In the war to preserve democracy, as battles wage both here at home and abroad, op-ed columnists are advocating for the establishment of a new battlefront. Somewhat surprisingly, their target is mainstream media outlets themselves.
Writing in The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin claims that these outlets “have been complicit in the current crisis of democracy” (Nov. 15, 2021). Joining the fray, The Post’s Dana Milbank goes so far as to accuse his mainstream media colleagues of “serving as accessories to the murder of democracy” (Dec. 3, 2021). He continues, “Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand” and become “partisans for democracy.”
Which egregious abuses, you might well ask, merit such protestations of alarm and disdain? And what would it look like if journalists became partisans for democracy?
Ironically, the abuses in question spring from the age-old reporting practice of “both-sides journalism,” long meant to safeguard objectivity and assure credibility. “Both-sides journalism” has “come to mean that news stories should give equal time to opposing viewpoints — typically linked to political causes — and that a failure to do so represents a form of bias” (The Nexus, Dec. 10, 2020).
So what is wrong with giving both sides an opportunity to weigh in on the issues of the day? Isn’t that, after all, the essence of a democracy? Unfortunately, in the current political climate, Milbank and others believe that this well-established journalistic practice has outlived its usefulness.
“Both-sides journalism,” the thinking goes, was all well and good when you could find credible spokespeople on both the center-left and the center-right to duke it out in the court of public opinion. The practice doesn’t work as well when one side now consistently strikes below the Belt(way) while the referees, i.e., political reporters, knowingly look the other way.
Welcome to the make-believe land of “false equivalency” whereby factual information is invited to compete on an uneven playing field with conspiracy theories. Think climate change science vs. climate change denial or rampant voting fraud vs. (practically) nonexistent voter fraud.
Since writing the seminal book, Breaking The News: How The Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows has continually taken his fellow reporters to task for succumbing to “the almost irresistible instinct … to present differing views as being equally valid ‘sides’ of an argument” (The Atlantic, Sept. 26, 2015). Thereby, they engage in “a habitual, even reflexive presentation of claims or statements that a reporter knows are not of equivalent truthfulness, as if they were” (The Atlantic, Sept. 15, 2020).
By giving equal time and credence to varying “sides” of a story, many op-ed columnists claim that political journalists not only help spread disinformation but also encourage extremism. In essence they create conflict for the sake of conflict without shedding light on the critical issues of the day.
With the midterms almost upon us, now might be an opportune time for the mainstream media to usher in a new age of enlightenment. New York University Professor of Journalism and media critic Jay Rosen urges political reporters to adopt a very different approach in the upcoming campaigns “instead of beginning with the candidates and the operatives and the strategy and the horse race and all the industry of politics” (Ezra Klein Show, Nov. 12, 2021).
Rosen would have reporters become partisans for democracy by going directly to voters in each state to outline a “citizen’s agenda.” By inviting voters to specify exactly what they want candidates to talk about, Rosen would hope to elevate campaign coverage by substituting substance for superficiality. The result: a better-informed electorate.
Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But hey, when it comes to saving democracy, isn’t it worth a try?
Skip Sturman is director emeritus of Dartmouth Career Services. He lives in Thetford.