The mainstream media have given up on truth. By Jenny Holland.
At the end of January, one of the most experienced and well-respected figures in American media authored an op-ed in the Washington Post. In it, Leonard Downie Jr essentially throws the entire idea of objective truth under the proverbial bus.
The woke admit no truth beyond what gives them power:
Downie was executive editor of the Washington Post for nearly two decades, and was one of the editors who worked on the famed Watergate story that led to President Nixon’s resignation. In the op-ed published last month, he writes that ‘truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever “objectivity” once meant to produce more trustworthy news’. …
According to Downie, the way to gain trust from the public is to abandon objectivity …
There is something deeply unsettling in watching experienced journalists so cravenly capitulate to the woke mania of the millennial generation.
Downie quotes Kathleen Carroll — former head of the Associated Press — who, like him, questions the very possibility of objectivity in news reporting. ‘It’s objective by whose standard?’, Carroll asks. ‘That standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy… And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t fit that definition.’ …
According to the Washington Post, journalists should contort a story so it affirms every pre-conceived notion your reader has. Telling your readers how something really is, even if it risks disabusing the reader of those notions, is no longer necessary.
The crux:
Journalism’s brief period of objectivity was an interregnum between the rough-and-tumble newspaper class wars of the early 20th century and whatever you want to call the pantomime hellscape of today.
Now, that period of objectivity is officially dead and buried.
It is clear from Downie’s article that the industry has been wholly captured. What used to be thought of as a workman-like job, in which you dug up facts and presented them to your readership, has been taken over by an elite clique of pampered millennials.
Members of this clique went to all the same schools and have all the same opinions. Their sworn mission is to make sure their shrinking readership knows how ideologically pure they are. Factual reality — once the king of the newsroom — doesn’t come into the equation. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Just one recent example of this is the collusion between Big Tech and the security apparatus of the United States revealed by the Twitter Files last year, which merited barely a sidebar in the liberal media.
Even some lefties prefer modernism to postmodernism:
There is a silver lining in this op-ed, and I found it in the comments. Judging from the people commenting under the piece, even the ultra-liberal, vote-blue-no-matter-who readers of the Washington Post were not buying what Downie was trying to sell them. One commenter wrote:
What’s really happening is young reporters are using emotional blackmail and not-very-sophisticated [postmodern] sophistry to excuse themselves from professional standards. I understand why new reporters would like to be liberated from dull, but necessary, professional standards, but I don’t understand why the grown-ups go along with it to the detriment of their profession.
The biggest problem with journalists may not even be their recent swing to the left, their intolerance of differing opinions or their backstabbing newsrooms — all characteristics of younger, woke media staff. Instead, the biggest blindspot for journalists of generations new and old is their tendency to vastly overestimate their own importance, and vastly underestimate just how few people share their outlook outside their media bubbles.
This too will pass. But in 20 years or 200?
