It’s been a momentous week not only in terms of politics and social history (#BLM) but also in my chosen field: journalism.
For starters, encouraged by years of Trumpist attacks on media as “enemies of the people,” protesters and, in the majority of cases, police have targeted U.S. press members during demonstrations, through Monday a total of 383 times, according to a tally compiled by groups including the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. That includes 56 arrests and 78 physical attacks (50 by police). (A reporter for investigative journalism site Bellingcat is keeping a Twitter thread that includes video of attacks.)
Photo credit: KQED/ERIN BALDASSARI
Just as demonstrations are shifting the ground upon which police budgets (among other things) are being debated, so are they upending the culture of mainstream journalism — a culture that for decades has been fretting about, but barely changing, its lily white complexion. The past several days have seen five significant personnel shifts resulting from complaints and action by staff of color:
1). After soliciting publication of an op-ed (“Send In The Troops”) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), which incited furor among staffers of color, among others, New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned.
2). Variety’s publisher placed editor-in-chief Claudia Eller on two months’ administrative leave after engaging in a social media dust-up over lack of newsroom diversity.
3). Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor, Stan Wischnowski, resigned after overseeing a banner headline that read “Buildings Matter, Too.”
4). Christene Barberich, top editor and co-founder of women’s lifestyle publication Refinery29, resigned after workers described the company’s “toxic culture.”
5). Adam Rapoport quit as editor of Bon Appétit after years of criticism for how the publication treated staffers of color, as well as foreign cuisines; the culminating move was the surfacing of an old photo of him and his wife dressed as Puerto Ricans.
Also, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is facing backlash after barring three staffers, two African-Americans and a white reporter who voiced support for them, from covering protests, questioning their ability to stay unbiased.
Another rumble: in a culture in which some disdain to so much as vote, believing it would tarnish perceptions of them as neutral observers, Axios’s decision to allow its reporters to march in demonstrations (and pay bail should they be arrested) raised eyebrows.
Media organizations are struggling to maintain balance in a social current that’s changing swiftly. One primary lesson: diversify the ranks. Newsrooms are routinely less diverse than the communities they cover; leadership posts are even more white and male.
Beyond that, conventions of objectivity and neutrality — bulwarks of U.S. journalism for at least 100 years, cornerstones of my education at the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism — are being questioned at levels I’ve never witnessed.
Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, poses this alternative: “What if we framed coverage with this question at the forefront: What journalism best serves the real interests of American citizens?”
Ben Smith, New York Times media columnist, wrote about his former colleague Bennet and tensions at The Washington Post, where rising star Wesley Lowery quit after battling about his social media feed with executive editor Martin Baron. Among Lowery’s comments: newsrooms’ “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity.”
That quote raised the hackles of one of my Berkeley professors, science writer Timothy Ferris, an Enlightenment thinker who, I imagine, would proudly wear the title of “traditionalist” if that were defined as upholding standards of journalistic rigor.
Ferris posted the story on Facebook with this comment: “Those who would prioritize ‘the truth’ over objective reporting are claiming that subjective perception outranks objective fact.”
That post sparked a bit of back-and-forth with me and another of Ferris's former students. Our conversation follows.
I wrote: “Serious question: How should journalism treat disinformation? If one party is arguing with lies, trolls, and bad faith, how best to contextualize that? Traditional ‘objectivity’ and the ‘view from nowhere’ aren't cutting it.”
Ferris: “How ‘not cutting it’?
Jesse Emspak, another former Ferris student, chimed in: "Because the ‘both sides’ only works when both are arguing in good faith, and both have a point, as it were."
Emspak followed with seven additional paragraphs:
“There's a couple of interrelated problems with the notion of ‘objectivity’ as it usually gets thrown around.
“First, there's no ‘both sides’ argument for racism, for example. I don't want to be arguing my humanity with anybody, and if I have to do that with you odds are you aren't being convinced anyway. If the NYT publishes on its op-ed page a long editorial by someone who is going to argue that I am less than human for some race-science reason (paging Nick Wade) that lends it legitimacy even when it hasn't got any, and I and others like me are left having to spell out why we are human. I'm rather tired of that. We had that discussion, and it was called WW II. There are some ideas that don't deserve a platform; I think we know they are bad already. Roy Moore doesn't need NYT space to argue why sex with minors is a good idea.
“Second, the problem with attacking falsehoods is that you have to spend time explaining why they are false, and the traditional format ends up amplifying the falsehood. (There's a lot of really interesting research on how people process what they read, especially when it is in small snippets). To a degree this kind of propaganda has been well explored already; certainly one of the better known examples is Himmler's operation, but there are many I am sure you could come up with. The technique is pretty simple: flood the discourse with so many lies that people recall those rather than the truth. There's also been a lot of research on this point from people who debunk conspiracy theories and the like.
“A third issue is that the position that newspapers — journalists generally — occupy is NOT a ‘neutral’ one. If you take the position that a free press is important that is a political stance; there's just no way around it. And further, you're taking the position (also political) that truth is an important value. So pretending that politics is some sport we can watch from the side and not take sides is at best delusional and at worst dangerous. Or as the old Rush song says, ‘If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice’ (there's a kind of Heisenberg principle here; you can't separate the observer from the observed).
“It's also the case idea of objectivity needs work. We went over before how your identity and experiences affect that; a lot of things you think are "objectively" true are only so for people rather like you. After all, to Louis Agassiz it was objectively true that Africans were a different species and clearly inferior. Wasn't it obvious, after all? And crucially, just getting new information didn't change a lot of people's opinions on the matter, nor has it done so even now.
“All this means that the way we write stories has to change a bit (and maybe go back a bit in time). Too many journalists and editors are so afraid of the word "bias" that we write words like ‘racially charged’ or ‘perceived as racist by some’ when 50 years ago the Arizona Republic (IIRC) was quite explicit: Racist Group Marches Downtown (it was a story of a Klan rally). None of this mealy-mouthed, both sides-ism for stuff that there really isn't a legitimate side for.
“As reporters we make value judgements all the time; our very profession is a giant, honking, elephant-sized value judgement about the way governments should run. So we need to stop pretending that we are viewing this from some god-like perch and that every idea has equal merit and deserves equal treatment. Because for me and many people I care about you're giving equal treatment to ideas that are explicitly and dare I say it objectively harmful.”
Ferris responded: “All empirical knowledge is an approximation; that some of what was 'learned' in the past turned out to be false doesn't change that. It is that fact that makes it possible for you to say with assurance that Agassiz was wrong. The rest is just professional challenge; sure it's tough to do journalism properly, but the same is true of anything else worth doing.”
I wrote seven paragraphs of my own:
“I’m not arguing that everything is subjective; I want the press to establish truth as clearly as they can describe it, based on verifiable facts.
“‘Objectivity’ — the Adolph Ochs model, at least, which dominated 20th century U.S. media and remains in place in our core mass media institutions — has depended on (at least in theory; exceptions abound) shared values of liberal Western thought: equality under the law; belief that the U.S. governmental system is worth upholding; acceptance of rational and scientific thought; a shared basis of fact. Trumpists see those values as opportunities to exploit, those who uphold them as suckers. Their goals are authoritarian: lust for power, lust for lucre, for themselves and their friends. Truth seekers obstruct them and must be marginalized or dispensed with: Congressional overseers, inspectors general, non-partisan governmental officials, the press.
“When the administration’s stated p.r. policies are to attack the press and ‘flood the zone with shit,' press institutions have to make a series of decisions about coverage. I was an early advocate of 'sending the interns' and thus minimizing coverage of White House press briefings (and Trump tweet storms), given the administration’s goal: to make sport of and attack the very ideas of a free press, governmental good will, rational thought, truth. (They made the game clear on Trump’s first full day, with Sean Spicer trotting out false inaugural crowd numbers and, later, doctored Park Service photos.)
“Stories that simply report that A says x, B says y, Analysts say z — given current circumstances, I believe such stories serve the propagandists. Those circumstances include: ease of message dissemination in the digital age; a half-century of (primarily) right-wing attacks on mass media as unfair arbiters; and the administration’s willingness to lie for the sake of obscuring the very idea of truth’s discoverability.
“The Trumpists’ goal: create a ‘post-truth’ world. In Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’ And: ‘True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.’
“The press’s ‘view from nowhere’ posits false notions of ‘neutrality’ that never really existed. (I prefer pursuit of the laudable goal of fairness.) The press has never been 'neutral,' nor should it be. It’s always backed horses in the race — supporting, for example, a governmental system that protects free expression. Many of those 'biases' have remained unstated, in part because they’ve enjoyed such widespread societal support. But at this political moment we can no longer assume such concurrence; better, in my view, for media institutions to tack toward values of transparency, to be open about the processes and values they use to report news.
“Of greater moment, U.S. media, among other national institutions, are in a struggle for their very survival. They’re covering an administration that would be happy to destroy the system upon which their existence depends. (Arendt: ‘Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.’) Are they to pretend otherwise, play by old rules, and play themselves into irrelevance or non-existence?”
Ferris responded: “Well put. I don't think the news media are in a struggle for existence, at least not more than they were when the U.S. was fighting a war against the National Socialists or when fully a third of the world was being ruled by Communist regimes. In my experience objectivity can be dismissed only by changing its definition — e.g., by claiming that a journalist cannot properly cover a given story without having some metaphysical claim of impartiality. It appears that the universe has a quantum wave function. Physicists don't know what it is, yet. That impedes the thousands of physics experiments being done at this moment not a bit.”
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