Traditionally, a journalist (as opposed to a columnist) was supposed to provide answers to the Five Ws: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Sometime in the last year, though, it appears that another W has been added to the list: What you’re supposed to think.
Journalists have always taken sides. It’s in the nature of the work. No matter how unbiased they try to be, at some point limits on space and time will force them decide what to include and what to leave out, which is itself a form of spin.
But they used to be more subtle about it. (For example, if NPR wanted to do a ‘balanced’ piece on gun control, they would get a guy from Harvard to present the anti-gun side, and a guy from the local trailer park to present the pro-gun side. It’s not that the guy from the trailer park would make less sense, but he would sound less educated, and therefore less credible.)
Before this year, I don’t remember ever seeing headlines like
Trump Continues to Falsely Claim Election Victory
or sentences like
Stanford neuroradiologist Dr. Scott Atlas appears to have taken a statistic from a CDC study wildly out of context to pose an anti-mask argument that has been central to his and President Trump’s approach.
in stories that were being presented as news.
The deal with news used to be: You tell me what happened, what was claimed, who said what, and so on; and I’ll decide what to think about it.
But that was the old journalism. The new journalism apparently requires reporters to do my thinking for me, presumably because I might not do it correctly myself.
Which I find disappointing, because there is a place in the world for actual news, but the people who used to provide it seem to be running away from it as fast as they can, leaving a huge vacuum.
It’s reached the point where I can’t find any American ‘news’ sources worth reading or watching. Even the BBC has jumped on the bandwagon. The closest thing to non-partisan news that I can find in English is Al Jezeera.
When you have to look to Qatar to find out what’s happening in the US… I don’t even know how to express how wrong that feels.
