The Press Is Its Own Worst Enemy

By Becket Adams

Sunday, December 24, 2023

 

Among the many downsides to a press that is captured by a single political ideology is the gradual dissolution of reasonable and measured editorial standards. When journalists and editors are in lockstep with the demands and passions of a lone political entity, what will naturally follow are indefensible, incoherent, and contradictory editorial decisions.

 

This week, we saw a prime example of this dangerous tendency in the headlines published following the Colorado supreme court’s ruling to keep Donald Trump off the state’s 2024 ballot.

 

“Colorado Supreme Court justices face a flood of threats after disqualifying Trump from the ballot,” reads an NBC News headline.

 

Threats? This is serious business, as serious as when wild-eyed protesters descended on the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices following the Dobbs decision. Yet, after all that, and even after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the target of a failed assassination attempt, this is the headline NBC News published in May: “Free speech or federal crime? Protesters are still marching outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes.”

 

Some threats against judges are more serious than others. It’s a real wonder that overall trust in the press is lower than trust in banks.

 

Other recent stories produced befuddlement in readers. On December 15, the Associated Press declined to release the name of a suspect arrested in connection with the murder of Detroit synagogue leader Samantha Woll. In its breaking news report, the AP explained, “The Associated Press is not naming the suspect because it’s unclear if he has a lawyer who can speak on his behalf.” (The suspect is a 28-year-old black man named Michael Jackson-Bolanos.)

 

Whether Jackson-Bolanos has legal representation is not the AP’s concern (or business, really). His arrest and name are a matter of public record. It’s news. Not a single news organization, including even the AP, has ever used the standard laid out by the AP.

 

“I worked for AP for three years and never once was told to do that,” a former staffer, Charles Hoskinson, told me. “In fact, the prevailing standard was to do the opposite. If it’s public information, report it.”

 

Also, as an aside, if Jackson-Bolanos does not have a lawyer, the court will provide one. Does the AP understand how the U.S. criminal-justice system works? Did AP staffers invent an entirely new journalistic standard, which lasted for only a few hours before the story was updated, because they believed the possible murder of a Jew by a black man required that they shield certain communities and individuals from potential blowback? Apparently!

 

But this isn’t reporting. This is crisis communications, and it’s a prime example of the type of on-the-fly journalism “standards” that come with ideological capture, standards invented practically on the spot by newsmen more worried about running afoul of their tribe than about reporting the news cleanly and accurately.

 

Lastly, Forbes ran a big piece this week, winking and nodding at Chief Justice John Roberts’s wealth. “How John Roberts Became the Supreme Court’s Richest Justice,” reads the headline.

 

Curiously, not mentioned anywhere in the story is the fact that Roberts took the title only after his former colleagues, liberal justices Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, exited the court. After little more than five years into Roberts’s career as a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg held a net worth as high as $45.48 million and as low as $10.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Breyer at the same time held a net worth as high as $16.2 million and as low as $4.5 million. During this time, Roberts clocked in with a net worth as high as $5.2 million and as low as $2.1 million. Forbes even reported this at the time! Unlike its reporting today, though, Forbes’s reporting back then wasn’t filled with all manner of insinuation and innuendo.

 

Now that Roberts’s worth has grown to an estimated $25 million, according to Forbes, he is the target of a whisper campaign unlike anything his wealthy liberal counterparts ever experienced. Forbes’s reporting, which is filled with snide asides, includes comments about the cost of Roberts’s son’s schooling (“70,000 a year”!), and this passage:

 

Roberts largely grew up in Long Beach, Indiana, an elite lakefront town on the Michigan border once populated exclusively by whites. The son of a Bethlehem Steel company man, Roberts quickly put himself on the inside track to the heights of American society, applying to the exclusive La Lumiere School nearby with an admissions essay that explained, “I want to get the best job by getting the best education.” After graduating from La Lumiere, he stuck true to that same philosophy, enrolling at Harvard.

 

There were no such Forbes articles written about Ginsburg’s or Breyer’s respective wealth. Only Roberts, the conservative chief justice, gets this treatment.

 

When considering what’s unprecedented or even newsworthy, many in the press seem uninterested in applying rigorous editorial and journalistic consistency. It’s simply whatever reporters and their editors believe their ideologically invested readers want to hear or read, but this approach produces the exact opposite of curious and fearless journalism.

 

When consistency means offering the other team fair and equal treatment — and our preferred demographic don’t want that! — consistency goes right out the window. Stories are reported, or not reported, depending on who benefits, not on whether the public interest is served. And when curiosity means uncovering stories with the potential to upset or embarrass the preferred demographic, curiosity becomes a dirty word.

 

Worse still, when the press is seen as catering exclusively to one side, it loses credibility.

 

Ironically, the general lack of curiosity that ideological capture encourages is precisely why so many people seek news from alternative sources — something major media claim is a direct threat to democracy. More ironic still is that this ideological capture, which dictates the hypocrisy — obvious to millions — in editorial choices and news coverage, widens ever further the press’s already yawning credibility gap.

 

For a media that warns endlessly of the dangers of alternative news sources, a “post-truth” America, and attacks on the press and its credibility, it doesn’t seem too keen on being part of the solution.