we need more transparently opinionated journalism
In recent decades, journalistic institutions have placed too big of an emphasis on objectivity, which I find to be a dead end and bordering on journalistic malpractice across the board, that have maneuvered us into the hands of the far-right. By trying to be objective, many prominent and reputable journalistic institutions have equated completely nonsensical and socially harmful ideas with ones that are debatable, but not necessarily harmful to democracy, equality, and civil liberties themselves. For the democracy we know to withstand the push towards autocracy, however flawed liberal democracy is, it cannot be acceptable to play both sides at each other as if they stood on equal footing to simulate objectivity as if the institutions in question weren’t part of the society they’re reporting on.
Journalism is done by humans for humans. As humans, we can never be objective regardless of the language we use to mimic objectivity. Every piece of information included or excluded in any piece is a choice made and defined by our political aims which in turn are influenced by our own personal experiences, political and religious beliefs, and socialization. For journalism to speak truth to power, it needs to stand definitively behind the ideals it wants realized and clamp down just as definitively on ideals that do not belong in a free and democratic society. Thus, the writer’s opinion can never be shunned out of any journalistic piece that isn’t in the opinion section because that would defeat the objective of journalism: to inform the reader of what the outlet considers worth knowing and to criticize who the outlet considers to be a danger to its mandate. A re:publica talk (in German) from this year explains this problem using examples from The New York Times and Tagesschau.
I would argue that journalistic objectivity has little to do with good journalism and more to do with audience capture. By equating outlandish policies with disagreeable but still reasonable policies, reputable journalistic institutions are unleashing immeasurable social harm by legitimizing the far-right as yet another political point of view worth considering, effectively laundering its fringeness into the political avant-garde—putting fascists in the position of leading the political conversation. Paradoxically, doing so contains an implicit opinion by itself and leaves no sign of objectivity on the journalistic institution’s end. By platforming far-right political positions, these outlets make themselves more receptive to the far-right in a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle, such as granting criticisms of fairness in reporting coming from groups that want sections of society gone with others violently dominated into subordination to be taken seriously and/or the privilege of a response. Again, doing so legitimizes the fringe and unacceptable politics of the far-right.
Trying to be more fair to the far-right in reporting isn’t only a spiral to hell, but it is an admission that democracy, equality, and civil liberties are only ideals to be paid lip service to for maximizing profits instead of the very foundation on which good journalism is built. It is a betrayal of us, the public in need of information, and of all our ancestors who fought for the civil liberties we have today that make free journalism possible in the first place. What a way to piss on their graves and dig our own in the process!
The failure of institutional journalism is the product of an economic system that puts profit before life itself, something I discussed in depth in my post on the failure to inform. We cannot have good journalism when the incentives for doing it well are economic. Journalism must stand on a foundation that allows it to inform us because we need that information and not because we, individually, would pay for it. Journalism needs to be seen and treated as the public service it is because the industry, operating within the logic of capital accumulation, is unsustainable for itself as well as for us as a society.
We can always repeat the glamorized peak of post-war Europe from the previous century, meaning New Deal type of policies for state-sanctioned redistribution and state grants for grassroots quality journalism, but we will without a doubt find ourselves in this exact spot again, fighting a tsunami of mis-/disinformation while the far-right pushes us further into the coast ever so slowly. Because what the far-right has always done well is prey on the economic insecurities and education inequality borne out of the whims of capitalism to pit the masses against each other. Journalistic institutions, or a future equivalent, will again stand before the choice of having a spine or choosing profit, and they will always choose profit because of the system they exist in. Or else their kind will cease to exist, forever.