Sins of Commission and Omission
Left AND right media are leading us astray
We’ve been hearing for a while that Americans’ trust in the media as a source of reliable information has been declining. A joint poll conducted by the Gallup and the Knight Foundation last month found that fully half of the respondents said they believe “national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.” The Pew Foundation reported last fall that only 34% of Americans trust the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly”; another Pew finding showed U.S. adults under 30 were about as likely to trust social media as they were national news outlets.
I haven’t put too much stock in these reports. For one thing, complaining about the press is something Americans have been doing for hundreds of years. Insofar as there’s anything new here—and I think there is, to some degree—the decline of public trust in the media reflects a broader sense of disillusionment in American life. I attribute some of this to the grinding down of imperial gears: as the United States grows overall less powerful and prosperous from its twentieth-century peak, those losing ground are more likely to feel let down by institutions, and those anxious to main their status, economic and otherwise, view what may seem like a threatening landscape with more suspicion. This fuels the sense of polarization that seems so characteristic of our time. To the extent that specific things have really happened to erode public trust, I would say the government is a bona fide culprit in the deceptions of the Iraq War and the malfeasance surrounding the Great Recession of 2008, where guilty parties went off scot-free and ordinary Americans saw their fortunes crushed. The memory—and effects—of these and other scandals linger, and have fostered a sense of distrust that has made responding to the Covid-19 pandemic more difficult.
Lately, though, I really have begun to think that the nation’s journalistic establishment really is guilty of malpractice in ways that justify hostility. It’s been happening on the right and the left, and while the underlying dynamics are at times similar, the underlying motivations are different. It’s worth noting both.
Let’s begin on the right. Unless you’re a hermetically sealed Fox news consumer (and it appears there are more than a few of those), you know that network is currently embroiled in an embarrassing lawsuit that has already demonstrated that mogul Rupert Murdoch and his celebrity media minions (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, et. al.) knowingly spread stories about a rigged presidential election in 2020 that they knew were false. The network’s investment in these lies was broadly consonant with the network’s ideological orientation, but the real driving force behind them was pecuniary: according to widely reported unsealed court documents, Murdoch explained his motive this way: “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
At Fox and most media outlets, journalism is—and always has been—a business. Whether as a matter of advertising or subscriptions, you build an audience, and the revenues you hope will follow, by telling people what they want to hear. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. But when you pander to your audience—which is to say a product you use to sell to advertisers—in a craven effort to keep it by telling it things you know aren’t true, a bright red line has been crossed. I think any fair-minded person would have to conclude that Fox has seriously, perhaps even fatally, compromised its legitimacy as a news organization. To which some of us will say, “duh,” and others will go on watching the Fox news channel as if nothing ever happened. (The problem for Fox there is that its aging audience is literally dying off.)
What we’re talking about here, then, is what might be termed a sin of commission. On the left, however, the issue is sins of omission: a persistent insistence on refusing to report information that its gatekeepers fear may be taken “the wrong way.” This pattern can be dated back to the George Floyd murder, when many editors concluded that the imperatives of racial social justice overrode any other consideration in reporting the news (leading many self-described progressives to wildly overestimate the likelihood a black man would be shot by police — see tables here). We saw it again in CNN accounts of “mostly peaceful protests” following the shooting of Jacob Blake, the avoidance of reporting on riots in Chicago and violence in Portland, and so on. We also see it in the highly contested issue of transgender rights, where many outlets were reluctant to report the possible dangers of medical treatment for transgender youth, despite the fact that European countries like Sweden—no bastion of conservative bigotry—have put the brakes on it. (The New York Times finally got around to acknowledging the existence of an actual debate on the subject last summer, years after concerns were first raised.) This week we saw a number of outlets consider the possibility of something many considered a wacky fringe idea once labeled misinformation on Twitter and Facebook (in part because it was advanced by the truculently conservative Senator Tom Cotton): that Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab (financed with U.S. money).
I really shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: I am not denying the reality of systemic racism, the moral claim of those supporting transgender rights, or endorsing the reality of a potential scandal whose implications carry grave domestic and geopolitical implications. I am saying that good journalism will report multiple sides of a given story, whether or not a particular publication has an avowed partisan orientation or not. Democracy depends on allowing people to come to their own conclusions, and a belief that, given the certainty that some of us will be wrong in one important way or another, truth will out and a workable consensus will be reached. Left or right, we have to acknowledge and respect the existence of inconvenient facts and the freedom of people to interpret them.
At the end of the day, objectivity is a myth. But I don’t mean that the way the once redoubtable Leonard Downie of the Washington Post did in a troubling recent column asserting it’s a lie that media organizations need to move beyond. I mean objectivity is a myth in the anthropological sense of the term: a widely believed idea whose empirical reality can’t be proven. Like just about every other idea to which human beings pledge their allegiance, objectivity is an unattainable goal that must nevertheless be pursued and taken on faith—informed, rigorous, faith with a substantial dose of humility. This faith, rooted in the nation’s Enlightenment origins, is the one that has constituted us as a people. We can’t give up on it now, lest government of the people, by the people, for the people, perish from the earth.
That will happen. Let’s not hasten it.