‘A challenging time,’ TV anchor Holt says
“Mainstream media” has become, if not quite a slur, certainly a term of contempt as newspapers, television and radio have struggled to adapt to an online world of reporting.
Not so for Lester Holt, “NBC Nightly News” anchor. In fact, he embraces the term.
“The boutiqueization, as I call it, of news has made it difficult, because you can find a lot of things that look like, taste like, smell like news that will kind of inform you of the world that you want to see around you,” Holt said Monday. He was in Phoenix to accept the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication — on Cronkite’s birthday, and he stuck around for an interview following the ceremony.
“Listen, it’s hard to break through. That’s why I proudly accept the term ‘mainstream media.’ I know it’s a word of derision a lot toward what we do. But I think we need to distinguish ourselves, be transparent about what we are and what we are not.”
‘A challenging time’ for journalists
He’s right, of course, certainly about the need for legitimate media to distinguish themselves. It’s tough out there. You may admire or revile President Donald Trump. But there is no questioning that his nonstop attack on legitimate media has changed the game completely. Trustworthy news sources are challenged by cries of “fake news” whenever there’s a story Trump or his base don’t like, and it has had a trickle-down effect. Now nearly everyone uses the term.
“I think it’s been a challenging time, because as journalists we’re used to covering issues,” Holt said. “One side has this thought on immigration, the other has this thought on the economy, whatever. We’re used to that. What we’re not used to is having to cover behavior as a whole different lane — behavior that is contrary to everything we’ve ever really seen in an administration.”
It’s a sticky wicket. Objectivity is the bedrock of legitimate media. Not of columnists or commentators, whose job is to offer informed opinion, but of straight-up reporting. Yet when the president, or anyone else, tells a demonstrable lie, calling it just that is objective. It’s the truth.
That leaves Holt, sitting in the anchor chair of one of the major broadcast networks, in an unfamiliar position.
“It doesn’t come easy,” he said. “It’s not what we want to do. It doesn’t come easy to call out inconsistencies or baldfaced untruths coming from a president. That’s a separate lane.
‘We have to call that out’
“But we’ve got to cover it. I think sometimes people, they look at it as some form of media bias. But it’s incumbent upon us to report the truth, and where there are inconsistencies, and where things don’t jibe. We have to call that out. It’s what we do as journalists.”
NBC has been mired in scandal, with new allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against former “Today” co-host Matt Lauer in Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill” and the network’s response to the allegations. Holt says the uproar hasn’t been a distraction.
“But listen, it’s not been fun,” he said. “Not at all.”
He argues that the “Nightly News” has covered it like any other story.
“The mark of any organization is how you deal with those things, and how honest you are with your viewers,” he said. “There was not even a big discussion. We knew, ‘That’s on Nightly News tonight. We’re doing that story. Stephanie Gosk, you’re going to do it. Get what you need.’ And probably gave it more time — I can’t say that for certain, I didn’t see the other networks — gave it probably as much or more time than even competitors.”
It’s not a great look, though, at a time when Trump is running around calling media “enemies of the people” and he and his supporters are looking for any reason to discredit real sources of information.