Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.
"Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro
Who won the 2020 US presidential election? If viewers think it was A and you report that it was B, will they believe you? Will they continue to watch/read you? If not, what does that do to your revenue and ability to pay your bills?
As Jason Zweig wrote:
> There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.
But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.
And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.
Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?
Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?
Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?
You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.
As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.
Let us try something simpler: is the world round or flat?
This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.
Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.
Journalism for quite sometime has little to do with informing and more manipulating. If not for money then political/personal agendas. Sadly for most people it's only clear in retrospect.
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.
> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.
Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.
But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.
If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.
Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.
Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.
The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.
That, I think, is the loss.
Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.