Saturday, January 07, 2023

Why Journalists Speak Out

 Over many decades of teaching classes, appearing on panels, speaking at ethics seminars, not to mention doing or supervising hundreds of reporting projects, one of the most frequent questions I faced was how journalists were supposed to possibly stay objective when doing this work.

The short answer to that is that we can’t. And we don’t.

In the course of producing stories, we learn so much about the various people and institutions we cover, it is simply not possible to avoid drawing conclusions and forming opinions about them.

So of course we do. And the more informed we become, the stronger our opinions tend to become. It’s only human.

The question is what do we then do with our opinions? Can we keep covering the same stories, pretending to be objective?

Traditionally, in newspapers, there was a strict line between the reporting we did in news coverage and the opinions expressed on the editorial page. Beat reporters rarely ventured over to the opinion side, which was considered unseemly. But there was more than a bit of irony in that as we were often the best-informed people employed by the paper on the subjects on the editorial page.

One attempt to bridge this gap was to have the beat writers produce analysis pieces, which bridged the gap between reporting and opinion and were traditional journalism’s answer to the objectivity problem.

The distinction between “analysis” and “opinion” was largely fictional but it was a useful fiction that newspapers employed successfully for many years.

Another aspect of the objectivity problem was that the ownership of the newspaper often held different opinions and loyalties on the major topics of coverage from the reporters and editors who provided that coverage on a day-in, day-out basis.

This led to a great deal of tension on occasion between the news staff and those in charge of the editorial pages. Trust me, anyone who ever visited the nearest bar to a big-city newspaper office knows exactly what I am talking about.

When baby boomers — the largest generation ever to hit American workplaces including media — came along, we brought a new level of tension to this traditional dichotomy between news and opinion — and the myth of objectivity.

For one thing, we were better educated than the older generation and way too many of us had been shaped by the civil rights and anti-war movements to remain neutral on the great issues of the day. We weren’t neutral at all on questions like racism or colonial wars — we knew right from wrong.

Furthermore, we didn’t like what we found of the culture inside most newsrooms, which was all too often misogynistic, racist, homophobic and more like an arm of the local police union than a force for truth.

At the same time, we met heroes — established reporters and editors who resisted all those entrenched prejudices and practices that simply acted to reinforce powerful interests. These guys challenged those very interests on more than one occasion.

We also discovered that there were plenty of enlightened owners and executives in media who would support the type of crusading journalism we aspired to, so we worked for them whenever possible and joined the great muckraking traditions that long have served as a counterweight to mainstream, by-the-books news mongering in America.

When it came to remaining objective, we agreed that it was absolutely necessary to stay open-minded when we were gathering the facts about any situation. We needed to be open to adjusting our analysis as those facts came to light, and it was vital that we remained our own worst devil’s advocate to counter the biases and prejudices we inevitably brought to the story.

But you can’t discover the truth as you wish it to be, you have to accept the truth as you discover it to be. Equally importantly, you can’t bend the facts to fulfill the wishes or desires of your bosses or your audience — the chips must fall where they may.

But once all of that was said, once you’d been as fair as you could possibly be during the process of gathering facts, it became completely appropriate and indeed obligatory for any journalist of conscience to speak out when asked about the meaning of what we had found.

That’s how many of us became what some considered advocates or activists as well as journalists during our careers. We were often called “alternative journalists” or “new journalists” or “gonzo journalists.” Take your pick. And of course the traditionalists denounced us, for good reason. But once our reporting was complete, we made a point of speaking out. 

That practice remains controversial to this day. But as my esteemed former Stanford colleague, Prof. Ted Glasser, once observed (and I paraphrase), “In the end, being a good citizen has to trump being a good journalist.”

Amen.

(I first published this essay on May 28, 2022.)

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Friday, January 06, 2023

Covid's Sad Echo

 The top link today is not about the spectacle on Capitol Hill, as tempting as that might be.

Nope, it’s back to our old friend, Covid-19.

In many ways, my newsletter’s origin was due to the pandemic, but it was never the virus itself that concerned me. It was much more the impact that fear of the virus on our lives and our society.

As I wrote in the early days of the pandemic, isolation is a disease every bit as dangerous as Covid and it kills just as surely as SARS-CoV-2. By disrupting our normal patterns of relating to one another out of fear of infecting one another, we inadvertently spread another hazard that weakens the human spirit and the sense of inter-connectedness we all need to sustain ourselves emotionally.

Meanwhile, of course, there’s a news hook here. Yet another subvariant is garnering headlines. You can read all about it if that you wish. And yes, it may be even more transmissible than the previous mutations.

But does any of that actually matter? We’ve always known that the coronavirus would continue to mutate and outwit our vaccines, which in turn will continue to evolve to resist it. So none of this is new or surprising.

Besides, that’s simply the scientific end of the issue. I’m much more concerned with Covid’s social and political aftermath, including the twin epidemics of loneliness and alienation that plague our society, with dangerously high rates of depression, addiction, suicide, and social dysfunction the inevitable result.

Way too many people have grown accustomed to using the virus as an excuse to hide behind their masks, real or virtual, and they are spreading misery in the process.

What we need now are ways to fix that problem.

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Thursday, January 05, 2023

The Wrench in the System

When it comes to the battle over the Speaker position in the U.S. House of Representatives, it’s hard to consider the so-called “rebels” like Gaetz and Boebert anything but a bad joke.

These are the types of people voters sent to Washington as their representatives? Then again, remember the worst joke of all time — Trump.

Despite or perhaps because of the cast of characters, we are witnessing an attack on democratic norms by the extreme right-wing faction of the Republican Party.

Republicans have been flirting with these extremists for decades, but rarely have the consequences of that flirtation been on such public display. The dissenting faction seems intent on not only embarrassing the would-be leader, Kevin McCarthy, but in roadblocking the majority caucus generally.

This, of course, is not what they would do if they were actually interested in helping govern, but it is, historically, exactly what a pro-authoritarian faction would do. My two most recent essays — Behind the Authoritarians and The Threat — have explored some of the key factors behind the rise of authoritarianism globally.

In that context. what we are witnessing most definitely is a warning sign of what’s to come if our democratic norms continue to crumble. As frustrating as the traditional two-party structure and its flawed leadership model may be at times, at least they serve as bulwarks against an anti-democratic alternative.

Over the coming days, the current state of disorder may be resolved somehow, though at present it is difficult to see how. But what I’m suggesting is that much more than who emerges as Speaker may be at stake here.

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Wednesday, January 04, 2023

The Threat

So far, one person has thrown their hat into the ring in the race for president in 2024.

Let’s take a look at his qualifications or lack thereof.

In their book, “How Democracies Die,” authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify four key factors in predicting authoritarian behavior:

  1. Rejection of democratic rules of the game.

  2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents.

  3. Tolerance or encouragement of violence.

  4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

These criteria are based on the authors’ study of political despots all over the world in recent decades. But the framework they’ve developed is particularly useful in assessing the role of Donald J. Trump in American politics.

Like the dictators who have risen to power elsewhere, many of whom he admires, Trump has already engaged in all four behaviors of an authoritarian.

  1. He has led an unrelenting crusade against the legitimacy of U.S. elections, claiming without any evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, and refusing to this day to concede.

  2. He undermined his political opponents, Democrat and Republican alike, with unprecedented viciousness and ridicule, leading his supporters in chants of “Lock her up!” against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

  3. He on a number of occasions told his supporters to rough up his opponents, saying he would pay their bail if they were arrested for doing so. Most critically, he incited his supporters to commit an insurrectional riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

  4. Finally, he repeatedly urged his supporters to attack the press, including physical assaults, labeling us the “enemy of the people.”

By all of these measures, Trump qualifies in a global context as an authoritarian. He emphatically does not, by any measure, qualify for president. The case is closed.

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Tuesday, January 03, 2023

Behind the Authoritarians

 As the new year gets underway, one of the issues I’m going to focus on in 2023 is the rise of authoritarian regimes globally. We are living in a time when two opposing forces— democracy and authoritarianism — are battling for supremacy in much of the world.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course, but the particulars of the confrontation change over time. There are subtleties involved currently that deserve special attention.

In that context, a recent article in Slate titled “The Tech Companies That Wield Even More Power Than Facebook or Google,” by Veszna Wessenauer, documents how authoritarian governments are propped up by relatively obscure but powerful technology companies most of us have probably never heard of.

Among her findings:

  • The U.K.-headquartered telecom company Vodafone announced it had agreed to sell Vodafone Hungary to the Hungarian government, in partnership with a local technology firm called 4iG, which has close ties to dictator Viktor Orbán’s party and already holds significant influence over the national telecom market.

  • In 2021, an investigation by nonprofit journalism center Direkt36 revealed that the Hungarian government was one of the many state actors to be using Pegasus software to illegally surveil journalists and politicians through their phones. Members of the Hungarian secret services have an essentially limitless ability to acquire data in their country. There are no real legal restrictions on or independent body overseeing surveillance. All of this raises the question of how the right to privacy of former Vodafone users will be ensured once the sale is complete and the Hungarian government is in control.

  • The Vodafone Hungary sale is a stark example of the extent of the global telecom industry’s real but underreported power, which authoritarian leaders can wield for themselves. Telcos are responsible for providing the essential communication infrastructure and services that enable citizens to exercise their basic human rights online. To operate in a given jurisdiction and provide their services, however, telcos must rely on government licenses. This gives governments a leverage over the operator, as well as its employees and assets, that they don’t customarily have over other types of information and communications technology companies, like social media platforms.

  • For these reasons, it is important that we insist that telecom companies assess the human rights context in which they plan to operate before entering new markets, as outlined by the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

There is much more in this article about similar situations in Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as the potential in other countries. But anything Viktor Orbán does in Hungary is of special interest to Americans, since he is currently a darling of the U.S. right-wing.

For more on that, see “Why is the American right obsessed with Viktor Orban?” in the Economist.

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Monday, January 02, 2023

New Year News


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