The Biggest Threat to Democracy Isn’t Donald Trump; It’s Nationalism Hidden in American Journalism
Originally published on December 9, 2021.
TRANSCRIPT: This is Baffled with David DesRoches, and this is our penultimate episode of our first season, and this one is called: The biggest threat to American democracy isn’t Donald Trump, it’s nationalism hidden in American journalism
Alright, y’all, I’m fired up for this episode. For one thing, I just got my Covid booster shot and I’m feeling a little loopy – and for another, I’m getting pretty sick and tired of the annoying subversive nationalism that colors almost every single news item about politics or elections or foreign affairs in the United States. And no, I’m not talking about the super-obvious nationalism that you might get from right-wing news outlets, like Fox, or the National Review. They don’t really hide their America-first bias, which in a way is more respectable than the nationalism I’m talking about in this episode.
That’s because those other companies are just as America-first as the right wing ones, yet in a much more subversive – and arguably more dangerous – way. And this episode is about that very thing. I’m gonna talk about how they do this, and why it’s a real problem – and why, it’s actually more of a threat to democracy than Donald Trump ever was.
Let me backup for a second. My colleague here at Quinnipiac recently shared with me a blog posted by Jay Rosen. Now if you don’t know who Jay is, you probably should, especially if you’re listening to this podcast. Jay’s an NYU professor who runs a blog called PressThink, and he’s arguably one of the more insightful critics of modern journalism out there. He posted earlier this year about how some news outlets have been making significant improvements to their practice since Donald Trump tried to subvert the democratic process with his Stop the Steal movement.
One example that Jay offers to show how journalists might be evolving, is public broadcaster WITF* in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After eight state lawmakers there supported Trump’s baseless claims about the election being rigged against him, so WITF decided that whenever they would report on those lawmakers in the future, they would include an important contextual caveat, which is this: “ Sen. Suchandsuch, who signed a letter asking members of Congress to delay certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes despite no evidence that would call those results into question, today introduced a bill” blah blah blah.
(*In the podcast, I misspoke, calling the station “WTIF” instead of “WITF”)
So essentially, that public news outlet was going to have that disclaimer anytime they reported on any of these eight Pennsylvania congressmen. The public news outlet then described the January 6 capitol riots as “an unprecedented assault” against American democracy.
First of all, bravo WITF for taking this stand. I am crazy about context. Has there ever been a nerdier journalism statement than that? I’m crazy about context!
As annoying as it can be, context is arguably the most important part of truth-telling, because the truth does not live in a vacuum. Truth is fluid, ever-changing, historical, complicated, and sometimes contradictory. And context is the frame that puts the truth into the proper light, so that all angles are illuminated.
WITF’s decision to provide important context on an ongoing basis about these Pennsylvania congressmen is an incredible step forward for their newsroom. They are, from now on, contextualizing any news story related to the eight lawmakers that, again, wanted to overturn certified elections results. Those lawmakers’ decisions would haunt them in WTIF’s reporting until the end of their careers – or at least until they apologized for their stupidity and genuinely tried to make amends.
WITF’s decision is a big deal. It’s huge. It’s a massive step forward for journalism to recognize the very real threat that these lawmakers posed to American democracy.
But… and this is a big but, a big ol’ fat booty but…. Assaults to American democracy happen all the time, and they have been happening for centuries. Donald Trump’s assault just happened to be super-obvious and beyond ridiculous. It’s taken a hyperbolic, completely insane assault on democracy for American journalists to finally begin offering context.
Again, not all American journalists, at least those at WITF.
So why did it take this long for any news outlet to start offering specific context like this? Well, the answer to that question is complicated, and I’m not sure anyone can answer it. Instead, I’d like to offer three reasons why the absence of context in American journalism is essentially a tool that serves a nationalist agenda, and also threatens democracy.
Now, maybe that sounds like a stretch, but bear with me, I think I might convince at least one of you.
Before I jump into the three reasons, let me explain what I mean about how American journalists do not provide context and how that can actually threaten our democracy.
Let’s take a recent example. December 7th was the 80th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Whenever journalists talk about Pearl Harbor in the United States of America, we talk about it as an unprovoked attack. We frame it as a surprise. At worst, the Japanese come across as evil, indiscriminate killers, and American soldiers are the victims – even if we’re not explicitly saying that, the message is pretty clear. At best, these stories inspire the public to get that patriotic feeling, as Americans. We remember what happened after the attack. We remember – we won the war. Maybe we even think of how we won that war – by dropping two atomic bombs onto Japanese cities – I’m not sure how many of us then think about how the bombs killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, but that’s a topic for someone else to dig into.
Most Americans, when we hear a story about Pearl Harbor, we think about us being the innocent victim and eventually beating Japan. And that feels good, as an Americam. There’s nothing more American than winning, right? And winning against those evil Japanese that surprise-attacked us, killing thousands of our brothers and sisters!
Now in fairness, I seriously doubt that’s the intended result of Pearl Harbor stories that journalists put together every year. I’m certain that they just want to tell a good story, and I get it. Those are good stories – a bad guy surprisingly attacks the good guy, but the good guy fights back and wins. Which is true – it’s not like they’re lying about it.
However, as I mentioned before, this is not the whole truth. There is no context.
Now bear with me for a minute, because I might say some stuff that will ruffle your feathers. And that’s what context can do – it challenges us to think deeper about what we think is true.
Pearl Harbor stories, written by American journalists, almost never have the important context that gives us the whole picture and the bigger truth. We never hear about the fact that, in the late 1800s, Hawai’i’s king went to Japan to seek an alliance, in-part because of America’s growing influence in the Kingdom of Hawai’i at the time. Less than a decade after the king’s visit to Japan, U.S. Marines invaded Hawai’i. The. U.S. illegally overthrew a kingdom, and it didn’t formally address its illegal actions until 1993 when Congress passed an Apology Resolution.
And by the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it’s estimated that roughly 40 percent of Hawai’i’s population was of Japanese descent. So think about that for a second. Could it be possible that Japan was simply trying to eliminate an uninvited usurper that was illegally ruling lands that were inhabited by a large number of its own people? Could it be?
Of course, the whole story is of course even more complicated than that, and there are plenty of other economic and defense-related reasons for Japan’s attack on Hawai’i, and yet we hear none of these things when we talk about Pearl Harbor. We also never talk about how the American military failed to predict the attack, when there were plenty of signs leading up to December 7th that should have been recognized. We only know of Pearl Harbor as a surprise attack.
It’s like the game of telephone we used to play when we were little. The truth always starts out complicated, but over time it gets watered down, altered, muddied, and sometimes it becomes unrecognizable.
But what happens as a result of eight decades of Pearl Harbor journalism in America? Well, our stereotypes about the Japanese get reinforced. The minimization of the use of atomic bombs gets reinforced. American propaganda that paints America as a good guy – and always the good guy – gets reinforced. And lastly, it oversimplifies the complex nature of truth, which robs the public of their right-to-know, and inevitably contributes to polarization, because when people don’t have the full truth, they fill in the blanks with their beliefs. And it’s those three problems that we’re gonna dig into today.
You might be listening to me now and be saying, “Holy crap, now this David DesRoches character, he’s the unAmerican one! Listen to him trash our country and support our enemies!”
Is the Taliban recruiting these days? Anyone know? I’m kidding people! Good lord in heaven. I would never work for the Taliban. Their health care plan is terrible. Kidding again people! Please relax. If we can’t joke about serious things, what have we become as a society?
But you might be half-right about me. I’m not unAmerican, though, by any means. I’m simply not pro-American. And any respectable American journalist who actually cares about the truth should also not be pro-American. Instead, we should be pro-democracy, which is very different. But again, American journalists are too often subversively, and probably unintentionally, pro-America and not necessarily pro-democracy.
If American journalists were actually pro-democracy and not Pro-America, we would mention the United States’s own meddling in other countries’ democratic elections since World War 2 – that’s happened at least 80 times, according to a Carnegie Mellon study. And we’d also mention our meddling anytime we talked about elections in those countries, just like we mention Russia’s meddling anytime we talk about our own elections. Isn’t that the only fair way?
And any time we’d talk about a democratic movement in another country, American journalists would report American efforts to subvert democratic processes in that country in the past, if such examples exist. Assassinations, CIA-sponsored coups. Salvadore Allende in Chile, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo… plenty of other examples of these things happening. Given our history of never being able to keep our hands out of other country’s pockets, my guess is that this context would exist when reporting on almost any other country.
We would be reporting those important pieces of historical context only, again, if we were actually pro-democracy. But we are not. American journalists are pro-America. And that is super problematic because it leads to the following three things which ultimately threaten democracy.
Problem 1: Stereotyping of Non-American Topics
First of all, hiding nationalism behind a mask of democracy perpetuates negative stereotypes about anything that’s not American.
Think about how many American journalists report on Alexie Nalvany, the Russian politician who’s a perennial thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. Uncle Sam’s reporters love Nalvany because he represents the possibility for a Democratic Russia. He talks a big game about d emocracy.
But what evidence is there that would suggest he would actually bring democracy to Russia?
After all, numerous psychological and social experiments have basically proven that Lord Acton was right: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Just look at all the examples of authoritarian regimes that were overthrown by people spouting pro-democracy rhetoric who later became authoritarians themselves? Hell, just look at the past couple of years. Aung San Suu Key is the latest, saddest example of this – a Nobel prize winner who became an icon of democracy when she was elected to lead Myanmar, who later ramped up oppression against the Rohingya Muslims in her own country. She even defended her own military in court when it was accused of genocide.
Or what about Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian leader who took over after a decades-long authoritarian rule there? He also won a Nobel Peace prize for his democratic reforms, but who, just like Suu Key, eventually turned against his people? Those are things that happened just in the last couple of years.
There are plenty of other examples of ostensibly noble, democracy-touting ideologues who got power and then clamped down on it. It’s not a new thing. Yet American journalists love it when a voice talking about democracy appears in an authoritarian country – but only if that country’s authoritarianism is a threat to America.
Cue – Russia. American journalists love Navalny not because he’s pro-democracy – though that is probably part of the reason. No, it’s more likely, I’d argue, that they love him because he’s anti-Putin. Or, better yet, he’s anti-Putin’s Russia.
And American journalists love nothing more than to demonize Putin. Russia is the perfect enemy of the United States, and has been for nearly a century. So the stereotype about Russia persists in American journalism – Russia is an authoritarian regime and a sworn enemy of the United States.
Which is of course true, but there is a deeper truth about Russia. Do reporters ever mention that a majority of people in Russia seem to like Putin? Look at independently conducted exit polls from the 2021 election that showed most people voted for Putin – even though the election was most likely rigged, there still seems to be more support for his party over the other major party. Hell, Navalny himself ran a telephone poll when Putin was trying to become essentially president for life back in 2020, and the results in cosmopolitan Moscow showed that 40 percent approved of Putin’s efforts. In Moscow, a city where – if anyone is gonna complain about Putin – it would be people living there – four out of 10 people polled wanted Putin to basically become king.
Where does a lot of that support come from? People like that Putin stands up to the West. Which is another way of saying, he stands up to America.
But journalists don’t provide any context like that, because it would challenge the narrative that Russia’s entire identity is based on an authoritarian regime that wants to destroy America, and that it’s populated by people who desire change but are silenced when they seek it. Which, again, is probably true, but it’s not the whole truth.
So journalists ignore the context, and decide to perpetuate the Russia stereotype, which makes it harder for regular people to understand the complexities that make up Russia’s cultural identity – and nothing is more important to world peace than understanding. So why aren’t journalists working harder to combat stereotypes with more nuanced and contextualized reporting?
In a phrase, it’s hard to do. It’s so much easier to write the same old story, especially when you’re on deadline. Why get complicated? Your editor is probably push back against it, the fact-checkers – if you’re lucky to have any – are gonna take longer to verify your claims, because most of that context isn’t commonly reported, so it’s not common knowledge, which means the process of confirming that contextual information longer and makes everyone’s job harder.
That’s why I think most journalists don’t provide context. It makes everyone’s job harder – especially theirs. Especially if the context is not common knowledge – meaning, it hasn’t been reported much, if at all.
But isn’t that the core of the problem? It’s not common knowledge because nobody is reporting on it! At some point, individual journalists, editors and fact-checkers need to take a stand and start providing more complexity in the form of context. Once that begins to happen, more journalists will begin doing it, and eventually, after a few years, maybe we’ll get over the knowledge hump. And eventually, maybe after a decade or so, it will be common practice in all reporting.
At least that’s my hope. Until that happens, journalists who avoid context will only be perpetuating stereotypes that may certainly be true, but ultimately limit our understanding… and the body public with limited understanding is a powder keg waiting to blow. January 6th?
Problem 2: The Unwitting Propagandists
The second thing that happens when journalists hide their pro-nationalism under a cloak of pro-democracy, is that they spread propaganda for the U.S. government at home and abroad.
Continuing with the Pearl Harbor example mentioned earlier, Pearl Harbor stories – and really any war story about America, including the Civil War for that matter – all these stories inevitably have the same message: American wars, or maybe we should say “American military interventions” in other countries’ affairs, are about spreading freedom and democracy.
Isn’t that what we’re always told by politicians and bureaucrats? Now of course most journalists see through that propaganda, and cover wars with only the truth as an objective. I’d argue this is where journalists excel – they know the line they’re being asked to tow, but they choose another line. Not all journalists covering war do this, but I’d argue a majority of American journalists do.
But here’s the kicker… it’s not so much what American journalists write during an American-involved war. No, it’s more about what they don’t write. Which again, boils down to context. And the lack of context is what perpetuates American propaganda. Journalists might not be waving American flags and talking about freedom and democracy openly, but they are certainly doing that subversively, by omitting the context that fills in the blanks and adds complexity to the truth – which, again, is the very nature of truth. It is complex, almost always.
The attack on Pearl Harbor is one example. Hell, the rise of Hitler is another example – rarely do journalists ever talk about how Hitler came to power, which happened in-large-part because of unfair and crippling financial burdens imposed on Germany by most of Europe after World War I. It was those policies that led to rampant inflation, crippling debt and deep frustration among Germans, which made them ripe for manipulation by a demagogue. Cue, Hitler. No, when journalists talk about World War 2 and Hitler, we usually talk about Germans being duped by a megalomaniac, which again is true, but it’s only part of the truth.
By not telling the whole truth regarding Hitler, journalists make it seem as if Germany’s path happened in a vacuum, and it inoculates the rest of Europe from any responsibility. It perpetuates the winning side’s propaganda. It makes the good and evil sides appear clear. It oversimplifies and keeps the public ignorant.
Or, consider when American journalists talk about the attacks on 9/11 – when we write those stories every September, do we talk about the origins of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, how they exist in large part because of atrocious U.S. activities in the Middle East and Central Asia for decades? How the U.S. supported authoritarians in Iran, how Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party had U.S. support from the 1950s until the first Gulf War, or how the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan in the 1980s after the war with Russia, leaving that country in literal ruins with absolutely no U.S. support?
Do American journalists talk about how U.S.-led efforts to suppress democracy in many countries is the most significant reason why so many anti-U.S. terrorist groups exist in the first place?
No, journalists don’t talk about these things. We don’t discuss the reasons why Al Qaeda or the Taliban exist when we talk about 9/11. We simply frame the story the same way we frame the Pearl Harbor attacks – which, again, is true, but it’s not the whole truth.
And when we don’t tell the whole truth, journalists end up as unwitting regime propagandists. Who suffers as a result? Everyone. Democracy also suffers because the people remain uninformed and unable to empathize with their foreign brothers and sisters. The missing context creates holes which are then filled in with beliefs. And in that ignorance the public remains, ripe for manipulation by the partisan press and of course, demagogues…
That’s why American journalism’s hidden nationalism is the biggest threat to democracy – it oversimplifies and leaves the people ignorant. And ignorant people simply gravitate toward what they believe, which deepens polarization. And because most American journalism exists within a for-profit business structure, the journalism itself becomes more partisan, because that’s what brings in the views, the clicks, the bucks.
Problem 3: Oversimplification By Omitting Context
And this brings us to the third thing that happens when journalists become de facto nationalists by omitting context: the truth is oversimplified. This might be a good time for an analogy.
Imagine you’re on a jury for a murder trial. The person on trial is accused of killing his father. The prosecution’s evidence against him is very tight – a murder weapon with his prints on it, the deceased’s blood on the accused – all sorts of evidence point to guilt. The man even admits to pulling the trigger and shooting his father.
So my question to you, fictional jury member, with all the prosecution’s evidence clearly showing this man’s guilt, and his own admission that he shot his father… do you convict?
Now I really hope that you’re saying to yourself, ‘Wait a minute, he admitted shooting his father, but how did he actually plead? What actually happened? We need more information.’ Maybe some of you Law and Order buffs are even thinking, ‘Isn’t a person presumed innocent until proven guilty?’
And yes, of course you’re both right. Even with all the evidence pointing to guilt, we do not know the circumstances that led up to the trigger being pulled. We don’t know if this man was abused by his father as a child, if this man was attacked by his father and he shot him in self defense, or if there was some other circumstance that would make the shooting NOT a murder.
Because, yes, it’s true that he shot and killed his father. But did he murder him? That’s the question you need to answer, Jury Member. And to figure out the answer, you have to hear not both sides, but all sides. You need not some context, but all the context.
Now lawyers from both sides are going to give you the partial truth. They’re going to bombard you with context. Sometimes the sides will completely contradict, but each side will somehow magically have evidence that shows that they are correct. How can that be? How can both sides have evidence that shows they’re right, but they contradict each other? The lawyers are going to omit some facts and emphasize others, they’re going to mislead you and guide you as much as the judge will allow, and it’s up to you to sift through all the madness and contradictory facts to determine what actually happened, and then what to do about it.
That is how justice works in America. Forget about all the flaws in our justice system for a moment. And just think about how it works in a best-case scenario. The jury sifts through the different versions of the facts to determine what actually happened. In a best case scenario, with all things being equal, the jury would, most of the time, make the correct choice.
Why can’t journalism be the same? Why can’t journalists find all the complexities and ambiguities that lawyers love? Ambiguity in journalism inspires doubt, and doubt leads to challenging one's opinion, and that challenging leads to open-mindedness which then leads to a decision based not solely on speculation or belief or desire, but an honest interpretation of the information at hand. And people tend to make smarter, more nuanced decisions when they have more complexity.
In any court case, the truth is never simple. In life, the truth is almost never simple. But in journalism, it almost always is simple. Why?
Think about any interview you’ve ever seen with a jury member from a well-publicized court case. When I think about those interviews, I'm almost always impressed with how conflicted the jurors are about their decision-making processes. You can hear the struggle in their voice, in their grasping for the right words to express the complexity of their experience.
But ask a person who’s just read an online news story or watched a TV segment about the murder, ask them what they think about it… and their answer is almost always clear and unequivocal. Guilty! Fry that bastard! Innocent! Set him free!
That’s because, again, American journalism oversimplifies the truth. To me, this is a symptom of the American way – we are a country that loves competition. Not only that, we love seeing the world and competition with a black and white lens, right? Two teams battling each other on the gridiron, that kind of thing. Everything is bifurcated, so naturally American journalism would also fall into this type of thinking.
Media critics have been talking for years about the problem with creating false equivalences and false dichotomies, because, again, it oversimplifies the truth. I’m arguing, however, that when American journalists do it, we are perpetuating American nationalism. We become spokespeople not of democracy, which is complicated and messy, but rather of America – and not the good parts. Just the overly-simple way of thinking that deepens the American people’s ignorance and ultimately makes it harder for us to talk across the aisle, which ultimately threatens our fragile democracy.
That’s why I think nationalism hidden in American journalism is actually a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump ever was or is. Trump is a blip. He’ll be gone when he dies. Maybe his movement will live on in some form or another, but it’ll pass. Authoritarians and their minions never last.
But American journalism has remained essentially the same since the 1800s, when the New York Times saw objectivity as the most important value. That value remains at the top of most news companies’ list of values, even as times have changed dramatically.
Interestingly, or perhaps hypocritically, American journalists are among the most partisan of journalists in the industrialized world, according to various surveys over the years. And yet, objectivity remains the highest virtue?
Now, to be clear, it’s not journalism’s obsession with objectivity that is the threat. Rather, it’s the profession’s refusal to be fully transparent about its biases and, more importantly, it’s processes… while at the same time, oversimplifying truth, omitting important context, and perpetuating nationalist propaganda while also reinforcing negative stereotypes about “other” countries. That is the real threat to democracy.
Our democracy didn’t begin its descent with Donald Trump. The rights of U.S. citizens have slowly been eroding since at least 2001, according to the Democracy Erosion Consortium. Trump was merely the light that showed us the holes. Let me backup. Trump could never actually be a light, even in a metaphor… let’s call him the soap on the tire that bubbled up and showed us that the tire has had a hole in it... wait… that’s not fair to soap, either, but you get the point. Moving on.
Trump was simply the culmination of the ongoing erosion that, again, has been happening for decades. And American journalists have stood by and watched it happen. Sure, we’ve covered problems with the PATRIOT ACT when it was proposed, and many of us covered it after it passed. But what about today? Do we ever consider its lingering effects on our freedoms? Or what about the prosecution of whistleblowers, or the illegal data gathering exposed by Edward Snowden, or any of other affronts to democracy that we’ve covered but soon accepted? Or what about all financial malfeasance on Wall Street? Do we ever remind the public about a company’s misdeeds whenever we report on that company in the future? Why don’t we? Where is all the context!?
The biggest threat to democracy isn’t an orange buffoon, but it’s journalism’s indifference to and acceptance of these incremental losses of freedoms, and its hidden nationalism that ignores important context and oversimplifies complex truths.
All journalists share responsibility here, no matter what you cover. Everything needs context, not just foreign policy or national security issues.. We need to recognize that our flaws are the real threat to democracy. We have done the United States a disservice by not providing people with the whole truth and by not properly fighting back against the yearslong erosion of our own democracy.
Maybe journalists think people can’t handle being told that the U.S. is not always great, or not always perfect, or sometimes not even pro-democracy. And maybe most people can’t handle it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t tell them.
We all need our vegetables, especially the ones that are hard to swallow.
Alright, cognitive bipeds that’s all for today. Thanks for hearing me rant on this topic, which is obviously super, super-important to me.
You of course don’t have to agree with me, and if not, I want to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter @SavingEJ, or email me at David-dot-desroches@QU.edu
This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio. Our producer is Grace McGuire, our social media coordinator is Jillian Catalano, and our videographer is Jake McCarthy. The music you’re hearing was composed and performed by yours truly. Please subscribe to the podcast on the app of your choice. To learn more about this podcast and others, visit quedu/Podcast. And also visit our new website, QuinnipiacPodcasts.com.
Thank you so very much for listening to Baffled with David DesRoches. Our last episode of the season is next week, until then.
It was the publication of a theory of justice in 1971 that properly made Rawls’s name. Having read and widely discussed this book, Bill Clinton was to label Rawls the greatest political philosopher of the 20th Century and had him over to the White House for dinner on a regular basis. What, then, does this exemplar of fairness have to tell the modern world? Firstly, that things as they are now are patently unfair. The statistics all point to the radical unfairness of society; comparative charts of life expectancy and income projections direct us to a single overwhelming moral.
Rawls understood that debates about unfairness and what to do about it often get bogged down in arcane details and petty squabbling, which mean that year after year, nothing quite gets done. What Rawls was therefore after was a simple, economical and polemical way to show people how their societies were unfair, and what they might do about it.
Rawls was talking about how society metes out justice through laws and other systems, but I think it's time journalists consider our role in this process as well, because clearly journalists are already a huge part of the justice system. Unofficially, yes, but still integral.
Now I don't want to get too deep on the philosophy here, because again, I'm not nearly qualified enough to talk about it. But the concept here is pretty simple and I can break it down into three parts.
First, understand what fairness is. Well, the dictionary definition says it pretty well. It says, “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.”
And as I'm reading it, I realize the word “just” is implied in the definition of fairness.
So let's take a step back for a second and put fairness into context with the other values that a lot of people hold. In his book, “The Righteous Mind,” NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how there are essentially six values that people think are the most important. They are: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
Liberals and conservatives value these six things to different degrees, and it's these six values and how they're distributed that generally drive a large part of our political ideology. Of those six things, I would argue that fairness and liberty are the most important things for a journalist to consider.
Liberty is one of the things that everybody values. I mean, except obviously for the filthy rich, you know, authoritarians who want everyone to bow to their power.
Fairness matters, because journalists already try their hardest to be fair. Now we just need to focus harder on the idea of doing journalism in the service of justice, which again could be defined as the pursuit of fairness.
I'd like to pose a question to you. When you were growing up, did your parents ever tell you that life isn't fair? Did anyone ever say to you, “Hey, deal with it. Life isn't fair.” It's a lesson that a lot of us learned pretty early on, that life isn't fair. Deal with it. Now, look, I don't have any delusions that journalism can make the world a fair place. But maybe if the pursuit of fairness took top priority above truth, which again, is fluid and almost always changing, maybe we'll have a better chance at restoring trust and, by extension, maintaining that trust over the long term.
This isn't a huge leap. In fact, the very first line of the Code of Ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists is this ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Now the first part of the code is seek truth and report it, and the first line under that says what I just said. Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair.
In other words, in the pursuit of truth, accuracy and fairness are the most important things to consider, and I agree 100%. So why not just flip that? In the pursuit of fairness, accuracy, and truth are the most important things, or even better, accuracy and contextualized truth. Or maybe even accuracy and the truth of any given moment.
Many of us agree that fairness is an important end result. Why then can it be a driving force?
Again, the world will never be fair, and I'm not sure it ever should be. I only admit that because I believe the important thing here is to strive for fairness. If we ever attain it, there would be no need to strive for it, and society would essentially be perfect. So why don't we strive for it in the meantime, work ourselves out of a job? How awesome would it be if we actually attained a fair and just society? There would be no need for journalists. But until we reach that day, which is likely never, let's strive for fairness.
But this is the important thing. It's not an unending striving for fairness for the sake of being fair, we strive for fairness in the pursuit of justice, because if we define journalism, again, as the pursuit of equitable justice and define justice as the equitable distribution of fairness, then, by extension, journalism is pursuing justice by pursuing fairness. I know, I know, I know this is a mouthful. It's getting very philosophical, I’m repeating words. Please forgive me. I hope you're not turning this off because it's too academic-sounding and not practical. I just really think it's important to literally redefine journalism to more accurately actually reflect what we are already doing and speak to people where they are instead of where we think they should be. And that last bit is actually pretty important to repeat because even if we don't agree to redefine journalism, I hope we can agree, at least on this: Journalists should speak to people where they are and not to where the journalists think their audience should be, in terms of what they think and how they think about it.
Where someone is in life and where someone else thinks they should be are often very different places, and to presume that someone wants to be where you want them to be solely because you call yourself a journalist and claim to be a provider of the unvarnished truth. Well, can you think of anything more patronizing and presumptuous? I can't.
So now we've talked about fairness, there's another word that we should also dig into, and that's the concept of equity. Because again, if we are to redefine journalism as the equitable pursuit of justice, what then does equitable mean? And I think equity is often conflated with equality. And no, we're not talking about a type of asset class here. We're talking about equity in the sense of how resources are distributed. In our case, journalistic resources, which equals time, space on the front page, you get the picture.
I like to think of equity like this. Take a classroom, a classroom where every student has equal access to a service and where every child has the same computer and gets the exact same amount of facetime with the teacher. Sounds great, right?
But what about a student with a visual impairment? Will they likely need something additional on their computer so they can access the lesson? Or what about a smart student who struggles paying attention? They might need more facetime with the teacher or an alternative lesson so they can stay engaged. And that's equity. It's distributing resources based on need, not on equal access to resources.
In fact, the concept of equity is the foundation of any law dealing with discrimination or equal protection. I'm sure some lawyers would probably disagree with me, but that's how I say it. Simply put, some people need a little extra than others to get the same result.
So, let's then apply equity to justice. If journalism was defined as the equitable pursuit of justice, what would that look like? Let's just take a daily newsroom as an example. How do they operate today? Under the current definition of journalism, as the pursuit of truth?
So, here's how a daily news operation works. Generally, there's a morning news meeting, the news director or editor leads the conversation about what's happening that day. The reporters chime in, the plans are made for the evening deadline. Assignments are doled out based on specific beats, but also more importantly, based on what can be turned that day into a story by the evening or afternoon deadline.
Now the 24/7 news cycle is its own monster that I'm not going to get into here, but suffice to say, the general rule of thumb in deciding what will be covered are these two things: is the story newsworthy, and can we cover it by the deadline. Now obviously, if you're an online-only outlet, the deadline issue might not be that important, but you're likely driven by your own deadlines, which are, “Let's get it out as fast as possible.”
But that word, newsworthy, that's the crux of everything in journalism. What is worthy of being news to one person certainly isn't to another. But the trick to being a great editor, I think, is to think about what do most people care about, and balancing that with what should most people care about? And unless you have a very hyper-specific audience, most editors think in terms of a broad audience. You really don't want to alienate anyone, so you focus on stories that have a broad appeal. Some stories are certainly targeted to specific audiences, of course, but daily stories usually have a broad appeal. That's what makes them possible to be turned in a single day.
Now let's take this newsroom example and flip its definition of journalism. If this newsroom was operating under the idea that journalism is about pursuing equitable justice, the story assignments for the day would look more like this: Instead of thinking about which story has the broadest appeal, stories would be weighed against each other to determine which stories serve the pursuit of justice to the most disadvantaged among us.
Weighing would be simple: if a story could have a significant impact on a marginalized population, it should be given top priority. That is equity. Any story that impacts a privileged population should only be given priority if that story adversely impacts a marginalized group.
For example, as I'm writing this, the Pandora papers are all over the news. The story should be a top priority for many newsrooms and journalists. And it is. But yet we're still seeing headlines that talk about the fourth death from a rare blood clotting disease as a result from the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. What makes that story so silly is the virtual insignificance of it. And yet it's still given attention by the major media outlets.
As of early October (2021), nearly 15,000,000 Americans have been given the J&J vaccine. Fifteen million... and four people have died because of a rare blood clot. It is, of course, tragic that these deaths happened, no question about it. There's no need to minimize what happened. But in the grand scheme of stories that people really, truly need to know about... is that a headline, or is it merely fear-based clickbait?
Does every single story about the coronavirus or the vaccine warrant coverage solely because of that fact, or does all that unnecessary incremental coverage numb us to the pandemic reality? Under a new definition of journalism, a story like that would not exist. Instead, the fact of these deaths occurring would instead be included in a more contextualized story about what we know and what we don't know. And importantly, what we cannot know about the health impacts of the vaccine.
Now, none of this matters if we don't make some other changes as well as a profession. I talked about these things in the first two episodes. I don't want to get into that here, but I think ultimately there are two forces preventing big change. First news consumers, maybe that's you listening now. News consumers need to stop clicking on garbage. Stop giving journalists a reason to not change. Demand, better work by consuming the best work.
Second, journalists need to reevaluate how we understand truth, if and how we defend democracy, and how we define the work that we do every day. We all depend on it.
I'll leave you with this final thought, the \bottom line of this episode. Journalists are biased. There's no getting around that. Why, then, don't we stop pretending to be objective while pursuing narratives and openly pursue equitable justice? Again, many journalists are already doing this, but we're often conflicted because of traditional values that eventually turn us into hypocrites.
Justice is fairness. And journalism pursues justice, all with the concept of equity at the forefront.
All right, Earth citizens. That's all the ranting I have for you today. We are four episodes deep in this podcast, and we're not hearing from anyone. Please, we need your help. Tell us what you think. Am I completely off my rocker? Is there something I've really gotten wrong?Or maybe I've missed a really important detail. I want to know. I want to get better and I need your help again. I don't have all the answers. I don't pretend to. I need your help. Find me on Twitter @savingEJ or you can email me at david.desroches@qu.edu
This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio. Our producer is Grace McGuire, our social media coordinator is Jillian Catalano. And our videographer is Jake McCarthy
Please subscribe to the podcast on the app of your choice, to learn more about this podcast and others, visit qu.edu/podcast and thank you so much for listening to Baffled with David DesRoches, until next time.