a new objectivity for the press
the press is lost, here's how to fix it
paradise lost
During the Trump era, the mainstream American press has completely abandoned the ideas of objectivity and informing the public. These values had been under attack by postmodern academics for a long time who insisted that there were no such things as objectivity and “a public.” But even though the Obama era, you would hear nominal defense of objectivity as a value.
Beginning with coverage of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and accelerating straight through to the present, mainstream American outlets like CNN, the NYT, and the Washington Post have de-emphasized values of evenhanded reporting and informing the public and become essentially mouthpieces for Trumpworld and the Republican party.
This right wing bias is largely not the result of conscious choices by these outlets, but by the Republican party and Trump in particular effectively out-manuvering the press into having asymmetric standards for the GOP and the Democrats. The press are mostly useful idiots for the GOP at this point, carrying water for Republicans and in the process presiding over an era where the public is deeply misinformed about basic facts in a way that highly advantages Republicans.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this era is the press, beginning with the New York Times, does not really view it as their responsibility to inform the public about these basic facts. And note that I’m not talking about things that are in any way subjective, but just like “is the violent crime rate higher or lower than 30 years ago”. The public thinks it is higher, the press breathlessly reports on crime, while in fact violent crime has declined and is near all time lows. And in response to this, journalists and editors working at major outlets don’t look at evidence indicating the public misunderstands reality as evidence that they need to work to better inform the public.
enduring pro-gop bias at cnn and the nyt
In the realm of slightly subjective things, the reporting on our two major parties is highly skewed to advantage Republicans. One simple example is how the press held the Biden Administration to sky-high standards. The American public indicated for a decade they wanted to end the forever-war in Afghanistan, and when Biden did just that the press killed him for it and permanently tanked his approval by overreacting to some stuff at the beginning of the withdrawal. When it was clear the operation was going smoothly, they didn’t turn around and go: “Oh! Things are going well now!” They just moved on to another story and left the public with the permanent impression that the withdrawal was bungled, which it was not.
Meanwhile, Trump can enact job-killing tariffs at a breakneck pace and the press portrays him as “winning” his trade war or “shaking up the international order.” Objective reporting on the trade war would just be like: this costing you money in taxes and slowing growth and jobs numbers. He’s a man of action! Never mind that action is bad and costing your family money every time you buy something at a store.
We can trace this back to the 2016 campaign, where Hillary’s emails where the defining story of the election, and the New York Times never did any public introspection on why they decided to report it that way. You get these vague answers like “well the public was interested in it so we reported on it,” which completely abdicates the press’ role in story selection which in part determines what people are interested in. You can tell the post-hoc justification that “people cared” from the NYT was bullshit because we never heard about the story again after the election, which would not be the case if it had objective merit. It was just a right wing conspiracy theory that the NYT went all-in on to appear balanced, regardless of whether the underlying facts of the case warranted that reporting.
More recently, it certainly appears that Trump had some shady dealings with Jeffrey Epstein—and it’s worth mentioning that Epstein died in jail while Trump was president, and Trump is obviously currently involved in covering up his association with Epstein, including editing a surveillance video and directing his Justice Department to redact his name from the Epstein files. Why major outlets can’t report on this with the same vigor they reported on Hillary’s emails baffles me, because it obviously has merit as a story. If the smoke is simply coincidental, it is currently on President Trump to prove that via full disclosure of the evidence.
It took the Wall Street Journal—owned by Rupert Murdoch—to reinvigorate this story. Kudos to them. But the “mainstream” press reporting on “objectively important” things should have informed the public before the 2024 election that there was a decent chance Trump both was involved in Epstein-world and then had a hand in covering up the mess during his first term. Obviously the first part of this is much more likely than the latter, but both are way more likely than you’d like for the literal president.
a path forward
Unlike most people talking about this, I do not want the press to “go back.” We cannot just magically go back to a time of low party polarization where people had higher levels of social trust and society was different in all kinds of ways. I do however want the press to go forward and to evolve, rather than doing whatever weird thing it is doing right now.
values and objectivity
First, I believe mainstream outlets should be evenhanded with respect to their stated principles. Instead of some vague notion of objectivity, I think press outlets should proactively define their values. For instance, an outlet could say that they value honesty in government, or fast economic growth, etc. Outlets should state their guiding principles and visions of the good society. Because it is only with respect to these values that outlets can be “evenhanded” or “objective.”
The postmodern critique that there is no “objective” is trivially true, but it is also a dumb critique. As soon as you define some values like “democracy is good” and “corruption is bad,” you can proceed to report objectively on the major parties with respect to these values. If an outlet proactively says “we exist to uncover corruption” and then reports ten times more on a bullshit emails story than the mountains of actual obvious corruption coming from the other candidate, then we can easily say the outlet is not being evenhanded or objective with respect to its stated values.
Outlets that refuse to do this (define values and refer to them when considering what to report on) shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, this is most major outlets today—you can find better content on Substack than in the NYT. To see this, we can just ask the question: what stories from both major parties have been 5 alarm fires at the NYT. Are these equally bad? The answer is obvious: a few messy days at the beginning of ending the Afghanistan war is not even close to equally bad as the Epstein stuff, and there are dozens of other Trumpworld stories that are much worse than anything that happened during Biden’s term that get no coverage.
both sides no more
Defining values proactively and then being objective with respect to them also provides a way out of the “both sides” trap. Outlets can and should communicate durable, lasting differences between the two parties. When Republicans have power, they do tax cuts for rich people and explode the deficit. When Democrats have power, more people get healthcare and deficits go down. At a high level, American politics is basically that.
Because outlets want to appear “fair”, during campaigns we enter this bizarro territory where Republicans say stuff like they will eliminate the deficit and get everyone healthcare, and the New York Times is like: wow, they’ve changed! Actually—no.
If outlets have a guiding value like: we want to inform people about the differences between the two parties, it’s not “unfair” to just plainly describe what both parties want to do, and have done.
Another way to think about this is that the press should strive to minimize regret in their horserace reporting—how much water did they carry for policies that turned out to be campaign fluff vs. how well did they actually communicate what would happen under an administration?
The American mainstream press has a pretty bad track record with Republicans when measured this way—every four years Republicans pretend to be a “workers’ party” and the NYT is like: wow, they’re a workers’ party now!
data informed reporting
Finally, the press should seek to inform. This sounds basic, but it is not. Americans systematically misperceive social reality, particularly in areas like crime and immigration. People think small minorities like Muslims are 10 or 20 percent of the country, while believing that crime is near all time highs and rising. Both of these are wrong: 1.1% of Americans are Muslim and crime is near a 30 year low.
Opinion pollsters routinely measure this type of misperception, and yet major press outlets do not see it as their role to correct this misperception. I believe it is their role, and this type of misperception is in part a marker of poor reporting.
Journalists and editors should use public opinion polling to help guide their story selection, and should have a sense of where the biggest misunderstandings are so they can mitigate these in the course of reporting.
putting it together
While the mainstream press are currently patsies for Republicans, this state of affairs is a sign of deeper rudderlessness. The small steps I have discussed here chart a way forward that is better everyone involved: the press can shed the Calvinball process of claiming they are “objectively objective” (which is not a real thing) and instead move to “read the sign, those are our values, we’re reporting with respect to them.” If people don’t like the values, or don’t like the reporting with respect to the values, they can have that discussion rather than being lost in the mud of debating “what’s really objective, man 💨.”
The press can and should re-assume its informing mission but not do so vaguely—it should be precise, informed by what we know about how people misunderstand the world around them. Finally, the press should routinely look back and see where they got it wrong, with the goal of proactively communicating durable truths rather than random things politicians say.
If the press continues on its current path, I believe Democrats will soon also lose faith because of the highly biased state of affairs, and we’ll be in really weird territory. I guess there’s still Substack, though.
advice for democrats
In the meantime, I think we Democrats should work the refs like the GOP has done for a generation. I think we should frequently remind people that the press is highly biased against us. Our politicians should point this out in interviews, and we should stop being buddy buddy with the press just because we all went to elite schools together. Trying to rely on that underlying cultural affinity of “we both went to Harvard” has lead to a place where most major outlets are deeply biased against Democrats. It’s time for Dems to say so, and much like with Gerrymandering, stop the unilateral disarmament. The way you deal with bad guys is not to let them walk all over you, but to be firm that there are consequences—although that’s a subject for another blog post.