Nate Hochman writes that journalists in many of the country’s most established newsrooms wear their bleeding hearts on their left, rolled-up shirtsleeves. He’s right. And he’s right to ridicule CNN’s John Blake for his inquiry to DeSantis’s office about the governor’s decision on the proposed AP African-American Studies course, a decision that Blake seems to allege is fascistic.
My colleague says:
In another era, a conclusion as wild as “culturally conservative curricular reforms are fascism” would rightly be viewed as one for the opinion section. . . . Journalists increasingly scoff at the idea of “objectivity” and “balance” favored by old-school editors. The new journalist-as-activist-interpreter conception trades the purported fallacies of “bothsides-ism” and neutrality for what the writer Wesley Lowery approvingly described as “moral clarity.”
However, I don’t think journalists should, or need to, choose between neutrality (usually feigned) and moral certitude (usually priggish).
The writer’s obligation to the reader is to be transparent about his implicit sense of how the world works. Writing cannot be colorless or objective when every author must identify — from a potentially inexhaustible set — the facts that are relevant to his subject. And he must do so by some sorting mechanism.
This transparency requires, first, that journalists be able to recognize their own predilections. Wesley Lowery gets it almost right when he urges his peers to “abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard,” and then immediately stumbles by offering that, instead of “objectivity,” one ought to “focus on being fair and telling the truth.”
An “objective” view of political matters is often a façade, yet Lowery’s idea of “moral clarity” is simply another attempt at this “objective,” putative truth-telling; it is not an alternative to it. (How he expects journalists such as himself to come to know this truth, he doesn’t say.)
There is a virtuous mean: journalism that is bound by a frame of reference, and is forthright about it.
Journalists at CNN and elsewhere should be honest about theirs. Their reasoning needs work, too, as Nate notes. What was ridiculous about Blake’s inquiry was its implication that DeSantis exhibits a desire — to shape public education — that is essential and unique to genocidal autocracies. We know, and Blake should too, that it’s not.