From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy
A large part of the mainstream press no longer seems to believe that its primary responsibility is to report what happened, present competing
arguments fairly, investigate the powerful and allow readers to reach
their own conclusions. Increasingly, journalists have assigned
themselves a different job. They arenrCOt merely reporting on society.
They are helping society move toward what they believe it ought to become.
Modern advocacy journalism has increasingly attached itself to a
collection of moral and political causes: climate activism, transgender ideology, racial equity, DEI, expansive immigration, abortion rights, hostility toward traditional religious morality, suspicion of
nationalism, and enthusiasm for international institutions and
technocratic government. These positions differ from newsroom to
newsroom, and certainly not every journalist subscribes to all of them.
But taken together, they form a remarkably consistent worldview.
The problem isnrCOt that journalists hold these beliefs. They are entitled
to them. The problem is that many journalists have ceased to recognize
them as political beliefs at all. They have been elevated into moral
truths. Climate policy isnrCOt a political dispute; one side is rCLdenying science.rCY Gender ideology isnrCOt a political or scientific dispute; one side is attacking rCLtrans rights.rCY Mass immigration isnrCOt a legitimate disagreement over national interest, labor, culture and sovereignty; opposition becomes rCLanti-immigrant.rCY Traditional Christianity isnrCOt simply another moral framework; increasingly it becomes rCLChristian nationalism.rCY National sovereignty becomes rCLnationalism.rCY Populism becomes a rCLthreat to democracy.rCY
Once you have classified your own political preferences as morally
correct rather than politically contestable, objectivity becomes almost impossible. Why would you give equal consideration to people who are
wrong? Worse, why give a platform to people whose ideas you believe
cause harm?
There is an arrogance buried inside advocacy journalism that rarely gets discussed. It assumes that the journalist is not merely better informed
than the reader, but morally better equipped to determine which
political outcomes are acceptable. The reader becomes less a citizen to
be informed than a subject to be guided.
And that is precisely where the intellectual justification for advocacy journalism enters. The old journalistic aspiration toward objectivity
has increasingly been attacked as rCLbothsidesism,rCY false balance or the rCLview from nowhere.rCY Prominent journalists and journalism scholars have argued instead for rCLmoral clarity,rCY an explicitly rCLmoral voice,rCY and journalism committed to defending an egalitarian conception of democracy
and confronting structural inequities.
Whether immigration levels are too high, whether biological sex matters
in womenrCOs athletics, whether national sovereignty should supersede decisions made by unelected transnational institutions, whether energy
policy should favor nuclear power, whether parents should have greater authority over schools, whether marriage and family deserve special protection, or whether a nationrCOs government owes a greater duty to its
own citizens than to people who arrived yesterday are political
questions. They are supposed to be debated.
Instead, an extraordinary number of these questions have migrated from
the category of political disagreement into the category of extremism.
That migration may be one of the most consequential stories American journalism has failed to cover, perhaps because journalists themselves
helped make it happen.
Consider Germany. Pick up almost any Reuters or Associated Press story
about Alternative f|+r Deutschland and you do not merely encounter the partyrCOs name. You encounter rCLthe far-right Alternative for Germany.rCY Again and again. Reuters used the formulation this month while reporting
that AfD is polling around 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The label arrives before readers learn what the
party actually proposes.
Think about what that language tells an American reader before he or she learns anything else about the party. Germany. Far right. Rising
rapidly. You do not need a degree in neurolinguistic programming to
understand the association being planted. AfD becomes associated first
with extremism, and only afterward with policy.
When Reuters calls a political party rCLfar-rightrCY in virtually every article, most readers are not reaching for Cas MudderCOs academic
definition of the European populist radical right. They hear something
much simpler: extremist.
And then something remarkable happens. Policies that would have been recognizably conservative, or even mainstream, within living memory now
serve as evidence for the label. Now, policies such as reducing mass immigration, deporting people who are in the country illegally,
protecting the traditional family, restoring nuclear power, resisting
further transfer of national sovereignty to the European Union,
preserving German culture, and putting German national interests first
all become rCLfar-right.rCY
Again, proportionality matters. Journalism is not obligated to pretend
that every fringe theory has equal evidentiary support. But who decides
when a political view no longer deserves equal coverage? The reporter?
The editor? The owner? The journalism professor? The NGO that has
labeled an organization extremist? The government agency supplying the reporter with information?
This becomes particularly dangerous when journalists overwhelmingly
inhabit the same political, educational and cultural ecosystem. They
cease to recognize their worldview as a worldview. It simply becomes
reality. Everyone else has an ideology. They have facts.
Two events happened that the transatlantic political and media
establishment clearly did not expect: Brexit and Donald Trump. Millions
of ordinary people rejected policies endorsed by nearly every
prestigious institution available to instruct them. The newspapers told
them. The economists told them. The universities told them. The
celebrities told them. The NGOs told them. The intelligence
establishment told them. The European establishment told them.
And the voters said no.
That should have produced a period of intense institutional
introspection. Why donrCOt these people believe us? Why donrCOt they want
what we are selling? What are we missing?
Instead, much of the establishment settled on another explanation. The
voters had been manipulated. Russian disinformation. Facebook. Cambridge Analytica. Fake news. Misinformation. Disinformation. Malinformation. Algorithms. Populism. Extremism.
Suddenly, the problem was not that citizens had looked at establishment policies and rejected them. The problem was that citizens had been
exposed to the wrong information.
This distinction matters enormously. Once the political problem is
defined as bad information causing bad democratic choices, information
control begins to look like defending democracy. Journalists become
natural partners in the project.
The change in language is impossible to miss. Protecting democracy increasingly came to mean protecting institutions from the choices
voters might make. There is a rather large philosophical problem hiding
in there.
The purpose of a free press is not to ensure that citizens reach the
correct political conclusion. It is to give citizens the information
they require to reach their own conclusions.
If you believe people are entitled to vote only after receiving
information curated to produce an acceptable result, then what you
actually believe in is something quite different. You believe in managed democracy.
The institutions decide the acceptable boundaries. The media enforce
them. The fact-checkers police them. The algorithms amplify them. The
public gets to choose from what remains. Then everyone congratulates themselves for having saved democracy.
https://www.malone.news/p/saving-democracy-from-democracy
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