At the beginning of the Trump presidency, a few cautious editors, such as the Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker, questioned the media's open embrace of biased reporting.
Had reporters listened to him, they might have spared themselves countless acts of journalistic malpractice during the course of the Trump presidency.
In the last week, reporters couldn't resist jumping to judgments about bogus stories alleging that Trump suborned perjury and that some MAGA-hat-wearing youth had accosted a Native American, both perfect storms of anti-Trump prejudice.
The frenzy over the bogus BuzzFeed story fed off the media's conviction that Trump is an inveterate liar; the fraudulent story about the Covington students fed off the media's conviction that the Trump hat is an inherent symbol of racism.
Neither truthful nor neutral, the media in the age of Trump is purely propagandistic and attitudinal: if something feels "True," which is to say, if it furthers an anti-Trump narrative, they report it as true.
Rather called Baker's advice "Deeply disturbing" and then mused on the mission of a journalist: "Journalism, as I was taught it, is a process of getting as close to some valid version of the truth as is humanly possible. And one of my definitions of news is information that the powerful don't want you to know. It is not the proper role of journalists to meet lies - especially from someone of Mr. Trump's stature and power - by hiding behind semantics and euphemisms. Our role is to call it as we see it, based on solid reporting."
Out of spite for Trump, journalists gave themselves permission to ignore rigorous rules of skepticism and destroy what little remained of the wall between straight reporting and liberal opinion.
https://spectator.org/a-perfect-storm-of-media-malpractice/
Had reporters listened to him, they might have spared themselves countless acts of journalistic malpractice during the course of the Trump presidency.
In the last week, reporters couldn't resist jumping to judgments about bogus stories alleging that Trump suborned perjury and that some MAGA-hat-wearing youth had accosted a Native American, both perfect storms of anti-Trump prejudice.
The frenzy over the bogus BuzzFeed story fed off the media's conviction that Trump is an inveterate liar; the fraudulent story about the Covington students fed off the media's conviction that the Trump hat is an inherent symbol of racism.
Neither truthful nor neutral, the media in the age of Trump is purely propagandistic and attitudinal: if something feels "True," which is to say, if it furthers an anti-Trump narrative, they report it as true.
Rather called Baker's advice "Deeply disturbing" and then mused on the mission of a journalist: "Journalism, as I was taught it, is a process of getting as close to some valid version of the truth as is humanly possible. And one of my definitions of news is information that the powerful don't want you to know. It is not the proper role of journalists to meet lies - especially from someone of Mr. Trump's stature and power - by hiding behind semantics and euphemisms. Our role is to call it as we see it, based on solid reporting."
Out of spite for Trump, journalists gave themselves permission to ignore rigorous rules of skepticism and destroy what little remained of the wall between straight reporting and liberal opinion.
https://spectator.org/a-perfect-storm-of-media-malpractice/
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