American journalism is collapsing before our eyes, by Michael Goodwin.
The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand in hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent. …
By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.
How it used to be:
I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.
My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”
That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.
Glenn Reynolds comments:
Actually, I think the big inflection point was 2005. The Dan Rather forged-memo thing collapsed spectacularly, but the press realized during Katrina that if they just all repeated the same lies and ignored the people who proved them wrong, they could still move the polls. Before that, they had at least pretended to a degree of fairness, but the price of that in the Rather affair — letting a Republican take the White House — was too high for them to allow again. It was, in a sense, a foreshadowing of the “who’s gonna stop me?” nihilism of the Obama Administration, where traditions and legalities were thrown out the window in the name of power.
Commenters and derfelcadarn:
Nothing but President Trump will force the elite rediscover the rule of law. …
Journalism has never been objective, it is just that issue has never been this coordinated. Lies are now knowingly told and believed to advance an agenda, it should be criminal.
