How mainstream journalism squandered its authority
If objectivity is a bourgeois notion, if language is just power all the way down, if feeling trump facts--it shouldn't be any surprise that newsrooms on board with these notions simply pump out biased pandering. The Niskansen Institute explores the nexus of bad newspapers and postmodern philosophy.
Trust in the news media has fallen sharply over the past half-century. Back in 1972, 68 percent of Americans reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the mass news media, while only 6 percent reported “none at all."
In 2022, those figures stood at 38 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
The authority of mainstream journalism wasn’t just toppled by a concerted external attack. It was also abdicated.
In the old 20th century model of objective journalism, the pose of cool-headed neutrality was taken seriously. It meant staying away from organized political activity, or even sharing your political opinions publicly. Some carried things even farther, refusing to join a political party or even vote in order to preserve their outsider
status.
I recognize that this little recitation sounds musty and old-fashioned – and that’s a good clue as to what’s gone wrong. In these postmodern times, the whole idea of objectivity has come under sustained attack.
For one thing, psychology and behavioral economics have found that we are riddled with cognitive biases that regularly distort our assessment of what’s going on.
But while the limits of individual human rationality are a fascinating area of study, they really are beside the point here. Even if we can never reach the bedrock of ultimate truth, we can all judge degrees of accuracy: There’s all the difference in the world between a conscientiously reported account of events on the one hand, and loose innuendo or outright fantasy on the other.
Beyond these concerns about individual human fallibility, there is the political critique of objectivity as a mask for power. According to this line of argument, journalistic neutrality isn’t really neutral; it’s an implicit decision to side with the powerful. Reporting a controversy, and the various sides of that controversy, without finally declaring who’s right and who’s wrong is an abdication of responsibility. If you’re really going to serve the truth, you need to take sides.
This political objection to objectivity has gained considerable ground within the profession in recent decades, with fateful results. The objection, in my view, rests on a massive confusion concerning journalism’s role in society. It may flatter some journalists’ egos for them to see themselves as arbiters of truth, but news reporting has no capacity or authority to fulfill that role. Its actual job, much more modest but nonetheless critical, is to provide society with an agreed-upon set of facts to guide public debate. And you can’t fulfill that role if you take sides on controversial issues, because those on the other side won’t trust you.
Journalism is already vulnerable to distrust because its practitioners are drawn so disproportionately from the left side of the political spectrum. There isn’t much that can be done about this: The simple fact is that the type of people for whom journalism holds appeal as a career – people who are good with words and more interested in ideas than money-making – skew overwhelmingly left. Moreover, in an age where self-expression values are dominant, authority of any kind is increasingly on the defensive. Under these circumstances, the profession was well advised to double down on objectivity, not back away from it.
Alas, backing away is what happened. In part it happened because of ideological changes on the left. As politics has grown more performative, and taking public stands on behalf of approved causes has become the benchmark of political virtue among those under the performative spell, many journalists were understandably swept along with the tide.
Meanwhile, as social justice activism roiled the internal workings of professional organizations across the board, newsrooms were no exceptions.
How do we get to something better? There’s no going back to information scarcity – and we shouldn’t want to.
Over the longer term, though, if we are ever to achieve an informational environment that is suitable to our level of technological and organizational complexity, I believe that fundamentally new institutions and approaches will be required.
Read the whole thing here.
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