gracchusdixit

It is an article of faith on the political right that the news media—the “mainstream media” in the parlance of Fox News Channel or the “lame-stream media” according to the linguistically inventive but otherwise dumb-as-wood Sarah Palin—have a liberal political bias that causes them to distort “the truth,” disdain “real Americans,” and all in all do damage to the country.

If only it were that simple.

The news media do have a bias, but it is not a liberal or even a political one.  It is a professional bias—one might call it a form of intellectual autism—in favor of what journalists fondly call “objectivity.”

“Objectivity” is the Holy Grail of modern journalism.  It was not always so.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, journalists were openly commercial and joyfully partisan.  Whether their readers (there were only readers in those days) agreed with them or not, at least they knew where they stood.  That all began to change a couple of generations ago, when the slightly disreputable craft of journalism, seeking respectability, began to “professionalize” itself.  With “professionalism” came standards.  Foremost among these was “objectivity.”

Insofar as journalists confuse “objectivity” with accuracy and evidence, they do indeed mislead us—but not in the way conservatives imagine.  “Objectivity” stipulates that any story or question that is even remotely controversial has two competing and equivalent sides that must be “balanced.”  To meet their self-imposed standards of “objectivity” and “balance,” journalists feel compelled to give equal weight and credence to both sides of every controversial question.

This is perfectly reasonable when it comes to questions of opinion or belief rather than evidence and reality.   For example, the existence of a God (or gods) can never be proved or disproved in a conclusive way.  Science is incapable of disproving a proposition that cannot be tested, and religion is incapable of proving a proposition that rests solely on faith.  Thus, any journalistic discussion of this question would necessarily require the two competing sides to be heard—that is, if anyone cared or was prepared to listen to such a boring and ultimately fruitless discussion.

This does not mean that all opposing arguments regarding questions of “belief” have equal claims on our attention.  The Biblical notion that a Judaeo-Christian God created the world in six days and took a nap on the seventh is factually absurd.  So is the notion (advanced by the Anglican bishop James Ussher in the 17th century and accepted as “truth” by evangelical Christians for hundreds of years thereafter) that the Lord rolled up his shirtsleeves precisely on Sunday, October 23, 4004 b.c.  Thanks to the unremitting work of countless geologists, paleontologists, and astronomers, we have known for quite a while now that the world was not created in six days a mere six thousand years ago.  To give equal time and credence to “faith-based” voices that cling to such fairy tales wouldn’t be “objective,” it would be preposterous.

Yet that is precisely what the news media so often do when it comes to questions of far greater consequence.

Perhaps the most egregious example is the news coverage given to the phenomenon of climate change over the course of the last twenty years.  Until just a few years ago, it was the standard practice of every major American newspaper and every American television network to “balance” stories about the effects of global warming with at least one—and usually more than one—voice of disbelief or outright denial.

No matter that these voices were (and still are) in nearly all cases quacks, hacks, or flacks, bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.  Never mind that a scientific consensus regarding the evidence for, and the causes of, climate change has existed for more than two decades.  No matter that the evidence itself has from the start been in the public domain and could have been read by any journalist who was willing to take the time to consult it.  Never mind that ours is the only country in the industrialized world where the deniers of climate change are still treated with a pretense of respect rather than the cranks or con men they are.   Because of the news media’s obsession with “objectivity” and “balance,” rather than accuracy, evidence, and fact, we as a nation have lost precious time in responding to a problem that threatens the existence of the planet.

For the same reason, we are now threatened by the prospect of an overtly racist, sexist, authoritarian bully becoming the next President of the United States.  The media’s first response to Donald Trump’s candidacy, of course, was disbelief, mingled with derision.  The moment he began winning primaries, however—which happened almost immediately—the cult of “objectivity” reasserted itself.  In the collective mind of the news media, Trump had become a legitimate candidate and had to be treated accordingly.   Every voice critical of his hubris, his vulgarity, his inflammatory and hateful rhetoric had to be “balanced” by another voice of explanation or exculpation, as if there were any meaningful equivalence between the two, as if Donald Trump were entitled to tear up the Constitution, ignore the rule of law, and subordinate the national interest to his personal interests and his all-consuming ego.

This absurd, and obscene, outcome is the direct result of the media’s obsession with “objectivity,” an obsession that makes no distinction between “right” and “wrong,” between accuracy and falsehood, between reality and fairy tales, a doctrine that subordinates all evidentiary considerations to a game of “he said, she said,” “on the one hand, on the other hand.”

As with climate change, it has taken the news media far too long to come to their senses regarding Donald Trump.  In the last few days, after nearly a year, finally, they appear to have realized that a psychopath like Trump must be covered, not “objectively,” but accurately—as the thug, liar, and danger to the nation that he is.  We can only hope that their realization hasn’t come too late.  We can only hope that voters will listen.