James Bennet, formerly editor-in-chief of Atlantic and editorial page editor of the New York Times>, now senior editor at the Economist publishes a lengthy lament for the sorry state of modern corporate journalism. Here’s a snippet:
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.
Don’t get me wrong. Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.
It should be no surprise that a majority of young people today think it is perfectly acceptable to shout down people with whom you disagree—it’s the message they’re receiving from many media outlets every damn day.
Read the whole (long) thing.
I think the problem is much greater than Mr. Bennet does and he thinks the problem is big. I think it stems from corporate media and the professionalization of journalism. The ink-stained publisher-editor-reporter bravely putting out his own newspaper is becoming a thing of the past like horse-drawn buggies. Today’s journalistic elites have forgotten that Mr. Dooley was lampooning, i.e. criticizing, journalists when he wrote about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”. Now they are the comfortable.
I would further assert that you could not have the massive corruption in Chicago and Illinois with the 40 chairman of the Democratic Party and Chicago’s most powerful alderman for decades both on trial for corruption in office without not just the entire political establishment but the media itself complicit in that corruption.
I’ll close with Mr.. Bennet’s assessment of the NYT:
The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
This media debate always reminds me of Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” and the part where he becomes a newspaper editor. In “wild west” towns, you can get killed by publishing an article somebody does not like.
(I would highly recommend it. It is semi-autobiographical, and he is the first Gonzo writer. Like Hunter S. Thompson, it is mostly non-fictional, but you can never tell where the line is.)
Sam Clemens wasn’t a great writer just because of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His non-fiction works are genius—Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi in particular.