Washington Post newsroom: Reality is what we say it is.
by James A. Bacon
The New York Times has published a piece today describing the revolution in the nation’s newsrooms. In what the author appears to regard as a positive development, the news and editorial departments of prominent newspapers are jettisoning the old idea of “objective” journalism in favor of social justice journalism. Citing the recent defenestration of several high-ranking editors for sins against the prevailing ethos, the Times writes:
As America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.
The conflict exploded in recent days into public protests at The New York Times, ending in the resignation of its top Opinion editor on Sunday; The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose executive editor over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” and the ensuing anger from his staff; and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And it has been the subject of quiet agony at The Washington Post, which Mr. [Wesley] Lowery left earlier this year, months after the executive editor, Martin Baron, threatened to fire him for expressing his views on Twitter about race, journalism and other subjects.
Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,” as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race.
The slow-motion purge of insufficiently correct-thinking writers and editors is not limited to the nation’s largest, most prestigious newspapers. It is taking place across the country, including here in Virginia, most visibly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Virginian-Pilot. Ironically, the loss of different views and perspectives is even more visible on the news side of the operation than in the editorial departments, which, though watered-down and vapid, still entertain a modicum of diversity in opinions.
I’ll repeat what I observed a day or two ago. Newspapers may not be “enemies of the people” as President Trump has described them, but they are enemies of conservatives and libertarians. With each passing day, they increasingly become organs of political indoctrination, not forums that reflect different views and perspectives.
That may suit liberals and progressives just fine. But every dollar conservative readers pay in subscriptions to these newspapers is a dollar they pay for the suppression not only of conservative voices but the very idea of a marketplace of ideas. China’s Communist dictator Mao Zedong once said, “Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a thousand schools of thought contend.” Even Mao would be shocked by what American newspapers have become.
