An argument for fairness

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

The problems with the fracas at the Los Angeles TimeS

When longtime Los Angeles Times legal columnist Harry Litman quit the paper, furious at its owner for “cozying up” to Donald J. Trump by cancelling an endorsement of Kamala Harris, he raised one of the most troubling questions in political journalism today. Should news outlets scrap the idea of “balance” in their coverage?

“First, the idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump,” Litman wrote in a Substack. The paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, “apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no ‘other hand.’ Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.”

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Litman further attacked the longstanding journalistic credo of neutrality, something long called “objectivity.” Instead, he suggested that news outlets need to clearly take a side, seemingly both on their editorial and news pages. He was particularly irked about the shelving of a multi-part series, “The Case Against Trump,” that was slated to run (presumably on the news pages) as a companion to the spiked pro-Harris editorial.

“These are not normal times. Look around. We are in the political, cultural, and legal fight of our lifetimes. Trump’s conduct since winning the election only reinforces his determination to replace constitutional rule with some form of authoritarian rule,” Litman wrote. “So the neutral posture that Soon-Shiong uses to justify his violence to the paper is exactly, fundamentally wrong. This is no time for neutrality and disinterest. It’s rather a time for choosing. And a choice for true facts and American values is necessarily a vigorous choice against Donald Trump.”

Litman’s impassioned argument is understandable, based in cold, hard facts and on claims by Trump himself about his intentions and his targets. The writer is also unquestionably correct about the incoming president’s long litany of lies, both in his first term and in the recent election. And Litman rightly observes that “people who voted for Trump were fed a relentless false account of issue after issue, including Trump’s signature distortions about immigrants (eating pets, committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes), which Fox News and right-wing social media parroted relentlessly.”

But his suggestions and solution, in the end, are wrong-headed and self-defeating. They not only call for violating longstanding journalistic ethics about fairness, but they would have exactly the opposite effect he seeks on the electorate – especially the 49.9 percent of American voters who backed Trump (by the latest Associated Press count, though the Atlas of U.S. Elections pegs Trump’s tally at 49.72 percent). They likely would drive such folks even further away from responsible media than they are now.

Litman is in effect arguing that the press must become full-throated participants in The Resistance, as the effort was called during Trump’s first term. But is that tack going to persuade anyone in the 49 percent? Or, rather, are they simply going to do more of what such folks have done for decades, which is to turn away from the press as hopelessly biased? Recall that just 11% of Republicans and only 58% of Democrats have a high degree of trust in the media, as reported in 2023.

Followed to its logical conclusion, Litman’s argument would have the press shouting into a void, preaching only to the choir. Sure, unceasing hostile coverage would please anti-Trump readers, reassuring them about their legitimate fury at the man and the dangers he poses. But would it make any difference in the end with many alienated folks? Would it win over hearts and minds that need to be gained?

Ever since Trump appeared on the electoral scene, we have seen polarization widen in the media. On the one side, news and opinion coverage in responsible outfits such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, as well as CNN and MSNBC, has been relentlessly negative. On the other, fawning operations such as Fox News and Newsmax have trumpeted rightist misstatements and exaggerations, pandering flagrantly to Trump and his partisans (and gaining ground in the process).

And the election results, tragically, suggest that the anti-Trump reports in the media made no significant dent. No matter how many ugly, if accurate, headlines the critics produced about Trump’s lies and dangerous plans, his backers remained unmoved. Many likely never saw them.

At best, the outlets proved impotent beyond their loyal readerships. At worst – and this is the more dangerous thing for our democracy and for an informed public – they alienated potential readers and viewers with the ceaseless critiques, no matter how legitimate they were.

In short, The Resistance failed. And now, Litman’s call for an end to balance and neutrality would drive it further into the wilderness. Abandoning such principles would cost the media still more readers and viewers.

What’s more, his problematic solution – as shown by his action – is to quit. Three other editorial page members did so at the LA Times and some 2,000 readers did so, in effect, by cancelling their subscriptions. Rather than join the fray and battle it out with pro-Trump commentators (such as CNN right-winger Scott Jennings whom Soon-Shiong is hiring as he develops what he called “diverse perspectives”) Litman took his marbles and went home.

Just who does that help? Certainly, it may be satisfying to Litman. And, yes, he still can air his views in his Substack and even might find other outlets. But will remaining LA Times readers be served by his trenchant views not appearing any longer in the paper?

In the end, the press needs to call out Trump’s lies. It needs to report fully and fairly on whatever dictatorial overreaches he attempts. It must report on the incompetents and ideologues he plans to lard his Cabinet with. It has to raise questions about the dubious judges he is likely to stock the courts with, right up to the highest court in the land.

Moreover, it will be obliged to report on the pernicious economic effects likely to arise from Trump’s tariffs. It will need to detail the human tragedies that his deportation plans will spawn. It must spell out whatever disasters arise from foreign policies, perhaps including the abandonment of Ukraine. Certainly, it has to cover the disregard for the law shown by his plans to pardon Jan. 6 insurgents.

All that demands coverage. But, at least in the news pages, that coverage should be free of the writers’s opinions. Sure, they should quote the many smart Trump critics, but they also must give voice to his credible defenders (hard as they may be to find). Put the authorial condemnations on the editorial pages, along with defenses. But leave the news pages to tell things straight.

My suggestion, for instance, for the LA Times series, “The Case Against Trump,” would have been a sister series, “The Case For Trump.” Admittedly, the latter would be harder to flesh out than the former, but some in a near majority of the electorate may have warmed to it (and perhaps would then have read the critical package, too).

Importantly, fairness differs from “bothsidesism.” It’s not a matter of he said/she said coverage that insists on equal numbers of inches for various sides. The first mission of the press is to seek out the truth, as best it can, and that doesn’t mean parroting “alternative facts.” When the president speaks falsely, as he surely will, that must be called out, for instance.

But, in the case of Trump, it means letting people in positions of trust for him air their views, even if others undercut them. It means trying to understand the fears and hopes of his supporters and reflecting them in the coverage, as well as pointing out likely shortcomings in solutions by Trump (will he really bring down the prices of groceries, for instance?)

In the end, I disagree with Litman’s approach, but I second his fact-based criticisms of Trump, a man all too easy to loathe and fear. But I also am mindful of the need for fairness in journalism.

That fairness ideal is fragile, relatively new and almost uniquely American.

As I wrote in an academic paper some years ago, it wasn’t until after World War I that a devotion to what was then called objectivity took hold in the U.S. In 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors adopted the Canons of Journalism, mandating that “news reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.” The American Newspaper Guild, the journalists’ union, in 1934 adopted a code of ethics that called for accurate and unbiased reporting, guided “only by fact and fairness.” And by the end of World War II, objectivity was “universally acknowledged to be the spine of the journalist’s moral code,” according to academics Michael S. Schudson and Susan E. Tifft.

Yes, “objectivity” has long since been discredited, since no one is truly objective. The very questions journalists raise and their choices of what constitutes news are subjective matters. Their approaches arise from their backgrounds, their educations and their biases.

But fairness as an ideal endures. It’s a value that my former editor at BusinessWeek, Steve Shepard, insisted on, even as we undertook viewpoint-oriented magazine journalism. It’s possible both to have little use for Soon-Shiong’s financially self-interested actions at the LA Times and to uphold the ideal of fairness and balance in coverage.

Indeed, if journalists don’t do that, the levels of trust in media will surely plunge still further.

As our major political institutions seem compromised by Trumpism, and at a time when the risks that Trump’s presidency poses for our democracy are all too real, the press is a guardrail we can’t afford to lose. And that’s why the press can’t afford to keep losing its audience.

Litman calls balance a “bromide.” Isn’t it, instead, a pillar that should not be undercut, whether by Trump or those opposed to him? Should we, in effect, help a potential tyrant by abandoning cherished journalistic ideals?

All That Is Old Is New Again

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Joe Weber

Couples who have been married a long time repeat the same arguments again and again. Denied resolution, they bicker over a husband’s habit of putting keys and wallets on shelves meant for artwork. They fight over whether he listens enough to her. They scrap over whether she is too critical. The arguments grow so familiar that they should, perhaps, be numbered so a wife can say “No. 13,” instead of berating the husband over the wallet, or “No. 17” over the listening issue, perhaps “No. 3” over whether she criticizes too much.

Some publications have sought to be helpful in seeking a way out of the never-ending battles. See the Guardian on this.

Lately, we’ve seen a similar dynamic at work in the argument over journalistic objectivity. Journalists and some non-journalists have beaten this horse for decades and lately the argument is getting a fresh airing by a generation that, apparently, is discovering the debate anew.

The latest missile to fly comes from A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, whose long discussion appears in the Columbia Journalism Review. To boil it down, he argues that objectivity should remain as a journalistic ideal. He argues: “I continue to believe that objectivity—or if the word is simply too much of a distraction, open-minded inquiry—remains a value worth striving for.”

But he avoids the term, mostly characterizing it as a hoary notion espoused by philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann, who detailed the objectivity idea in the early decades of the last century. Indeed, Sulzberger prefers that media instead regard itself instead as “independent.” Sulzberger’s view: “But independence, the word we use inside the Times, better captures the full breadth of this journalistic approach and its promise to the public at large.”

By independent, he means reporting without fear or favor, as his great-great-grandfather put it, enshrining the ideal so much that it became the motto of The Times.

“It means Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth—and the search for it with an open yet skeptical mind—above all else,” Sulzberger writes. “Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be.”

Martin Baron, source; The Washington Post

This eloquent round of the argument was preceded by similar thoughts from Martin Baron, a former Washington Post executive editor. In late March, he weighed in with a straightforward – if similarly nuanced — defense of objectivity, relying on the rhetorical device of comparing journalists to professional of various sorts. The public demands objectivity in judgments by judges, police officers, government regulators and, perhaps most persuasively, by doctors, he argued.

“We want doctors to be objective in their diagnoses of the medical conditions of their patients,” Baron wrote. “We don’t want them recommending treatments based on hunches or superficial, subjective judgments about their patients. We want doctors to make a fair, honest, honorable, accurate, rigorous, impartial, open-minded evaluation of the clinical evidence.”

Neither Baron nor Sulzberger were naïve in their contentions, though. They acknowledged the arguments that reporters’ backgrounds shaped their viewpoints and their familiarity or unfamiliarity with communities they write about would be important. They recognized the problems posed by bias.

Still, Baron suggested that certain practices, well-honed by earlier generations of journalists, can elevate one above the limits. Also citing Lippman, Baron wrote: “Our job as journalists, as he saw it, was to determine the facts and place them in context. The goal should be to have our work be as scientific as we could make it. Our research would be conscientious and careful. We would be guided by what the evidence showed. That meant we had to be generous listeners and eager learners, especially conscious of our own suppositions, prejudices, preexisting opinions and limited knowledge.”

And Baron defined objectivity in negative terms, arguing: “Objectivity is not neutrality. It is not on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand journalism. It is not false balance or both-sidesism. It is not giving equal weight to opposing arguments when the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction. It does not suggest that we as journalists should engage in meticulous, thorough research only to surrender to cowardice by failing to report the facts we’ve worked so hard to discover.”

“The goal is not to avoid criticism, pander to partisans or appease the public. The aim is not to win affection from readers and viewers. It does not require us to fall back on euphemisms when we should be speaking plainly. It does not mean we as a profession labor without moral conviction about right and wrong.”

Putting the ideas positively, Baron echoed what journalism teachers have taught for years. “The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible,” he held. “It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know. We don’t start with the answers. We go seeking them, first with the already formidable challenge of asking the right questions and finally with the arduous task of verification.”

These spirited and much-detailed arguments were all kickstarted anew in January by Leonard Downie Jr. His view, distilled, goes like this: we all are prisoners of our racial, gender, socio-economic and political backgrounds and thus cannot hope to report objectively on anything, so why bother trying? Instead, just own up to the biases and, indeed, own them.

Downie, another former executive editor at The Washington Post who now is a professor at Arizona State University, argued in a Washington Post piece that objectivity is obsolete. He and a colleague quizzed newspeople and concluded: “What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news. We interviewed more than 75 news leaders, journalists and other experts in mainstream print, broadcast and digital news media, many of whom also advocate such a change. This appears to be the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism.”

He suggested that one’s biases can’t be readily shelved and that identity is central.

“But increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality,” Downie wrote. “They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

Indeed, newsrooms need to “move beyond” objectivity, he argued, though just how that would look seemed a bit gauzy.

“We urge news organizations to, first, strive not just for accuracy based on verifiable facts but also for truth — what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have called ‘the best obtainable version of the truth.’ This means original journalism that includes investigating and reporting on all aspects of American life.”

These debates, including the question of whether to deep-six the term “objectivity,” remind me of the contention of my former editor at BusinessWeek, Stephen Shepard. Because BW was a magazine – a venue in which readers expected a point of view in coverage – Shepard maintained that fairness was really the attainable goal. Our reporters were not akin to cameras, unblinkingly recording reality, but rather we were making judgments constantly. But our judgments and arguments had to be fact-based and fair to all views involved.

Demonstrating a few years earlier just how old this argument is, I wrote about this all in an academic piece published in 2015 in Journalism and Mass Communication Educator. The piece detailed the development of the objectivity ideal –- which is really only about a century old — and the arguments that have raged about it. The debate, as I say, is hardly new.

The bottom line, I believe, is that objectivity is a myth and an ideal. It is as unattainable as the beauty of a Greek god or goddess — but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying, striving to reach the grandeur of a David or the loveliness of an Athena.

We owe it to readers to report the facts thoroughly and fairly, acknowledging differing views. We need to pursue the truth as best we can determine it, quoting responsible voices on all sides of the issues we write about. That doesn’t mean showcasing “alternative facts,” or failing to call out misstatements or untruths (indeed, Trump coverage is a sorry example of the need to make such callouts). And it does mean reporting on things that might go against one’s own views and doing so well and with appropriate distance.

But we also can’t forget that it is often outrage at or discomfort with things we cover that drive us. We get angry at injustice. We are stirred to write about wrongdoing. Why? Because we judge that it’s wrong. And it may be that who we are informs our passion or judgment about what is right and wrong. That is hardly objective, but it can make for great journalism.

There is much wisdom in the pieces by Sulzberger and Baron and, it must be admitted, in the Downie piece — even if one disagrees with his conclusions. Reflecting the journalistic traditions these three were reared in, the arguments they make are balanced, thorough and smart. They are worth pondering.