News About the News
“Trump spouts election falsehoods at Georgia rally.”
President Donald Trump was in Georgia the first weekend of December for a rally in support of the state’s two Republican senators facing a runoff election to retain their seats. The headline above was for an Associated Press article the next day, which included references to “the president’s baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud.”
“Baseless accusations” and “election falsehoods” are not words we are accustomed to hearing applied to presidents of the United States. Not that presidents throughout U.S. history have not had strained relationships with the media, or that media have not accused presidents of falsehoods. But something different is going on now, the question of whether objectivity should be the guiding principle for journalists and “alternative facts” should be challenged.
Some of the earliest United States newspapers appealed to a partisan base of readers. As distribution expanded, and pursuit of advertising dollars relegated reporting to “the facts,” the principle of objectivity was embraced. “Advertisers wanted less partisan coverage to sit alongside their messages.”
A June 2020 New York Times article noted changes in reporting beginning with the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Is objectivity acceptable when the difference between right and wrong is clear? The article described newsrooms as “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.” As Anne Applebaum wrote in her book Twilight of Democracy regarding the UK vote on leaving the European Union, “Dominic Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign proved it was possible to lie, repeatedly, and to get away with it.”
Discontented with objectivity as a guiding principle, some journalists have argued that in clear instances of right versus wrong, “moral clarity” should be the guide. Wesley Lowery, a Black journalist who reported from Ferguson in 2014, put forward moral clarity in advising journalists to “abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts.” But from the perspective of the libertarian site Reason.com, “In replacing their decidedly strawman version of the ‘objectivity’ ideal with a more courageous ‘moral clarity,’ journalists are trading the unattainable for the unknowable.”
This debate is taking place as journalism itself is undergoing immense change. Instead of a limited number of nationally distributed newspapers and only three broadcast television channels, news is distributed over dozens of channels and internet sites and social media platforms, often with highly partisan content. The fragmentation has been devastating for traditional news sources dependent on advertising dollars for support. Instead, advertising dollars go to FaceBook, Google and many others. When presented with a president unable to distinguish truth from fiction, a more diverse array of journalists had the courage to challenge “alternative facts.”