Opinion: (Post)modern journalism is a mishmash monster of conflicting goals
If Silicon Valley's advocacy local journalism gives you deja vu all over again, you're not alone. Political philosopher Peter Berkowitz explains how we've slapped together the “frank[ly] partisan” early American news approach and pious 20th century “objectivity” label, thanks to postmodern progressivism's subtle creep into academia. From RealClear Politics.
One crucial factor inspiring journalism’s abandoning of its primary mission to inform the public and impartially hold powerful interests accountable is the postmodern progressivism inculcated by higher education in America. Since at least the late 1940s, colleges and universities have been reshaping the curriculum by putting it in the service of progressive priorities. Since the 1970s, colleges and universities have come to function as the indispensable credentialing institution for journalism’s higher echelons. And since roughly the 1980s, they have injected into the curriculum the postmodern demotion of reason and repudiation of authoritative norms and standards. Eventually, the progressivism and the postmodernism coalesced into a single sensibility, committed to empowering government to emancipate individuals from traditional moral virtues and judgments. Few are the members of the mainstream media who, during their passage through the credentialling institutions of American higher education, have not imbibed the spirit of postmodern progressivism.
Thanks to instructive writings by predominantly – but by no means exclusively – conservative authors, four stages stand out in the establishment of postmodern progressivism as higher education’s governing ethos.
The process began in the soft dogmatism that then-recent-Yale-University-graduate William F. Buckley documented in 1951 in his book God and Man at Yale. Buckley’s examination of course syllabi from the social sciences, particularly economics and political science, demonstrated the faculty’s determination to portray what Buckley called collectivism – a preference for larger government staffed by supposedly disinterested technocrats seeking the people’s good often contrary to the people’s expressed interests – as preferable to individualism, or the traditional American view of individual liberty and limited government. At the same time, Buckley’s review of syllabi from Yale’s humanities curriculum as well as from the Yale Divinity School’s course offerings, disclosed readings and assignments that did not merely teach the arguments and influences of atheism but consistently advocated a secular point of view. While assuming basic principles of objectivity and academic freedom, Yale’s overall curriculum gently eroded them by presenting the faculty’s preferences for collectivism and atheism as objectively correct and the alternatives, by their silent omission, as unworthy of serious exploration.
In his 1988 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom illuminated the soft relativism that, with the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, had conquered the campuses. …
In the 1990s, campus dogmatism turned hard. In their 1998 work The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate explored an outbreak of cases across the country in which university administrations, often joined by faculty, conspired to deprive students of rights basic to a liberal education: liberty of thought and discussion, and the right to due process in the adjudication of allegations of misconduct, particularly sexual misconduct. …
Over the past twenty years, political correctness has metastasized into “wokeness,” in which dogmatism has become militant. Wokeness combines an idiosyncratic interpretation of postmodernism according to which only the West’s grand historical narrative has been thoroughly discredited with a dogmatic grand historical narrative of its own. According to woke doctrine, America’s political ideas and institutions—and indeed those of the Western civilization from which they emerged—serve white people’s interests in domination, are permeated by racism and sexism, ineluctably usher in colonialism and imperialism, and must be overcome by all means necessary. …
No book has done more to expose the woke spirit’s militant dogmatism than Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In that 2021 work, Columbia University professor of linguistics John McWhorter explained how elites’ redefinition of “truth” as that which serves the empowerment of socially approved oppressed groups harms those it purports to benefit, poisons the public square, and undermines the quest for knowledge.
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