When Reporters are Accomplices

For journalism in modern America, false balance is the root of all evil. But false balance derives from "fair and balanced" journalism. So fair and balanced journalism is the source of all evil. How can that be? What can be wrong with fair? OK, nothing is wrong with fair. The problem is balance. But balance is not always wrong and balance in journalism worked pretty well in the 1970s. Times change.

Forcing balance in every news article about politics is a problem. Balance is not objectivity, but reporters try to use balance as a perfect proxy for objectivity. The fact that reporters on politics do this creates an opening that ruthless politicians and their allies at ruthless media outlets are willing to exploit to make the purveyors of false balance look and act like fools.

This site has many blog posts decrying False Balance. In our current political environment, with an extremist president and Congress, the failures of the false balance squad emerge in new formats.

Jay Rosen's "What savvy journalists say when they are minimizing Trump’s hate movement against journalists"
breaks this down for us with numerous examples, noting "To the uninitiated it may look like a fight. Actually, it's a dance, they tell us." and "For two years I have been tracking a speech pattern among American journalists, in which they try to explain to us — and perhaps to themselves — why Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit them is not what it seems, why it’s no big deal."

Several examples are taken from the some of the usual suspects from Politico, Vox, and ever the New York Times. Rosen's brief, trenchant essay culminates in:

"So that’s the pattern I wanted to show you. What are we to make of it? First, the speakers in this post make valid points. Among them are: 

* In Turkey journalists are being arrested. Independent media has been absorbed into the state. Nothing like that is happening in the U.S. 

* Journalists can still report freely and publish what they find. As far as we know, Trump’s worst threats on that score have not materialized. 

* The civic emergency created by Trump’s election has been good for the media business, and good for writers who wish to be read. 

* Reporters on the White House beat find sources eager to talk and an almost unlimited supply of big, important stories to chase. 

* Trump is desperate to be liked. He craves press attention. He is a media animal. These facts modify his public expressions of disdain for journalists. 

I do not contest the truth of these observations. Journalists are right to point them out, and we should factor them into our understanding of events. 

But I do dissent from the larger theme of a “phony war.” Something quite dangerous is happening. I have put my arguments for that proposition into an essay for New York Review of Books. You can read it here. It begins, “There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding.” 

So what is going on here?

I would argue, by inference from these behaviors, that for the traditional, objective media, standards of reporting news about a president who appears to behave very badly require strict adherence to a standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt". That is, the more extreme Trump's behavior, the more compelled these reporters feel to report only the facts and deliberately avoid collecting those facts into identifiable patterns that would point to extreme levels of guilty intent.

And to the extent Trump's patterns of behavior, and those of his inner circle, appear to indicate malfeasance and criminal acts, the more inclined these reporters are to push themselves to concoct innocent explanations for these statements and actions. In order to be "unbiased", the so-called objective reporters act as proxies for the administration.

Basically, if it has not happened yet, it's not going to happen could be their motto. Reporters have not yet been locked up. Hillary Clinton has not been put in jail yet, so it could never happen and must be taken as a joke, or bad form.

The endgame may not be locking up journalists, but totally discrediting them. If the coalition of the Trumpanistas and loyalist Republican voters are able to maintain the electoral advantage through hook or by crook, then there is no need to lock up the journalists. Their articles can be called fake news when reporting is negative on Trump and Republicans and weaponized as "real" news when weaponized as balanced favorable reporting on Trump.

In a way, the situation reminds me of the days prior to the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait when reporters briefed by "senior government officials" were told that Saddam Hussein was "saber rattling". News reporting at the time, at the NYT and other outlets, tended to accept the Bush administration depiction. Sure, that intelligence assessment might have been accurate, but simple common sense suggests that gradually amassing up to 100,000 troops and all of the necessary weapons of war along the border of a small country rich in oil is the logical first step to a rapid strike.