessity. We cannot build to social justice without adequate representation of intersectional perspectives.
To Duca’s credit, she at least recognizes that objectivity in journalism is an illusion. But she takes the wrong lesson from it. Instead of embracing a transparency about her own bias, and recognizing that all journalists and media outlets have biases, she concludes there is “only one side to journalism.” No surprise that it happens to be the side she’s on—the side of “social justice.”
But in fact there are many sides to journalism, all of them informed by biases, agendas, prejudices, and animosities. Anyone can see that. Almost everyone does. It would be great if journalists would start seeing that, too.
Libel and Slander laws need to be reformed. If the NYT prefers Democrats over Republicans, that’s their business — I see no decent way to “force” the MSM to be nice to Republicans.
But if the NYT publishes baseless accusations designed to convince the public that Trump is corrupt, then Trump should be able to sue them out of business.
We can’t make the media unbiased, but they should at least be honest.
Oh they’ve embraced it. They celebrate it and enforce it.
They just didn’t want us to notice.
Many people have a problem with truth today. They will ignore it for their elitist pretensions, their efforts to rise in the liberal ranks, their ambition to be “a success story”, at the top of their game in the Media Tower of Babel. What has caused this lack of respect for the truth? There are many causes:
1) lack in religious morality
2) leftist indoctrination
3) the relativism of the age — many different “truths”
4) a secular mind set that believes this life is all their is, so grasp as much as you can, anyway you can.
5) no belief in God
The last point is the cornerstone for all of this lack of respect for the truth. In this age everything is permissible.
Oh they’ve embraced it as evidenced by their continuous lies and deceits. They are just liars so they dupe the masses by pretending to be offended when their total dead soul bias is exposed.
Embrace the suck!....................
Consumer warning—we are lying sociopaths—watch or read at your own risk!
There are certain people whom I know personally that believe ALL this BS that is put out on ABCNNBCBSNYTWAPOLAT..........................
They should be required to register as a Political Action Committee (PAC).
They see it, they know it, they like to "shape" opinion and change the world to their world view, thus the reason they won't admit it because it would lesson the propaganda value of their deceit. I mean can you imagine CBS saying, we're forming this new Climate Change Unit and will report only stories that support our bias - they'd lose "control" of the narrative - it will not happen.
The big issue with the media is their believability. They have none. When a real story hits, no one will believe them. They are now the boy that cried wolf.
Watch the Network news streaming services.
They don’t even pretend.
Let alone that all of the reporters are between 25-30.
Good post(s). DEPROGRAM yourself from propaganda.
A while back, my son asked me why I watched Fox news in a accusatory way. I told him that they were the news group that insulted my intelligence the least.
Well, they are gone now.
The fifth-column leftist media gives aid and comfort to the enemy. They need to be indicted, tried, and convicted on that!
BTW, when is AG Barr going to take a break from his bagpipe playing?
IMHO the claims of “journalistic objectivity” trace back to the mid-late Nineteenth Century, when the individual printers unambiguously were ideologically independent of each other.Problem was, people were getting nervous about the propaganda power of the AP. The AP responded to their question by pointing out that everyone knew that the newspaper printers who were members of the AP didn’t agree about much of anything.
And the AP carried stories from all of them so, the argument went, the AP itself was objective.
- News Over the Wires:
- The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem BlondheimThat was logical, as far as it went. But the problem was that the AP “wire” was a continuous virtual meeting of all major US newspapers - and Adam Smith’s analysis
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)proved exactly correct in the long run.Major journalism is a cartel (the words, “Associated Press” alone should tell anyone that). The actual form which that conspiracy against the public took, and takes, is the self-serving propaganda campaign to the effect that “journalists are objective.” That claim:
- is fatuous and incorrect, in that objectivity is a (laudable) goal but not a state of being. Trying to be objective is hard work, and knowing that you are objective is impossible. Whether or not you belong to a mutual admiration society claiming objectivity for you.
- politically homogenizes journalism, forcing all journalists to conform or risk being labeled, “not a journalist, not objective.”
- marks those who endorse it as cynics. That is true because all journalists know that “If it bleeds, it leads” put them on the lookout for bad news. Thus, all journalists know that journalism is negative. And only a cynic could claim that “negativity is objectivity.”
The upshot is that that cartel has redefined the words “liberal” AND “objective” to mean “in perfect accord with the perspective of the journalism cartel.” The USAGE of those words is, per the cartel, strictly that journalists are never to be called “liberal,” and politicians are never called “objective.” Also, per the cartel, the definition and usage I have articulated must be denied. Even if no more plausibly than the claim that a pitcher didn’t intend to hit a batter with a pitch.
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