On Friday, Associated Press media reporter David Bauder looked at recent internal newsroom debates that went public, “Journalists taking the critical gaze they deploy to cover the world and turning it inward at their own employers.” He cited Uri Berliner’s essay on NPR, NBC dumping RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, and a fight at The New York Times over a story on sexual assault by Hamas.
Journalism as a profession attracts people who are anti-authoritarian, who see themselves as truth-tellers. Many believe the way to make an organization better is by criticizing it, said Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of The Elements of Journalism and a professor at the University of Maryland.
“We’re taught to hold power to account,” said Kate O’Brian, president of news for the E.W. Scripps Co.
There’s one difference in these controversies: Berliner was basically forced out for exposing the Left. The other controversies were the Left enforcing their wokeness. Bauder summarized that “NPR management says he is wrong. But Berliner quickly became a hero among conservatives who hold the same belief.” The AP reporter doesn’t identify most of the rebels in these controversies as leftists enforcing a new ideological hard line (that Berliner was protesting):
A generational change also has emboldened many young journalists. In his own classroom, Kaplan sees more young journalists questioning traditional notions of objectivity that keep them from expressing opinions. Many believe they have the right to state their beliefs and support causes, he said.
“Now you have journalists that are advocates,” Rosenstiel said. “That reflects something of a culture war that is happening inside of journalism.”
Debates over coverage of the Trump administration had a similar galvanizing effect.
“There are some journalists who say, ‘I’m not interested in covering conservatives because they are not interested in the truth,’” Rosenstiel said.
See? There it is. The Woke Left doesn’t believe in debates. They call it “bothsidesism” and insist debates be shut down, that contrary opinions somehow make “marginalized” people feel “unsafe.” Are these journalists “anti-authoritarian” when they only want one side to be published? They clearly believe conservatives should become the “marginalized,” now and forever.
This was what happened when New York Times staffers had a fit over their newspaper posting an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton on using National Guard troops to suppress violent rioting.
One of the most prominent thinkers on this issue, [leftist] journalist Wesley Lowery, has written that some defenders of objectivity are more interested in inoffensiveness and appearance, less so on journalistic rigor.
“In pursuing objectivity, we silence the marginalized,” a Harvard student, Ajay V. Singh, wrote at the height of the debate. “In silencing the marginalized, we tip the narrative of ‘truth’ into the hands of the powerful.”
The logic there is bizarre: quote conservatives, and you “silence” someone else? Wesley Lowery wrote a book with a conspiracy-theory title, They Can’t Kill Us All. In Lowery’s world, he thinks no one should be allowed to protest they don’t want him dead, they just oppose his paranoid views. When you represent “racial justice,” then you can intimidate journalists out of quoting the “anti-justice” side.