Part II: What is "truth"? What is "news"?

Alas, "conclusion-first“ journalism is what many citizens want. But there are ways to fight that.

Do Americans want news that is accurate, balanced and fair-minded?

That’s an awkward question, for people who worry about the future of public discourse in this bitterly divided land. The evidence is that citizens (a) complain about the state of journalism (see these depressing numbers on the public’s lack of trust in the news industry), while (b) continuing to focus most of their attention on sources — television and print — that serve up commentary and “news” aimed at “red” or “blue” America, but rarely both at the same time.

As I wrote earlier this week (“The doctrines that built America’s news silos”), America’s competing advocacy journalism cultures:

“… exist, and are dividing America, because it no longer makes economic sense, in our splintered digital age, for journalists to report and produce news that will upset their paying customers. #SIGH. …

In the South this is called “preaching to the choir.” Sadly, this strategy does work, producing many online clicks and “reposts.” If you want to read more about these niche-news wars, click here for a GetReligion post, and podcast, with lots of links to more information.

The question, in today’s Part II post, is how some journalism thinkers explain what is happening.

Americans on the cultural left and right point fingers at each other, citing evidence of clear bias and (#trigger warning) the spread of dangerous misinformation. However, every now and then a few symbolic people offer some candid words. This allows critics on the other side of the news divide to quote, and criticize, them. World without end, Amen.

This is frustrating, but it still pays to read what journalism leaders have to say. This leads me to an essay by Mike Pesca, at his Profundities Substack, which ran with this double-decker headline:

The Media Thought Misleaders

Journalism Professors Jay Rosen and Margaret Sullivan are trying to redefine basic tenets of journalism, to horrible effect

Yes, that is the same Jay Rosen of New York University who played a major role in Part I of this post.

As always, today’s niche-news debates are connected to this question: How can self-respecting mainstream journalists cover Orange Man Bad in an accurate and balanced manner without risking the future existence of “our Democracy.”

(Personal comment: Rational Sheep readers need to know that I remain #NeverTrump and, now, #NeverHarris. I cannot in good conscience support either. However, let me say a word to progressives who insist that Donald Trump is poised to create a theocracy. I believe that, if he wins a second term, he will treat the Religious Right the same way that President Barack Obama, after securing a second term, treated conservative Black churches. In other words: They will be ignored, for the most part, since their support is no longer a political necessity.)

If you followed murmurs in elite media about Elon Musk’s X interview with Trump, you know that a powerful buzzword these days is “deplatforming.” That’s a powerful doctrine among people who once defended the First Amendment (and opposed monopolies) who are now trying to prevent dangerous people from talking-writing in forms of mass media that reach millions of ordinary folks.

Here is some key Pesca material on that, with a reference to the earlier encounter between Trump and some members of the National Association of Black Journalists:

Even the conceit of “platforming” is a misnomer. Trump is running for President of the United States. He is going to give hundreds of speeches, do hundreds of interviews with outlets who won’t push back, and be seen millions of times on social media in forms controlled by his campaign and its fans. It’s not giving him a “platform” to ask him a hard question, it’s journalism. It might be “platforming” if Trump were given a forum without an opportunity for questions, but the “J” in NABJ is for “Journalists”. The three moderators, including Fox’s Harris Faulkner, were engaged in journalism. The interviewee might clash with, criticize, or be fundamentally objectionable to the sensibilities of the journalists, but none of that means it’s no longer journalism. The hostility or charmlessness of the subject of journalism can, in fact, be instructive to the consumer of the journalism.

This all seems obvious. Yet some prominent journalists disagree.

This brings us to Rosen, as well as Margaret Sullivan of the Guardian, who also leads the Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. Pesca describes them as leaders of a movement that insists the “only appropriate way for the media to take the Trump threat seriously is to suppress coverage of almost every aspect of politics that’s anything other than the impending nightmare.”

In other words, Orange Man Bad is the lens through which these journalists view almost everything that happens in the United States of America. What about questions about the records of those running against Trump and his allies? Covering those stories would endanger America. So there.

This is the doctrine that, for Pesca, leads to “Conclusion-First Journalism.” The same formula works in reverse, of course, for many alternative, conservative forms of media. The powerful X platform is controversial because Musk (yes, many argue otherwise) has allowed controversial voices on the right and left to post links to all kinds of information and commentary.

Peca’s bottom line:

For the record, I share Sullivan and Rosen’s assertion that a second Trump term would probably test norms and the strength of our institutions, as his first administration did. That’s a very bad thing and why I’ll be voting against him.

However:

Sullivan and Rosen want more of the “Trump Dangerous” coverage and much much less of any other type of coverage. They want virtually no coverage that portrays Democrats in a negative light, if their opponent is Donald Trump. I’m sure they’d say desperate times make for desperate acts, but so desperate as to make the role of journalism indistinguishable from the role of the Democratic National Committee ?

The Profundities essay discusses several case studies in the work of Rosen and Sullivan.

First, here is a shot of Rosen, linked to the COVID-19 era:

Rosen phrases his advocacy of media self-censorship as “Not the odds, but the stakes.” By this he means that election news other than news of how bad Trump will be needs to be suppressed. Rosen has been at this game for a while. He was among the more prominent adherents to the idea that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “bullshit”, and that media suppression of its actual existence and validity wasn’t a black eye, but an example of progress.

Also in 2020, when Trump had begun holding nightly press briefings during the pandemic, Rosen issued an imperious decree mixed, with a little cosplay, titled, “Today we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting.” In it, he advises the press to no longer attend press briefings, broadcasters to no longer broadcast Trump’s words live on TV, and reporters to stop reporting on what Trump actually said.

Here’s an interesting thought: What about the fact that Trump’s handling of the pandemic was, for many Americans, a key reason that they lost faith in his leadership? Thus, some voted against him because of what they saw in news coverage.

That was important in a razor-thin race.

More recently, the ethical crisis for many journalists was the “will we or won’t we” matter of covering the mental and physical decline of President Joe Biden.

This brings us to a dose of Sullivan:

One particularly embarrassing column of Sullivan’s was titled “The Media's Circular Logic and Destructive Obsession with Biden's Age; Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails”.

Believing the voters to be idiots, Sullivan writes of the coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline: “For the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice.”

What happened when Biden dropped out?

There was no mea culpa. It’s not clear from her writing that Sullivan has even contemplated her error. Of course, when your project is bending the rules of journalism toward a conclusion-first approach, what hope is there for reflection or humility?

Sullivan of course wasn’t alone among the many media pundits who made the knee-jerk “but her emails” comparison to Biden’s cognition, but few did so as smugly. Sullivan congratulated herself on the bravery it took to name the names of the offending parties:

“How about a note from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to two key people who report to him directly — the opinion editor and the top newsroom editor — that goes something like this: “Katie and Joe, I’m concerned that we’re going overboard with both coverage and commentary about Biden’s age. Let’s keep this in better perspective and tone it down.” Believe me, those two sentences would make a world of difference.”

Good thing Sulzberger didn’t take her advice. Good thing newspapers aren’t in the business of guaranteeing election results.

OK, is this how “mainstream journalism” is supposed to work?

In my grieving 2023 Religion & Liberty essay (discussed in Part II), I firmly said “no.” The problem is that the business models linked to digital screens culture — with Big Tech gods controlling almost all of the online advertising money — clearly lead to way too many journalists saying “yes.”

Millions of Americans do not trust the result of this doctrinal shift, but they keep clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking.

The results have been tragic and, at times, truly ironic. Here is a final byte from Pesca:

I imagine a rebuttal to my descriptions of the Sullivan/Rosen news suppression initiative is to say that I’m exaggerating, that all they’re doing is emphasizing well-accepted practices in the profession, and that what I call suppression they call proper discernment. That might be fine if it weren’t for the tangible examples of the types of news they have wanted suppressed, combined with what we know about the veracity of that news and the potential impact of their admonishments. Rosen believed suppression of the laptop story was a proper journalistic decision — exactly the kind of decision that his project was arguing for. He believed that less attention paid to Trump’s covid response would help Trump. Sullivan has gone on and on, arguing that news of Biden’s decline should have been de-emphasized. They are offering not a reasonable tweak but a radical break from journalistic practice, and the results of their advice are in: Terrible for journalism, destructive for democracy, and crippling for any hope of future press credibility.

This leads to the question that I hear all the time: What do I think that fair-minded readers should do, in terms of tweaking how they read the news? Yes, I have already heard this question from Rational Sheep readers.

I tried to answer that question in a 2023 GetReligion post — focusing on a crucial U.S. Supreme Court religious liberty case — that ran with this headline: “After 303 Creative — Can readers find Twitter voices (hello David French) that help us think?”

Please read it all, if this subject matters to you. What I offered was, by no means, a perfect solution to a puzzle that nags many of us like a toothache. But here is how that post ended, with including some confessions about the core voices in my X feed:

So who do I follow? Remember that the goal here is to note the URLs offered by these thinkers, pointing to news coverage and documents worthy of attention. Also, you are looking for writers and readers who are willing to critique and even criticize “their side” of public debates, looking for weaknesses and important new information. This is my list. …

The common denominator here — on left and right — tends to be respect for old-school First Amendment thought. Do these writers on my “old left” and the “complex right” see eye to eye with each other (and moi) on all issues? Of course not. That’s the point. Here we go:

* David Shor — head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research in New York City.

* Michael R. Wear — best known for his work with faith-outreach efforts for Barack Obama.

* Father James Martin — Jesuit, media-maven best known for his work on LGBTQ+ issues.

* Bari Weiss — Editor of The Free Press; formerly of The New York Times.

* Andrew Sullivan — Gay-rights activist and one of the world’s blogging pioneers.

* Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist known for his writings at The Atlantic.

* Glenn Greenwald — Hard-to-label online journalist and Pulitzer winner.

* JK Rowling — Author.

* Ryan Burge — Political scientist, liberal Baptist pastor, master of religion-info charts

* Democrats for Life — An often forgotten, but surprisingly large, political minority group. …

Now, here are some of my favorite, and often unpredictable, right-of-center voices and sources of information. Yes, there are lots of #NeverTrump folks. I know that. It’s the times in which we live.

* David French

* Marvin Olasky — Journalism historian and religious conservative (as opposed to being a generic Republican).

* Kristen Waggoner — President of Alliance Defending Freedom

* Sen. Tim Scott — Not your normal GOP voice in U.S. Senate

* Robert P. George — Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton; Catholic banjo player

* Karen Swallow Prior — Relentless evangelical thinker who only pays attention to news when she needs to.

* Frederica Mathewes-Green — Eastern Orthodox scribe on family issues (and a friend for decades)

* Rod Dreher — Author of bestsellers, blogger, provocateur (and a friend for decades)

* Anthony Sacramone — Relentless reader who edits Religion & Liberty

* Tim Carney — Author of the must-read book “Alienated America”

Yes, this list has major weaknesses, especially when it comes to finding Scribes of Color, female and male, who thrive outside obvious niches in the media on right and left. Who should journalists turn to in Black and Latino churches, in particular?

Please remember that this is my list and I am always seeking new voices that find ways to fray nerves on both the left and right.

The goal here is to Make. Your. Own. List. We are seeking scribes who save us time and make us think. Period.

Hang in there.

FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration posted with “Catering to Specific Interests, Niche News Finds Its Footing in the Digital Age” article at Cyberjournalist.net