The decline of American journalism
Major US journalism schools are leading the decline in American news standards. What was once a beacon is now just another political battleground. Pity US democracy.
More than 50 US journalism professors have signed a petition demanding the New York Times examine the sourcing of a major story it published on sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. This does not portend well for American journalism.
The New York Times story “‘Screams Without Words’: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” has come under attack for alleged discrepancies in its sourcing. The New York Times is standing by its story, but the petition has nothing to do with the paper’s editorial standards. It is part of the campaign of denialism and lies about Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. The Islamist-Leftist alliance is working to delegitimize Israel and its war in Gaza against the genocidal Hamas terror group.
George Orwell wrote that “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This petition is a transparent attempt to control the past and, therefore, the future, by casting doubt about what happened on October 7. Holocaust denial took decades to take root, but in the post-truth internet age, it began almost immediately after October 7.
It is indisputable that Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war. Hamas terrorists filmed it, there were witnesses, and there are survivors, including Israeli victims who needed abortions. How hard Israel and these women have had to fight to have this weaponized sexual assault recognized has been a study in moral decrepitude.
The fact that American journalism professors are participating in this is disgusting and concerning. Firstly, it shows US journalism has lost its unique credibility and standing. Secondly, these professors are training the next generation of journalists.
The US was long the only place where being a journalist was respectable. Elsewhere, journalists rank with used-car salesmen and real-estate agents as untrustworthy. While the US is not alone in valuing free speech, the constitutional elevation of it put a halo around journalists and their work. Reporters were seen as doing something noble and patriotic, reporting the truth. Publishers invested in newsrooms and magnificent investigative journalism was produced. American long-form journalism remains a treat.
Journalism schools themselves are distinctly American. Journalism is a vocation, not a profession, and the training was traditionally a cadetship. If you were a graduate, you did a shorter cadetship, but only over time did this become the norm.
America was unique in awarding university degrees in journalism, giving it an academic veneer, and, when done well, a theoretical foundation. While you can study journalism in most countries today, such degrees are far less common outside the US. Most journalists elsewhere have liberal arts and law degrees.
Journalism schools have not been immune to the Far Left’s takeover of liberal arts faculties, and universities more broadly. The ratio of liberal to conservative professors has changed from four-to-one twenty years ago to nine-to-one today. Different kinds of reporters are now coming out of these schools.
An old mentor of mine, an esteemed columnist at Fortune magazine when it was one of America’s platinum mastheads, used to joke that “Journalism is a good way to get a liberal arts education at someone else’s expense.”
That used to be true. Journalists used to learn about the world by reporting on it. Today, they learn about the world at university, then go out and start writing about it. They think they know what is going on before they have done any reporting.
Journalism has always had a role in speaking truth to power, but that was by publishing facts and truths that were awkward for those in power. Many reporters today see themselves as activists.
Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war illustrates this. Journalists have come to the conflict with many assumptions and reported events on that basis. Ideology has taken over. Rather than looking at the facts and then building a story from those, reporters increasingly start with a narrative and search for facts to support it, or to discredit facts that undermine it (as this petition to the New York Times aims to do).
Trust in the mainstream media has fallen off a precipice. About 53 percent of Americans report being worried that news media will report inaccuracies or misinformation during this year’s election campaign. There has been an avalanche of fake news, and the cynical rejection of real news as fake. The result is the loss of an agreed narrative, and that, ultimately, is what makes a nation.
There are still many excellent journalists, and there are plenty of outstanding pieces of journalism, but overall, standards have declined. It is not clear that any great journalistic institutions remain.
It is vital we halt the freefall in news media standards. It is an uphill battle when America’s once-revered journalism schools are now part of the problem.
In the Moral Clarity pipeline…
The danger of false premises: Reporting news based on certain assumptions is sure path to biased and partisan journalism. Unfortunately, it is everywhere.
Colonialist imperialist nonsense: The idea that Israel is colonialist and imperialist is the most absurd of all the nonsensical lies perpetrated about the Jewish state.
Is the diaspora losing its liberal home? Israel is not the only Jewish homeland under attack, liberal democracy is the other.
Time to pay attention: Islamists mean it when they say they want to destroy Israel, murder Jews, and bring death to America and the West. It is a dangerous mistake not to believe them.