by James T. Murphy
Declarations of unity aside, it appears as though the present tenant in the White House will say one thing and do another, unlike the previous tenant who left no guesswork with respect to what he said he would do. Knowing for sure that past behavior does not justify present conduct in all instances, it would nevertheless appear that taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seems to bestow a certain protective shroud allowing for all sorts of now you see it, now you don’t. The degree to which this is upsetting is measured by whether or not your guy is doing the talking. The problem however runs deeper.
Beneath the pomp and circumstance of offical speak by a President and his staff lie the Fourth and Fifth Estates, those actual and would be purveyors of “news”, sometimes reported accurately, more often not. Whether you line up with CNN or FOX News for example, not recognizing the slant applied to daily events leads only to acquiesence, a blind acceptance that whatever is feed to you is healthy and pure. If truth be told, very few news outlets tell it like it is on all issues, and at all times. Therein lies the danger.
A free press needs to be diligent in its search for the truth. It cannot pay homage or in anyway conduct itself as though it is other than unbiased, free of all attachments to this or that, excepting the truth of course. It must leave a consumer with an unvarnished recap, without slant or favor, and should not be in service to anything save the real skinny. Neither is the truth so difficult to uncover, nor should journalists exploit it in a biased or partial manner. To report as though one is writing an OP/ED, unless of course one is, is to cheat the reader/viewer/listener and even malign the reporter’s sense of integrity, though such a concern seems, more and more, to be willingly sacrificed upon the altar of nepotism, and this is so whether the broker of such prejudice cares to admit it or not. And that is where the twains will never meet, for it is all too clear that the scions of news gathering, from whichever side of the aisle they observe and report, have been co-opted, a situation they themselves have caused.
A basic, fundamental principle of proper journalism is to get the facts straight, an effort one can hardly abide while acting as a wingman for one political persuasion or another. If one’s objective is to further a particular goal, other than dispassionate and truthful revelation, the result is necessarily contaminated, poisoned with the inclination to inform with bias, instead of impartiality. A journalist’s stock in trade is their independence, freedom from special interest, political, corporate, societal or otherwise. If you prefer to hear/read/see only that with which you agree, there is plenty of media to go around, but in the end, when the government and the cultural elites come to collect and control all aspects of a free society, the lack of an independent reporting source, if we in fact descend to that level, will be at the heart of that moment. The media should stop acting like cheerleaders and get back to broadcasting the play by play as it appears. When we are feed more than the actual facts, and tinted by an agenda, the game clock no longer matters, as the result is pre-ordained.
Now it is certainly true that most stories have at least two sides, nevertheless it is the obligation of the storyteller to present all sides, objectively and accurately. The sad fact however is that just as two eyewitnesses to the same event may report differently, so too, reporters can and do report the same business with a contrast sometimes so stark we are sometimes left with wonderment as to what actually transpired. Read any article on the same topic as reported in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune for example and then spend some time reconciling the differences. One sees two teams of cheerleaders rooting for, and impelling you to root for, a particular team. This is not the dissemination of news for its own sake, but accounting calculated to make some point or other, be it red, blue or purple.
Another basic tenet of reporting the news is to do no harm. Leaving aside the Twitterati of the Fifth Estate, and other unsocial media, the intent of which most often is to besmirch and cancel, some working journalists need to recognize the power of the press, while others clearly do and take advantage of that power. And as in all else, power corrupts. You know the rest. Lastly, why are the retractions, if and when they appear, relegated to the lower right hand column mixed among the legal notices? Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. Is it because accountability is held in such low esteem these days when it comes to proclaiming the ‘truth” of one side or another?
Fake News, a term ironically popularized by Delaware’s Favorite Son’s immediate predecessor is all around, emanating from all quarters. and without respite. We ignore it, or accomodate it, at our own peril. Valuable and ethical reporting is a bedrock of a democracy. Anything else leads to tyranny.
“All I want is the truth. Just give me the truth.” John Lennon.