As the nation braces for another Trump administration and its likely participant of emotional turmoil, please allow some thoughts on the civic duties both of the media and of the American citizenry.
The media’s duty is to “inform” the citizenry’s, in both meanings of that word.
Early in the 20th century, journalism developed an unwritten code of conduct that separated news from opinion; demanded standards of objectivity, context, and fairness for the former; and expected the latter to be fact-based and to apply principles equally across the board even as it argued a particular position. Even though plenty of journalism regularly fell short of those ideals, the ideals still were recognized as at least aspirational guideposts by every honest journalist.
The Watergate scandal caused a large fissure in that template, as it made “straight news” reporters into celebrities and introduced the idea of reporters as crusaders for their own sense of righteousness rather than mere recorders of events. The advent of cable news turned those fissures into chasms, first as the networks abandoned the practice of clearly labeling opinion distinctly from “news” and next as written-word outlets badly blurred whatever lines they didn’t entirely erase.
Now, even worse, most of the supposedly elite legacy media is dominated by young reporters who, sometimes egged on by editors who should know better, believe it is the right and duty of journalists to “move beyond objectivity” because some “higher truth,” to which they are mysteriously privy, supposedly demands it.
Meanwhile, even where outlets still formally claimed to maintain the lines, they stopped treating opinion forums either as an earned reward for years of solid “straight reporting” or as a privilege afforded to those with demonstrated expertise. Suddenly, in almost every media forum, writers or talking heads sprang up as opinion-mongers straight out of college, with little or no professional reporting experience and no substantive record of subject-matter expertise. And in both print or cyber-print and on the airwaves, the rewards all accrued to those who pick a political side and relentlessly promote it, rather than those who begin with empiricism and then apply consistent principles to the empirical evidence regardless of whose ox is gored.
In other words, even for those news outlets that still try to draw distinctions between news and opinion, the ordinary, not to mention grammatical, standards are inverted, so that opinion takes precedence over journalism. Memo to the practitioners: In the phrase “opinion journalism,” the real noun, the subject, is “journalism,” whereas the word “opinion” is adjectival. The subject is supposed to dominate — the adjective merely modifies. Yet, alas, today not only does the opinion take the lead, but even the ideal of neutrally applied principles, the very foundation of journalistic ethics for a full century, takes a back seat to cheerleading for one’s “team.”
Good journalists ought to have absolutely no “partisan instincts,” yet again and again, we see opiners and reporters both excuse for their “side” the self-same actions they would fiercely criticize if the other side committed them.
For one example, if President Joe Biden withheld weapons that American law required him to provide to Israel while demanding that Israel open a criminal investigation into President-elect Donald Trump that Biden’s own Justice Department had said was unwarranted, every conservative outlet in the United States would have demanded Biden’s impeachment. Yet when Trump did the same thing to pressure Ukraine to gin up a case against the Bidens, most conservative outlets insisted nothing at all was amiss. Likewise, when Democrats call Trump a “fascist,” conservatives treat it as a heinous affront, but those same conservatives merely laugh when Trump calls Kamala Harris a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”
And if the double standard is bad on the Right, it is arguably even worse in the outlets of the Left that include almost every big “legacy” media outlet. For example, parents complaining about uber-explicit pornography in elementary-school libraries are treated as avatars of incipient fascism, all while direct government pressure on social media platforms to literally censor conservative speech is treated as a righteous attempt to stomp out “disinformation.”
Meanwhile, woe be to the rare journalist who asks for facts before deciding what the correct opinion is. Woe be to the essayist who applies principles consistently rather than obey the bloodlust of the tribe.
The pathology of intense tribalism that infects most journalism today also rages through almost the whole body politic. It matters not whether the tribalist sin originates in the media and inflicts its ills into our politics or whether it originates in our broader culture in ways the media merely mimic and amplify. By now, the pathology spreads from and to and throughout both realms and now essentially feeds on itself. The most minor variation from a tribe’s approved positions carries an almost instantaneous label of weakness, and it takes only a few variations to be accused of traitorousness to the cause or even of treason to the nation.
Almost completely obliterated is the sense that adversarial politics can remain mutually respectful within the same broadly unifying superstructure. Almost completely forgotten is the reality that our Madisonian Constitution was built to disperse power rather than centralize it, to promote hard-won compromise rather than treat as anathema anything short of total victory.
In an August 2024 book review of Yuval Levin’s American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation – and Could Again, the Witherspoon Institute’s Matthew J. Franck put into one sentence what this essay otherwise would take several more paragraphs to elucidate: The Constitution “took a factious, fractious people in all our diversity and compelled us to argue, negotiate, and accommodate our way to transient majorities in making public decisions, learning in the process that while our position in today’s majority or minority is evanescent, we have a durable membership in a federal republic responsible for governing itself.”
What we need, ever and always, is what conservative intellectual forebear Russell Kirk wrote in the first sentence of the last book he ever published: “a defense of prudential politics, as opposed to ideological politics.” Likewise, we need to recognize the truth that the conservative “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer identified in the final sentence of his first book, namely that “fanaticism” is a terrible “malady of the soul.”
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In the realms of both media and civic life, we all should strive for and benefit from much more humility, forbearance, goodwill, and patience. As former President James Madison wrote, angels do not govern men here on Earth. Even as our government can avoid tyranny only through what Madison called both “external [and] internal controls,” so must we all recognize that we as citizens need our own internal controls as well.
As for journalists, they should put that reminder about the need for self-control in bold headlines, and then abide by it themselves.