Michael Goodwin offers an excellent 5-pager on the above, with special attention to his previous employer, the NYT. He begins:
I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close...
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During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos—“afflict the comfortable”—leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened...
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The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension.
Big Journalists: Because we're smart and you are stupid, we are idealists and you are not. When you think about it, it's tough on the ego to be a journalist, always watching others, never doing anything. But always imagining that you know better than the common folk or even the big people they write about. Egotism is for people who feel small. Well, that is not really fair to reporters. Most likely most reporters are humble folk who enjoy their reporter roles covering the Zoning Commission and the obits, but the ones in the big time want to be players not observers, moral leaders or some such grandiose BS. Baloney. Nobody anointed you. Just the facts, please. Thank God for the internet.
Michael Goodwin has always been one of the humble guys.
