Peddling opinion as news

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you check the ‘media’ category over on the right, you’ll see plenty of critical analysis on the state of journalism today. Over on the Ethics and Public Policy Center site, George Weigel has some critical commentary of like mind.

The press was even more an unruly beast in 1787 than it is today; yet the Framers of the Constitution gave the fourth estate extraordinary latitude, convinced that the robust exchange of ideas was democracy’s lifeblood. Journalism’s virtual immunity from legal sanction implies, however, certain responsibilities. One of them is to distinguish rigorously between what gets printed as “news,” and what gets printed as “opinion.” The welcome invention of the op-ed page should have thickened the line between what happens in the news hole and what happens on the opinion page. But has it?

Rhetorical question. Of course not. There is no longer any real delineation between news and opinion….’opinion’ pages notwithstanding.

On May 21, USA Today ran a news story on the recently-published Reagan diaries which, according to the reporter, “show Ronald Wilson Reagan more engaged in the job [of president] than had been portrayed.”( Portrayed by whom? By papers like USA Today, papers that clearly got it wrong.) Moreover, the diaries illustrate what Reagan was “really thinking” during “two terms of self-styled optimism…” (Self-styled? What does that mean? The man was an optimist, period; no mild put-down adjective was required — if this were really a news story.)

Weigel reads news stories the way I do…talking back to them.

The very same day, in a New York Times story on “A New Breed of Evangelicals,” readers were informed that a 2004 Pew Forum study had “placed evangelicals into three camps — traditionalist, centrist, and modernist — based on how rigidly they adhered to their beliefs and their willingness to adapt them to a changing world.” “Rigidly,” I submit, is an op-ed adverb, not a news story adverb. The reporter could easily have used “firmly” or “deeply” — and in doing so, would have conveyed the real meaning of John Green’s study. Instead, “rigidly” was the adverb of choice: an editorial interjection signaling that there are evangelicals you can live with (because they “adapt…to a changing world”), and there are nutters. Two generations ago, no serious editor would have permitted such intrusions of reportorial point-of-view; today, no reporter could get a  story on evangelicals into the Times without including such adverbial winks and nods.

Actually, type “New York Times” into the search window here and see more on that.

Which is why good journalism so distinguishes itself.

My first mentor in matters journalistic, Seattle’s David Brewster, once said that journalism’s claim to being a “profession” would remain an affectation until journalism became self-disciplining (like law and medicine), with the members of the guild taking real responsibility for policing themselves. Such professional responsibility means editors keeping editorials out of the news hole, and reporters telling the whole truth. That the misshapen stories cited here are hardly rarities suggests the unhappy probability that David Brewster, who was right thirty years ago, will remain right long into the future.

Which is bad news for American democracy.

Some big media are not proponents of American democracy as it stands, which makes this a self-perpetuating problem. More on that in the article accompanying that photo up at top, in MercatorNet.