The new model of U.S. journalism
By James J. Brodell
Dec. 29, 2022
How quickly U.S. journalism has changed from the adversarial to what can only be described as the old Soviet model in which reporters, editors and, indeed, every news story supports the official ideology.
Soviet writers, journalistic and otherwise, had the responsibility of building socialism. U.S. writers today promote social justice, an ill-defined concept that has morphed into racial division.
Just as in the Soviet era, the prevailing U.S. ideology finds strong endorsement in the professional schools where students report being forced to conform to the professor’s opinions. In turn, professors, particularly those lacking tenure, are forced to conform to the prevailing ideology of their organizations.
Such also is true in non-journalistic organizations. A number of professional groups, including those of teachers, architects and even physicians, find that social justice ideology has permeated membership and licensing rules.
The stress now is on skin color rather than merit. Universities, to comply, are dropping standardized tests for admissions, despite a pending U.S. Supreme Court decision that may hamstring diversity pushes.
Newspapers always have been political. The concept of a neutral press is a post-Civil War idea, first adopted by the fledgling Associated Press to gain customers from all political inclinations. One did not need to see the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune to know its position. Its liberal counterpart, The New York Times, became an unintentional mouthpiece of Joe Stalin by publishing the distorted reports from Moscow of its long-time correspondent Walter Durante.
News reporters themselves usually have been more liberal than their readers. Typically their older and more experienced editors and publishers kept the idealistic and naive in line. The national targets for exposes still seemed to be more Republican than Democratic. Many Washington reporters knew of Jack Kennedy’s infidelities and how he cavorted in the White House swimming pool when his wife was elsewhere. None of that made the headlines until much later even though the facts were important news. Richard Nixon was driven from office by an unfriendly press that amplified his failings. Trump has been vilified as a racist, hater of immigrants and business cheat with little evidence. The White House press conference attendees seem to disrespect anyone of their peers who ask hard questions of Biden officials.
Perhaps the biggest change is the current tendency of reporters to take to social networks to spew opinions. The days of the impartial or at least mute reporter are over. Television companies have found the use of talking heads far cheaper than actually covering the news. What is really going on in Brazil these days and how about Botswana?
The added factor is the reduction of the newspaper and television advertising savaged by direct appeal online marketing efforts. The New York Times long has been criticized for running bulky advertising inserts that appear to be public relations for one foreign nation or another. One claim is that the government of China has spent millions currying favor with influential newspaper, radio, television and internet outlets. Certainly U.S. billionaires have done so, as well, by donating to journalistic professional organizations as well as to the national media companies.
The analogy with the Soviet media seems to be appropriate. Money talks. It’s better to go along to get along. The ideal that opinion is separate from straight news seems to be an historical oddity.
The Investigative Reporters & Editors organization, based at the University of Missouri, calls itself “. . . a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting.” It was more than that. The organization was the refuge for brave reporters who chose to confront those highly placed politically and socially for their sins. Now the organization has preferred pronouns listed for writers in its professional journal and has surveyed the race and ethnicity of its membership.
The Bolsheviks had the problem of teaching most of the country to read and write so they could be reached with official propaganda. As Elon Musk’s revelations from Twitter showed, authoritarians of today do not have that hurtle to their molding of the public mind.
The Soviet leadership needed a monopoly of information because its policies did not stand up to criticism. Yet it needed a literate public to support its programs.
In the U.S. today many government programs or social trends challenge logic. Among these is the global warming cult that seeks to use climate fluctuations to foment fear. The fear is the engine by which the Biden administration has allocated some $369 billion to various alternative energy schemes. Truth, being the first casualty of war, has faced a battering due to the Ukraine invasion. Again, the real reasons make the cash register ring.
American educational institutions have brought scam to the level of art with suspect courses. Local school boards have injected weird programs led by weird individuals to students. Illegal aliens flood the country. Inflation soars. Children’s literacy in many districts is far below expectations. Gender uncertainty is now a rite of middle school passage.
Still, few television and newspaper outlets expose these realities. To do so would undermine the preferred orthodoxy. After all, the Soviet Union collapsed, in part, because of smuggled foreign rock music extolling freedom and sub rosa distribution of anti-government pamphlets and dissident folk songs demolished its orthodoxy. The journalistic militia can’t let that happen here.
Instead, many newspeople now seem to favor censorship of off-narrative messages and some even support the firing of their colleagues who are not sufficiently in line. This is true even though U.S. newspeople have a unique power bestowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. One wonders why.
They have forgotten that the goal of adversarial journalism is to rip the scabs off the festering sores of society and expose the wounds to the healing light.
