The lament that political activism pervades too much of what passes for journalism isn’t new. “Arrows of malevolence” was how George Washington, in 1793, described the lurid polemics of the Philadelphia-based National Gazette, a mouthpiece for the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party. Later, after Jefferson was elected president, it was his turn to complain: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he wrote a friend in 1807. He proposed a new formula for publishing the news: “Heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies.”
“The first chapter,” he added tartly, “would be very short.”
Activism remained the norm for American journalism for more than a century. Horace Greeley, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Pulitzer were the great crusading publishers who used their newspapers to advance social and political causes. Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens, Nellie Bly, and Ida Tarbell were the great crusading journalists who sought to expose racial injustices, abusive corporate practices, municipal corruption, and other social ills. They thought the highest purpose of their vocation was to filter facts, as they presented them, through moral truths, as they saw them.
This style of journalism lost influence in the early 20th century, partly thanks to the influence of a prominent American Jew, albeit one who didn’t much care for his fellow Jews: Walter Lippmann. In one of his early influential essays, “Liberty and the News,” Lippmann made the case for “disinterestedness” in news coverage. “The work of reporters,” he warned, had
become confused with the work of preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators. The current theory of American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities of civilization require the sacrifice. . . . When those who control [the news] arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.
Lippmann’s solution was “objective information,” “objective testimony,” “objective criteria,” and “objective realities” — supplied or described through “disinterested reporting.”
The reporter needs a general sense of what the world is doing. Emphatically he ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good. In his professional activity it is no business of his to care whose ox is gored. . . . While the reporter will serve no cause, he will possess a steady sense that the chief purpose of “news” is to enable mankind to live successfully toward the future.
What Lippmann advocated became the standard of practice for most American broadsheet and broadcast reporting for much of the rest of the century, epitomized by the likes of the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal, the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, and CBS’s Walter Cronkite. Generations of journalism students were schooled in the idea that the best reporters were the ones who worked hardest to submerge, if not erase, their moral convictions, political beliefs, and personal backgrounds in the service of keeping the news straight — a sentiment Rosenthal chose as the epitaph on his tombstone.
In many ways, this ethos has served journalism exceptionally well, both among its professionals and its consumers. Reporting that has been scrubbed of personal bias can have credibility in a way that partisan reporting will usually lack, thereby establishing a common set of facts from which intelligent differences of opinion can emerge. A reporter’s honest effort to check his priors, to listen to both sides of an issue and be fair to each, to be less judgmental and more curious, to guard against ideology, to be skeptical of the official line, to give readers the story without steering them toward a preferred conclusion — those are markers of intellectual health. At its best,
objective journalism can be an exercise in liberal-mindedness, modeling a form of democratic citizenship that cares for truth while knowing that pursuing it requires doggedness as well as humility.
But objectivity also had pitfalls — ones that, in Lippmann’s case, had a specifically Jewish coloration. His response to antisemitism was repeatedly to go out of his way to demonstrate that he would do no special pleading for a Jewish cause and would even malign other Jews as socially uncouth “parvenus” — all the better to demonstrate his supposed objectivity. He embraced Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish enrollment. He also initially welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, speaking of the Führer as “the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people” (a line that ended his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter).
His record over the next several years was, if anything, worse. “In more than 10 million printed words on world affairs, he said nothing about the death camps, or the revelation that the State Department actively tried to suppress information about them,” noted Julien Gorbach of the University of Hawaii in a perceptive 2020 essay. “Nor did [Lippmann] mention the camps even after the war, when the full horror about them became known.”
These sorts of prevarications illustrate how the ideal of objectivity, powerfully defensible in theory, sometimes goes badly astray in practice. Not only can it be blind to significant moral truths, but it can also, in the wrong hands, shade truth itself.
One example: Twenty-five years ago, on the eve of the second intifada, it became the lazy fashion among the foreign press in Israel to speak about “extremists on both sides” of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict — a handy phrase for reporters to demonstrate their own evenhandedness. The problem is that the term extremist is elastic: A far-right Israeli who advocates settlement expansion in the West Bank may be an extremist by Western lights. But he’s not the equivalent of a Palestinian calling, as Hamas did then and does now, for the enslavement, extermination, or forced exile of the Jews. The scales simply don’t balance — and trying to make them do so to maintain a superficial appearance of objectivity means minimizing the sins of one side and magnifying the sins of the other.
Another example: coverage of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Because the story required specialized knowledge, reporters tended to rely heavily on the opinions of public-health officials and others deemed to be objective, while dismissing the people promoting the lab-leak theory as racist know-nothings. But the belief among many reporters that experts would provide objective information turned out to be an illusion. At least some of those experts were compromised or shamelessly dishonest, while others thought they were operating in the name of a higher good that gave them the right to make things up.
Put simply, what began as an earnest attempt at journalistic objectivity lent itself, through a combination of credulity and disdain, to various forms of manipulation, the political consequences of which will live with us for years. That isn’t to say that objectivity itself was the problem. But it is a tough standard to achieve and even tougher to maintain.
The most powerful trend in modern American journalism — one that began in the 1990s with the advent of Fox News and MSNBC and gained force on digital media thanks to people such as Andrew Breitbart, Josh Marshall, and many others — is the return of the activist model of journalism in ways that recall the late 18th or 19th centuries.
There are many things to say against this form of journalism: It’s biased, sensationalist, polarizing, misinforming, partially false, flatly so. But it’s also, in its way, honest. Few people who faithfully tune in to Fox or MSNBC are under the illusion that they are being served traditional straight news. Typically, they go to those channels because they want to have their worldview affirmed. They may think the version of events being offered to them is truer than the alternatives. But they also know those “truths” are hotly contested and geared toward a political objective, one they generally prefer to the alternatives.
There is no great scandal in this. When Sean Hannity — or Rachel Maddow — says something that’s distorted or untrue, I generally don’t feel lied to (unless there’s good reason to believe they know they are lying). Instead, I feel argued with, just as I would in any normal argument with an interlocutor straining facts or contorting logic to serve an ideological point. To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6. As with any other kind of consumer, consumers of news media have a responsibility to know just what sort of establishment they’re patronizing.
Nor are we worse off as a country for having so many choices for what counts as news. Americans were not necessarily better informed when an aristocracy of elite journalists effectively colluded with the White House to hide Franklin Roosevelt’s infirmities or — a more recent example — Joe Biden’s mental decline. The era in which Walter Cronkite ended his broadcast with “that’s the way it is” may have served the tastes of an earnest and trusting public. But it also ran much larger risks of duping them. Much as the new activist media can polarize and distort, it can also serve as an invaluable check on the deceptions and self-deceptions of the establishment press.
Still, there is a scandal that has tarred important corners of American journalism for years. That’s the increasingly activist bent within the newsrooms of the country’s ostensibly impartial news organizations. This goes well beyond the ordinary human failings of objective reporting that remains framed by rigorous standards of accuracy and fairness. What we now have is something else: activist reporters and editors using the cover of objective news organizations to pursue nakedly ideological ends, suppress contrary opinions, and shape misleading, exaggerated, or false narratives that define political debates.
This is not to say that the mainstream media is “fake,” as a certain political leader likes to say, or that there aren’t thousands of diligent journalists doing their best to play it straight and keep their personal opinions out of their reports. There are. But there are also far too many rotten apples in the barrel. Clearing them out and restoring trust and credibility to the business lies in the hands of editors and publishers.
How did this scandal happen? Ten points come to mind:
- The old blue-collar journalism of figures such as Jimmy Breslin, which had an innate grasp of the experiences and thinking of regular people, has mostly disappeared. Elite journalism is now largely the domain of upper-middle-class professionals educated at elite universities. It reflects the conventions, convictions, and guilt complexes of a socioeconomic bubble.
- Certitude and “moral clarity” — a sly term of art among certain activist reporters — has increasingly replaced curiosity, skepticism, and intellectual humility as the dominant mindset among a younger generation of reporters.
- “Bothsidesism” — that is, giving voice to both sides of a controversial subject and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions — has come to be considered a cardinal journalistic sin on a proliferating number of topics. Other words for “bothsidesism” would be balance and fairness.
- In place of Lippmann’s disinterestedness, newsrooms became obsessed with the value of racial and gender diversity, but one of an ideologically narrow kind.
- One form of diversity many newsrooms did not particularly value, however, was viewpoint diversity. Like-minded reporters and editors fell prey to political groupthink, especially when it came to polarizing figures such as Donald Trump.
- The bright line between news and opinion faded in the gray zones of so-called news analysis and criticism, which gave reporters an opportunity to vent their opinions in revealing ways.
- Reporters also got in the habit of unloading their personal views on social-media posts — sometimes merely through a “like” or a repost — thereby undermining their claims of being impartial journalists.
- A plague of moralizing adjectives — racist, sexist, –phobic, and so on — came to infest the prose of supposedly straight news reporting. The adjectives often said more about the ideological persuasion of the reporters than they did about the prejudices of their subjects.
- Editors or reporters who dissented from newsroom orthodoxies on sensitive subjects suffered punitive professional consequences, often by way of transparently thin pretexts of supposedly unprofessional conduct.
- Not only did too much reporting become captive to the claims of experts, but reporters also tended to rely on experts whose views coincided with their own. That’s how a reputable health economist such as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya (now director of the National Institutes of Health) and other signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called into question the wisdom of Covid lockdowns, were dismissed in much of the media as a bunch of cranks.
There’s more to add, but these points help explain why, in 2024, only 18 percent of Americans had a lot of trust in newspapers, as opposed to 48 percent who had little to none, according to a Gallup survey. That’s not only a damning vote of no confidence in the mainstream press. It’s a threat to freedom.
A news media that repeatedly betrays its promise to play it straight impoverishes and coarsens the discourse of democracy. A news media that tries to substitute capital-T “Truth” on hot-button issues like race relations and climate change for the humbler truths of cold facts and diverse views will alienate the very audiences it most needs to win over. And a news media that loses the public trust is also one that’s profoundly vulnerable to political pressure and bullying. When Trump takes legal actions against ABC or CBS for their reporting, or bars the Associated Press from covering presidential events because they won’t refer to the “Gulf of America,” it’s no longer met with any great outrage — just a collective public shrug.
Is there a way back? There is, provided we are clear about where the problem lies, and where it doesn’t.
The problem is not that the new activist media fails to live up to the standards or expectations of mainstream news: never has; never will. Activist journalism — colorful, ribald, opinionated, impassioned, contrarian, morally informed (or misinformed), frequently brilliant, occasionally right — will always have a place in the world of letters. Most of us wouldn’t want it otherwise. And it isn’t going away anytime soon. Media criticism that does little more than rail against it is a wasted effort.
Nor is the problem that the so-called legacy press has outlived its usefulness, or that objectivity itself is a false idol, or that objective reporting must, by definition, be morally blind. Even fervent critics of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will grudgingly concede that their reporting is essential, whether it’s from the Ukrainian front lines or the fentanyl labs of Mexico or the boardrooms of major companies. And the point of objective media isn’t to obscure the moral elements of a story: It’s to depict the story clearly and trust readers to reach intelligent moral judgments of their own. Quality of judgment will always depend on clarity of information.
The problem is the mixing of milchig and fleishig, dairy and meat, in activist and mainstream media alike. Fox News pretends to play its news coverage straight — but then fires political analyst Chris Stirewalt for the sin of calling the 2020 election in Arizona for Joe Biden. Mainstream media insists on fidelity to objective journalistic values — but often seems to turn itself into a de facto arm of political opposition whenever a Republican is in the White House. That some in the mainstream media don’t even seem to be consciously aware that they do so merely underscores the depth of their failing.
The solution is a more clear separation, in order to maintain the distinctiveness of each. If activist media organizations still leave anyone in doubt about their agendas, perhaps they should be more explicit about them. Years ago, the late Roger Ailes ruefully confessed to me that a more honest version of his network’s motto might have been “Fair and Balancing.” At least it would have been an improvement over “Fair and Balanced” (though “Argumentative and Entertaining” might have been better). Except for the bounds of law — libel and defamation; hacking or trespass — the activist media should be even less bound by objective journalistic conventions. The world could use more truth in advertising and a more unabashed form of bending the truth.
At the same time, for all the reasons mentioned above, the world desperately needs a less distorting form of telling the whole truth — without fear or favor; without bias or obfuscation; with the consistency and credibility to win back a wary, tuned-out, and often cynical audience. How can the mainstream media do it once again? It really shouldn’t be that difficult. See the bullet-pointed list above. Then, like George Costanza, do the opposite.
March 28, 2025
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