December 19, 2023
Over the last few years, we have heard from federal government agency employees, former and current, telling about their experiences doing and/or witnessing improper things in dealing with serious and sensitive matters.
These whistleblower’s allegations, if true, paint a troubling picture of how federal government agencies often work to the benefit of one group at the expense of another group.
These alleged activities are the epitome of what our government is not supposed to be. The government must be a fair, balanced and just organization that serves the interests all of the people.
Like the government, the news media is expected to perform its duties in a fair and balanced manner, and make certain that opinion and news reporting are clearly separate.
The Founders of this nation thought that a free press was so critical that they granted protection to do its job properly in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, along with the guarantee of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
But as with so many of our noble and cherished traditions, the honesty and integrity of the nation’s news media has been abandoned by far too many of its practitioners.
Recently, a news story broke regarding the New York Times. The Times once was regarded as the greatest newspaper in the world. It had become known as the Gray Lady. It has since become regarded as politically biased, and a weapon of the left.
The internal workings of the Times was the topic of a cover story published in The Economist by senior editor James Bennet titled, "When The New York Times Lost Its Way."
Bennet worked at the Times for many years, most recently as its editorial page editor. He was forced to resign in 2020 after he published an article written by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. The article stirred a great deal of emotion among the Times’ staff, due to its non-left content, prompting the paper’s publisher asking him to resign.
Cotton, who had served in the U.S. Army, had suggested using military troops to protect businesses under assault by Black Lives Matter rioters following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer.
In the story in The Economist, Bennet described how as the Times moved leftward, he was encouraged to attach “trigger warnings” to conservative opinion pieces to alert the paper’s leftist readers about material that may offend them.
"It was a frenzied time in America," Bennet wrote. "It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfill its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides."
Comparing the current attitude of Times’ reporters to that of his time as a reporter, Bennet commented that today’s reporters "may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files ... many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world ‘without fear or favor.’”
And in citing his former paper’s increasing bias he called attention to the Wall Street Journal, saying that the Times could “learn something” from its rival.
The Journal, he wrote, “has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work," concluding his cover story.
Although the Times’ leftist orientation has been well recognized and discussed for many years, the actual experience of a long-time and ranking former employee adds much credibility to that belief.
It is a further sad commentary on the condition of many of our news media that an editor of a major newspaper lost his job for actually doing his job: presenting all sides of an issue so that readers would be equipped to make sensible, informed judgements about that issue.
Deliberately burying opinions that differ from the chosen narrative, fearing that those opinions will be accepted by your readers, is cowardly. And, it is un-American.
Back in 1997 the Carnegie-Knight Task Force began a national conversation to identify and clarify the principles of proper journalism. After four years of research, a Statement of Shared Purpose that identified nine principles was released. The sixth principle is: It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
It reads: “The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges. This discussion serves society best when it is informed by facts rather than prejudice and supposition. It also should strive to fairly represent the varied viewpoints and interests in society, and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate. Accuracy and truthfulness require that as framers of the public discussion we not neglect the points of common ground where problem solving occurs.”
How wonderful it would be if the instructors, students, and practitioners of journalism would adopt this concept.
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