Writing in The Economist, former New York Times editor James Bennet commented about the state of his profession. He thinks today’s mainstream media often fails to provide open and objective, truth-seeking journalism.

However, James Bennet writes to defend his own career and hints at bitterness over the NY Times asking him to resign in 2020. He accuses his former employer of being illiberal and opposing freedom of thought. Yet, he expresses sympathy for intolerant Americans who oppose abortion, immigration and modernity. He admits these people may use coded appeals to racism and antisemitism, but expressed pride in reporting empathetically about these people.

Bennet engaged in bothsidesism, the practice of presenting both sides of issues, regardless of evidence, facts, or the credibility of sources.  Truth is unlikely to emerge from the extremes. Free speech may be menaced by people on the far-left and the far-right, but most of the power and the money is on the right.

The Economist columnist makes many comments worth consideration. He notes that the internet damaged traditional news providers and left a once profitable industry facing financial challenges. He criticizes responses by owners of important media properties.

Bennet says unprincipled media operators followed the money and began serving versions of reality preferred by segments of now broadly dispersed audiences. Reporting truth became less important than satisfying followers who want existing beliefs confirmed.

As a result, news organisations churn out unfounded theories and news they know to be dishonest, shaded, or incomplete. Audience biases are reinforced and media commits more strongly to repeating false positions. A dangerous feedback loop is established and amplified.

Media maleficence was demonstrated by private text messages after the 2020 U.S. election between performers featured regularly on Fox News. The texts were revealed in discovery during a lawsuit filed against the network by a voting machine manufacturer.

Simply put, they show the network’s top names privately ridiculing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters that the election was stolen from him, at the same time that they promoted and gave credence to those claims on air.

Private texts of Fox News hosts beg the question: Is the network a feedback loop or a fraud?

Bennet rightly believes journalistic misconduct puts democracy at risk:

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief.

There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

The reality is that the American democracy that once seemed secure is disappearing. Other countries are at risk as well. Billionaires who own many of the world’s major media operations bear major responsibility.

Update to the December 15 post:

Richard J. Tofel, founding General Manager and long-time President of Propublica, discussed James Bennet’s article about his experiences at the New York Times. Bennet had been removed from his role as opinion editor of America’s most influential newspaper after publication of a screed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, a man who had falsely claimed service as “a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Cotton also asserted that slavery had been “a necessary evil.”

According to Tofel, Bennet complained about journalistic standards in the controversial piece linked above without holding himself to a high standard. Tofel says the Cotton op-ed was simply not a good piece of work and Bennet had been responsible for other missteps that contributed to his NYT dismissal. But Tofel asserts Bennet’s article in The Economist is worth considering:

As an editor’s note published two days later recognized, [Cotton’s Op-Ed] assertion that “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa [were] infiltrating protest marches” after the murder of George Floyd was at best unsubstantiated, and probably bogus. Saying that police “bore the brunt” of the violence was at best an “overstatement.” The editor’s note didn’t say so, but the article’s claim that “the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich,” sourced to one tweet from a reporter, was nonsense…

When Bennet, for instance, analogizes to newsrooms in saying that “liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses,” I think he reveals more than he intends. Universities, perhaps a bit like op-ed pages, are not analogous to newsrooms in being appropriately subject to “control.” Rather, they ought to be places where diversity of all sorts, very much including in views, are among the attributes most highly prized…

A month later, and having now read the Bennet piece several times, I maintain the view that it’s worth your time. More than that, its arguments, even if you vigorously reject them, deserve your engagement. At a moment in our history when illiberalism (a polite word for it) seems ascendant on both ends of the political spectrum— even if far from symmetrically— grappling with these issues is an urgent task for all of us.

Taking That James Bennet Article Seriously

Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover of Twitter is a “chilling development” in billionaires’ desire to increase their political influence by buying up many of the world’s largest and most influential media brands, a leading British analyst has warned.

Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, said the super-rich have long sought to buy newspapers to help push their agendas and it was now possible to “count on one hand the big media brands that aren’t owned by an oligarch or other billionaire”.

The Guardian, May 2022