When Reporters Act as Referees, the Public Approves
Even before Donald Trump became president, most Americans said reporters are biased. Seventy-four percent described news coverage as slanted or prejudicial, according to a July 2016 Pew Research poll. Seventy-four percent! That’s three in four respondents.
Almost as surprising, most Democrats said media coverage was slanted: 57 percent of moderates and 73 percent of liberals. Four years later, public opinion about media bias has… worsened. Can you blame Americans?
Cable news hosts have been the most biased. In November 2018 in Cape Girardeau, Fox News’ Sean Hannity actually appeared with President Trump at a political rally.
We hard-news print reporters have more respect within the profession for playing it straight. We are expected to be objective or strive to be at least. By objective I mean use neutral language and avoid conveying personal opinions and portraying people or institutions positively or negatively.
Now, this informal rule is coming under attack.
The Movement for Reporters as Fans
In a New York Times op-ed in June, Wes Lowery, a two-time Pulitzer winner, criticized objectivity as unrealistic. “No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective because no human being is,” he wrote, adding that reporters ought not to promise “our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias — submitting ourselves to a life sentence of public thoughtlessness …”
Mr. Lowery’s op-ed received more praise than criticism from journalism’s leading lights (and even outright support from others). I recall thinking they had given in when they should have stood firm in opposition. Now I recognize I was naive.
The journalistic establishment has failed to endorse objectivity as a goal. The venerable Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics has not used the words “objective” or “objectivity” since 1973. Nineteen seventy-three!
Nixon had not even waved goodbye on the helicopter on the White House lawn. Striving to be objective is difficult and inconvenient.
They don’t propose to elevate their sources’ subjectivity; reporter David Simon, then of the Baltimore Sun, urged reporters to do this, but not them. They wish to elevate their subjectivity. They have the ink and online screens. Their perception of reality wins.
This attitude does not check or counter bias. It leads to or begets it. One reporter’s embrace of his or her reality is a reader’s perception of bias. They feed off one another.
When Reporters Become Fans …
The downside to reportorial subjectivity is so obvious I am surprised no one made it. Yet I will make it here. Politicians and public figures can more easily make demagogic appeals against the media.
Say what you want about Donald Trump, but he didn’t create distrust of the media. It was waiting to be exploited. All he did was whip up and amplify it. Mr. Nixon despised reporters as much as Mr. Trump. Yet it’s impossible to imagine him finding a large, angry audience for bashing the press. He lacked the constituency. What was to despise about Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, and Eric Sevareid (or later, Barbara Walters and Max Robinson)?
Yes, the Nixon-era media culture differed from ours. Cable news did not exist, let alone social media, and few political talk shows aired. Still, the extent to which the media culture differed is often overstated.
The Watergate hearings dominated American public life like no event since 9-11. They dominated TV coverage gavel-to-gavel during the day and early evening for months. They dominated daily life so much that after he resigned, President Ford said that “our long national nightmare is over.” The press coverage felt suffocating. If President Nixon thought he could gain politically by accusing the press of creating fake news, he had the time and opportunity to do so.
To be sure, the Watergate reporters performed a popular role. They were watchdogs who held public officials accountable. Reporters are still are viewed as much, and few argue they should stop.
Yet the role more of us should play is as a referee or umpire. You know, the people wearing the black-and-white striped shirts and whistles around their necks or protective gear. They call fouls on players. They resolve disputes between or among coaches. They let the players play. They strive to be… wait for it… objective.
The country’s attitude to referees has been complex. Americans love to hate them. They also accept their legitimacy. This isn’t Colombia where a soccer referee was murdered last year.
The referee analogy is illuminating in another way. It casts media bias in a new light. To most Americans, news has become akin to a typical American pickup basketball game. There are no referees. Players and fans from one political party call the fouls. And readers are required to be partisan fans rather than spectators.
This analogy highlights a weakness of Mr. Lowery’s argument for fairness and accuracy as standards to rally around. Who thinks players and partisan fans can be fair, much less accurate?
By the same token, American readers approve of journalists performing the role of society’s referees. Take a 2014 study from two academics of 436 college students. Students were much more likely to say a news article was credible when the reporter adjudicated truth claims than when he or she did not, the survey found.
That cinches the case for me. More reporters should act as referees rather than fans, let alone players. All they can lose are their egos and biases.
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The threat to our republic by emerging anti-authoritarian trends in the Republican party and its followers is so grave that by-the-book objective reporting — as opposed to telling the truth as best determined fairly — won’t suffice, with each side’s arguments and claims given the same credence, and with the assumption of good faith. “On the one hand this and the other hand that” perspective no longer represents the political reality of our time. This critique of mainstream journalism is well represented by press critics Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen, an NYU professor: https://pressthink.org/2016/09/asymmetry-between-the-major-parties-fries-the-circuits-of-the-mainstream-press/ On the other hand, reporters choosing up sides early and failing to credit legitimate arguments made by political players they oppose, can also cause dangers, so it’s important to keep an open mind. The best recent example is how too many mainstream and liberal journalists ruled out the possibility of a lab leak involvement in the origins of COVID, tarring even legitimate scientific concerns as simply parroting the right-wing conspiracy theories, China-bashing of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. Jonathan Chait pointed out this weakness in New York magazine: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/lab-leak-liberal-media-theory-china-wuhan-lab-cotton-trump.html His critique seems to echo the dangers you highlight in your article about the risks of reporters becoming fans of the anti-Trump critics then dominating debate in the scientific community, without looking too closely at the facts. In the arena of science and medicine, especially, political biases shouldn’t play a part.