The New York Analysis of Policy & Government concludes its look at the latest challenges to journalistic ethics.
The collapse of objectivity in journalism has been noted by respected members and observers of the media who are not engaged in the worrisome trend.
In her significant book, The Silencing, journalist Kristen Powers discusses how the media has purged those who disagree with left-wing bias.
“The vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are left of center….and some prominent journalists have openly confessed it…Daniel Okrent…conceded in July 2004, when he was editor of the New York Times, that on social issues…’if you think the Times plays it down the middle…you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.’ Similarly, at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the room is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions…if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be libweral, progressive, a Democrat.”
The American Press Institute has discussed the “The lost meaning of ‘objectivity.”
“Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in a form of deception. This damages the credibility of the craft by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased.”
Michael Goodwin, in a landmark speech at Hillsdale College reported in Imprimis, said that
“I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this… last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.
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“It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left…But I was still shocked at what happened…This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it…The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast…We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news…For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown…They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings…
“…the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. …What happened to fairness? What happened to standards?
…If I haven’t made it clear, let me do so now. The behavior of much of the media, but especially The New York Times, was a disgrace. I don’t believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered…
“Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return.”
Goodwin believes that advances in technology may be the savior of free speech, despite censorship attempts by Facebook and Google.
Long the subject of criticism for left-wing bias, the 2016 campaign brought into clear focus the extraordinary extent of journalism’s’ lost standards.
On election day, Kelly Riddell, reporting for the Washington Times noted: “There’s one thing I’m certain about going into Wednesday: The mainstream media is going to need to go through a serious readjustment period after this presidential election. The collusion between reporters and the Clinton campaign, revealed by WikiLeaks, have laid bare to the American public the left-leaning bias of the press. The American public thinks the media wants Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win by an almost 10-to-1 margin, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released late last month. It mirrors an Associated Press/GkF poll showing 56 percent of likely voters, including 87 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters, believe the media is against him. The mainstream media has let the American public down in serving their own interests.”