OPINION:
This is an op-ed piece. It appears in the Commentary section of this newspaper. It does not pretend to be straight news, or news at all. It represents my opinion, and I would expect rebuttals from those who disagree with it.
When I took a journalism class in high school, the teacher’s first injunction was to point out the difference between an editorial and a straight news story; she explained that the fastest way for any news outlet to lose its professional reputation and credibility was to editorialize in the pages advertised as straight news.
In the past few years, that ethic has been steadily degraded in outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times to a point where the front pages of these papers are nearly indistinguishable from the op-ed sections.
Instead of responsibly supervising their reporters, it now appears that some editors are encouraging this practice. In broadcast journalism, CNN abandoned any pretense of objectivity in its newsrooms years ago and strives to become the anti-Fox News. However, when James O’Keefe of Project Veritas hacked into an editorial meeting and caught CNN’s Jeff Zuckerberg in the act; CNN executives tried to have Mr. O’Keefe arrested.
In a column in The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan celebrated this rise in advocacy journalism and encouraged her colleagues to do more of it. Her argument is that — because so many Americans increasingly get their news from social media and partisan sites on the Internet — mainstream outlets must become advocates for the correct point of view which represents ground truth as she and a presumably omnipotent group of fellow journalists define it.
This is the equivalent of the “everyone else in doing it” argument that I used on my mother. The retort of mothers throughout history has been. “if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do so too?” Streaming news channels and social media sites put out a lot of garbage, but for established news outlets to imitate them by letting their editorial positions seep into the straight news pages is a slippery slope that could mean the end of journalism as we have known it since the founding of the nation.
There is a place for investigative journalism, and it has deep roots within the traditions of the profession. Good investigative journalism still stays within the framework of objectivity. The investigative team gets wind of a perceived wrong, and proceeds to gather the facts. Attempts are made to confront the alleged malefactor to get his or her side of the story.
If the alleged perpetrator slams the door in the face of the reporter, or goes screaming from the office when confronted, that is reported too. The facts of the story are laid out and the reader — or listener/viewer in the case of television and radio — is left to draw his or her own conclusions.
There is probably even a role for “gonzo journalism” as practiced by Hunter Thomson — the model for Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke — where the writer becomes part of the story. However, those pieces are usually confined to the entertainment/style sections.
Ms. Sullivan, and those like her in academic journalistic circles, argue that reporters should set what they consider to be the proper moral tone. She quotes Professor Nikki Usher of the University of Illinois. “This battle can’t be fought with facts alone. The only hope for mainstream journalism to appeal to passion as well as reason — providing moral clarity along with truthful content.” That quote could have easily come from Joseph Goebbels. What Ms. Sullivan is advocating is indoctrination, not journalism.
When I was in college, I picked up beer money as a stringer for the local paper. One day, I inadvertently editorialized on a story about what I considered to be an unfair practice by a local merchant. My editor asked, “did you interview the store owner or just the customers?” I admitted to not having confronted the owner. “Kid” he said, “here we do journalism not fiction; now go back and be a reporter.” That editor is long dead, but generations of journalists were kept honest by people like him.
I find it disappointing that traditional old school reporters have not spoken up and attacked the increasing loss of professional standards. One would hope that distinguished journalists such as Tom Ricks, Greg Jaffe and Ted Koppel would take their profession to task; but the silence has been deafening to date. Journalism may have crossed a Rubicon and burned the bridges behind it.
• Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis at the graduate level.
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