Hard Times T
Journalists used to be respected. But in the age of Trump, fair reporting has gone out the window. Here’s what you, the reader, can do to save the media
Since President Trump was elected, the media landscape has divided and hardened more than ever. Even the once unimpeachable New York Times has been guilty of “fake news,” while on Tuesday CNN had to retract an article that slimed a Trump aide based on flimsy reporting. In April, The Post’s MICHAEL GOOD WIN delivered this speech at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Atlanta, analyzing how we got here — and how journalism can survive. Here’s an adapted excerpt . . . HERE was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. Wewere generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale — that most of what you read, watch and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it.
It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the antiauthority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government — and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men.” Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.
During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often foundmyself telling my students a reporter’s job was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heardthat line, butit still captures the way most journalists think about whattheydo. Translate the first part of that compassionate-soundingidea into the daily decisions about what makes news, andit is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help.
The rest of that journalistic ethos —“afflict the comfortable” — leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebodyhastopayforthat government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a waytoequalize conditions for the poor. Hewill also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
A New Dimension
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naïve liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics.
As with grief, there were several stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn’t a serious candidate but a circus act. And yet the more television executives put Trump on the air, the higher their ratings climbed. Soo news shows started devoting hours s simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.
As his rallies grew, the coverageage ge grew, which made for an odd dy-dynamic. The candidate nobody in thethe media took seriously was attracting ing the most people to his events and getetting the most news coverage. Despite ite the mockery of journalists and lateenight comics, suddenly Trump wasas winning. Only when the crowded Reepublican field began to thin andd Trump kept racking up primary and d caucus victories did the media’s tone e grow more serious.
One study estimated that Trump p had received so much free airtimee that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump.
Day in, day out, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction — toward Hillary Clinton and away from Trump.
For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.
On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided (and continues to provide) lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds. But there was a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it — George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Dem would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
I rread that paragraph and I thought toto mmyself, well, that’s actually an easy quesquestion. If you feel that way about TrumTrump, normal journalistic ethics wouwould dictate that you shouldn’t covecover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.
I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times’ top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter had nailed his own thinking. Trump “challenged our language,” he said, and Trump “will have changed journalism.” Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet had this to say: “I think that Trump has ended that struggle . . . We now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false.”
Baquet was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without
consequence. Thus began the spate of stories, which continues today, in which the Times routinely calls Trump a liar in its news pages and headlines. Again, the contrast with the past is striking.
The Times never called Barack Obama a liar, despite such obvious opportunities as “you can keep your doctor” and “the Benghazi attack was caused by an Internet video.” Indeed, the Times and The Washington Post, along with most of the White House press corps, spent eight years cheerleading the Obama administration, seeing not a smidgen of corruption or dishonesty. They have been tougher on Hillary Clinton during her long career. But they still never called her a liar, despite such doozies as “I set up my own computer server so I would only need one device” and “I never sent or received classified emails.” All those were lies, but only statements by Trump were fair game.
As weknownow, most of the media totally missed Trump’s appeal to millions upon millions of Americans. The prejudice against him blinded those news organizations to what was happening in the country. Even more incredibly, I believe the bias and hostility directed at Trump backfired. The feeling that the election was, in part, a referendum on the media, gave some voters an extra incentive to vote for Trump. A vote for him was a vote against the media and against Washington. Not incidentally, Trump used that sentiment to his advantage, often revving up his crowds with attacks on reporters. He still does.
If I haven’t made it clear, let me do so now. The behavior of much of the media, but especially The New York Times, was a disgrace. I don’t believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered.
The Times’ previous reputation for having the highest standards was legitimate. The commitment to fairness made The New York Times the flagship of American journalism. But standards are like laws in the sense that they are designed to guide your behavior in good times and in bad. Consistent adherence to them was the source of the Times’ credibility. And eliminating them has made the paper less than ordinary. Its only standards now are double standards.
I say this with great sadness. I was blessed to grow up at the Times where I worked for a decade. It was the formative experience of mycareer where I learned most of what I know about reporting and writing. Alas, it was a different newspaper then. Abe Rosenthal was the editor in those days, and long before we’d ever heard the phrase “zero tolerance,” that’s what Abe practiced toward conflicts of interest and reporters’ opinions. He set the rules and everybody knew it.
To wit: When Abe heard a reporter had had a romantic affair with a polit- ical figure she had covered back in Philly, and that she had accepted a fur coat and other expensive gifts from him, he called the woman into his office and asked her if it were true. When she said yes, he told her to clean out her desk.
As word spread through the newsroom, some reporters took the woman’s side and told Abe that firing her was too harsh. He listened for about 30 seconds and said, in so many words, “I don’t care if you f--k an elephant on your personal time, but then you can’t cover the circus for the paper.” Case closed.
As for reporters’ opinions, Abe had a similar approach. He didn’t want them in the news pages. And if you put them in, he took them out. Abe said he knew reporters tended to lean left and would find ways to sneak their views into the stories. So he saw his job as steering the paper slightly to the right. “That way,” he said, “the paper would end up in the middle.” He summed up this attitude as “keeping the paper straight.” He even had it put on his tombstone.
Looking to the Future
Which brings us to the crucial questions. Can the American media be fixed? And is there anything that we as individuals can do to make a difference? The short answer to the first question is, “No, it can’t be fixed.” The 2016 election was the media’s Humpty Dumpty moment. It fell off the wall, shattered into a million pieces and can’t be put back together again. The orgy of visceral Trumpbashing continues unabated.
But the future of journalism isn’t all gloom and doom. In fact, if we accept the new reality of widespread bias and seize the potential it offers, there is room for optimism. Consider this — the election showed the country is roughly divided 50-50 between people who will vote for a Democrat and people who will vote for a Republican. But our national media is more like 80-20 in favor of Democrats. While the media should, in theory, reflect the public, it doesn’t. Too much of the media acts like a special-interest group. Detached from the greater good, it exists to promote its own interest and the political party with which it is aligned.
The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: free speech; free markets; and you, the consumers of news.
Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in The New York Times — virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.
But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how Fox News got started. Rupert Murdoch (who owns The New York Post) thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited the late Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market all right — half the country!
Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.
As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs madeeach and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system knownto man? Theyhadnoclue. And neither do manygovernment officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.
Which brings meto the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. Anexpanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: Join the side you’re on.