Friday, May 10, 2024
Good morning.
As regular readers of this news blog know, the state and fate of the news media is a subject near and dear to my heart.
It’s the business I occupied for four decades, at the Wall Street Journal, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a startup Chicago weekly. When I entered the business in 1979 at that weekly as a 23-year-old cub reporter, I was pounding out stories on a manual typewriter (reminiscent of the Billy Wilder comedy classic, The Front Page, also set in Chicago).
But the sad truth is that journalism, as practiced today, is barely recognizable to me. The newspaper world I started in 45 years ago next month more resembled the one Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau portrayed (from the 1920s) than it does the journalism of today. News was exclusively print in 1979, as it had been since Gutenberg invented moveable type five centuries earlier.
As a former practitioner and teacher of the craft once known as “journalism,” I sadly note changes the profession has undergone. But as dramatic as the transformation has been in journalism’s technology, ownership and business model, its practices and standards have changed even more. I observe these changes on a daily basis in the news and commentary I consume, whether in print, online, heard or viewed.
Sometimes, I note the changes up close and personal, as the story I am about to relate conveys.
Six years ago, I retired from a 25-year career as an editor and manager at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I am, therefore, more than casually acquainted with the ways of journalism as practiced at “one of America’s great newspapers.”
I do not cite that slogan (proudly displayed atop the PG’s front page) derisively. I worked at the PG twice – sandwiched between 14 years at the Wall Street Journal. For the vast majority of my time at the Post-Gazette, I regarded it as a great place to work.
Whether it is now or ever was “one of America’s great newspapers” is a subjective call. There can be no denying, however, that journalism when practiced as a true truth-telling enterprise, is among the most noble of professions, and the highest of callings. Telling the truth and discerning it is at once a biblical and civic command, with good reason.
But the column I read on Sunday, February 25 – brought to my attention in a sermon Pastor Nate Devlin preached that day – surely didn’t qualify as “great” or even truthful, in my judgment.
Besides being terribly ill-informed, the column was dismissive toward anyone who disagreed with its perspective. The author portrayed transgender proponents in Mt. Lebanon as innocent and altruistic in the advocacy they’ve brought to our community. They’re simply seeking to promote less bigoted, “less hateful” attitudes toward non-binary persons, the column said.
What I objected to most in the column was its moral ambiguity and outright misrepresentation of fact. I am citing it at length today because it exemplifies what I’ve come to expect from the news media (sadly), and how the standards have changed over my lifetime.
The news media has always been liberal. Only a fool would assert otherwise. But in recent years, it’s moved well beyond predictable liberal bias. Now, the news media not only tells you how to think – it also infers (or sometimes explicitly says, as in the case of this column) that you’re promoting hate if you have the audacity to hold a viewpoint counter to theirs.
This is especially true when the media writes about anything involving gun control; abortion; the environment; or gay rights, as Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the New York Times, noted in this trenchant commentary, which caused a stir in the Times newsroom when it was published in 2004.
“If you think the paper plays it down the middle on any [of these] issues,” the former senior editor at Time magazine confessed then (he left the NYT shortly thereafter), “you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.”
You can now add Donald Trump; Covid; Russiagate; Hunter Biden’s laptop; diversity, equity and inclusion; race; antisemitism on college campuses; free speech issues; the border crisis; police; and religion to the ever-growing list of subjects that no mainstream news organization I am familiar with plays down the middle (except perhaps for the Wall Street Journal).
And of course, the newest shiny object: transgender rights. Those championing the “trans cause” are invariably portrayed in the coverage of the PG and elsewhere (National Public Radio, which we’ll get to in a moment, plus the Times, Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, you name it) as heroic defenders of virtue and human rights, and their opponents as ignorant bigots. Hence, the portrayal in the offending column.
In recent years – let’s say the last decade or so – I’ve noted that the traditional embrace of liberalism has taken on a far more progressive tilt.
But why is this shift in standards happening now? There are likely many reasons. As in the law and many other professions, younger journalists are the product of the educational system and society they were raised in. They’re steeped in social media, which has enforced uniformity on progressive social norms to a very high degree. The prevalence of the iPhone (introduced in 2007) has further exacerbated these trends.
Simply put, journalism as practiced now among the young journalists coming of age in this progressive era is that you protect your allies and pounce on your enemies. If you support gay or trans rights, you don’t ask skeptical questions that will alienate those whose cause you support.
In fact, skeptical questions likely wouldn’t even occur to you. That is the point social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes in his ground-breaking book The Coddling of the American Mind. In it, he explains why young adults in Generation Z (those born after 1995) have become so intolerant of opinions that conflict with their own, and how this intolerance has impacted the country and our culture.
I got an education on public perceptions of newsroom bias when I left the PG newsroom in the second half of my time there. Suddenly, I was charged with selling the paper. Here’s what that experience taught me: Calling balls and strikes fairly is a business imperative.
When you don’t treat your customers or audience impartially, with respect for all viewpoints be they conservative or progressive, you’re digging your own grave. That’s true whether you are publishing a newspaper or serving lattes. Little wonder, then, that the news business is in the ditch it’s in.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), the brilliant former United States Senator from New York (and moderate Democrat), once famously said: Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
The Post-Gazette op-ed column was long on opinion and short on facts, as so much of modern journalism is these days. It ignored and grossly distorted the essential facts of the case it purported to shed light on. These facts have been unearthed in the extensive legal discovery of a lawsuit filed against the Mt. Lebanon School District two years ago.
The lawsuit was brought by three Lebo moms whose children attended first grade at the district’s Jefferson Elementary School in the 2021-22 school year. The moms have alleged in their suit that the district and its top administrators permitted an extremist teacher to instill her beliefs about transgender topics to the six- and seven-year-old students in her class, over the objections of their parents. The court record (which I’ve read) more than supports this claim.
Knowing the details of the lawsuit – which were twice judged sufficient to go to trial this fall, over district challenges – I couldn’t believe that a person objecting to the grotesque violation of parental and child rights described extensively in the court record, could be characterized as “hateful.”
Hateful? Why? Because you object to innocent first-graders being force fed transgenderism? Really? It’s “hateful” that a person would object to that? Exactly when did advocating for common sense and decency become hateful?
The columnist’s take on the Lebo situation was so offensive I decided to voice a public objection to it (which I hadn’t done on any story I’d read in the PG since my departure).
I wrote this letter (published on our Parrhesians website) and also submitted it to the PG. At first, I was told there wasn’t space to run the letter. But to its credit, the PG (through a very kind editor, David Mills) asked if I would write a rebuttal.
“Absolutely,” I eagerly replied. My column was published on March 18. Here it is. Below is how the column appeared on a friend’s computer screen the day it was published.
The response I got to the column underscores how absolutely out of touch the news media has become. The column generated 159 comments on the PG website. Not a single commenter (that I was able to find) objected to it or my thesis. Nor did the 30 or so emails I received from readers who reached out to me directly.
When you register a 189-to-zero majority on any subject nowadays, you know you’ve hit a rich vein of public sentiment. People may post yard signs in Lebo to signal virtue and support for gay and trans rights. But there are many, many citizens who quietly object when those rights supersede common sense – parental objections on a subject as sensitive as sexualizing first-grade children, and jeopardizing their welfare.
Which brings me to the terrain my recent encounter with the PG plays out against. While the news media is something nearly everyone complains about, few understand the risks some truth-sleuthing reporters face while gathering the news or the larger role that plays in our democracy.
Journalism is a tough business. The stakes are high. Decisions can have great, and sometimes grave, consequence. And the demands it exacts of its practitioners can be tremendous.
Consider the situation involving Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, now 32 (my age when I covered Germany for the WSJ). On March 29, 2023, he was arrested by Russian authorities on false allegations of espionage. He has spent the entire time since in a Moscow prison cell. Many attempts to negotiate his release have been futile.
The Journal cleverly printed a blank front page (below) on its March 29 front page this year to mark the one-year anniversary of Gershkovich’s unjust imprisonment. At the top of the paper was this headline: “HIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE: A year in Russian prison. A year of stolen stories, stolen joys, stolen memories. The crime: journalism.”
If his imprisonment on false charges isn’t stunning enough, the fact is that many in Western society increasingly hold journalists in low esteem. Vainglorious columnists masquerading as “reporters” have done much to reinforce the belief that journalists have little interest in reporting fairly.
When people become distrustful of information the news media conveys, as they increasingly have in seismic numbers in recent years, our democratic ecosystem fails to function properly.
My opinions on this subject are supported by hard data which comes from the Gallup organization. For a half century, Gallup has regularly tracked Americans’ trust in the news media. Its data is generally recognized as the most reliable measure of public sentiment on this subject.
According to its most recent polling last fall, public trust in the news media (sadly) is now at an all-time low. In fact, as the chart immediately below indicates, the share of Americans who have no confidence at all in the news media (now 39%) has, for the first time, surpassed the percentage who have a great deal or fair amount of trust (32%).
To state the obvious, this is a problem not just for the business which provides news and commentary to the public (as well as for the professionals who provide it). It is a universal problem which affects us all. Distrust is a signpost that democracy is not functioning properly.
My observations today about the news media are also occasioned by a scathing indictment and expose of National Public Radio revealed last month.
You may not care a whit about NPR, but along with the New York Times and a handful of other journalistic heavyweights, it sets the agenda for much of the information conveyed to you via the news media. So as these journalistic pillars go, so goes our democracy, which is why the state and fate of NPR and the Times and more broadly journalism, is worthy of your attention.
Once the nation’s premier provider of audio journalism, NPR has lost America’s trust. And when you’re in the news business, trust is existential – you have no economic reason to exist if your audience doesn’t trust you.
As trust in NPR has fallen, so has its audience. It has lost 18 million listeners (me among them), or a stunning 30% of its audience since 2020, according to this report in the New York Times, falling from 60 million weekly listeners then to 42 million now.
That’s a problem not just for the radio network but also for the American taxpayer, which keeps it afloat. The federal government provides hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to NPR.
The scathing indictment of NPR was authored by none other than one of its own employees, a senior editor by the name of Uri Berliner. In a blockbuster essay published a month ago on the news site the Free Press, the 25-year NPR veteran said the public radio network had lost its way by letting liberal extremism skew its coverage.
Berliner, a self-identified liberal – “I’m Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley” – was suspended once his essay went public.
Publishing the essay was a huge scoop for the Free Press, whose owner (Bari Weiss) and senior editor (Nellie Bowles) both left the New York Times in 2020 because of complaints they had over bias and insufficient viewpoint diversity on the Times’ staff.
In a message to NPR staff after the essay was published, Chief Executive Katherine Maher (who’d only been in the job two weeks) lashed out at Berliner’s critique. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity … is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” she said.
Maher then became part of the story when critics exposed her past posts on social media that indicate liberal leanings and progressive views, including having called Donald Trump a “racist” in a 2018 post that has since been deleted.
Berliner resigned a week after the essay was published.
“I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” he said in his resignation letter. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. … But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
In the essay, Berliner cited “three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered.” He provides an insider’s firsthand perspective of three huge stories in which NPR botched its coverage but failed to admit its mistakes afterward. NPR was not alone in that regard; I noted in this report the same coverage lapses, and failure to fess up, elsewhere in the mainstream news media on the same stories.
But Berliner has been the most outspoken insider to date to pull back the curtain on these lapses and attribute it explicitly to overt media bias driven by political motive.
First, there was NPR’s questionable ethics in its handling of Donald Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia in winning the 2016 election.
“… we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff,” Berliner writes. “By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. … But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparce. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
Second, there was the Hunter Biden laptop story. In October 2020, the New York Post published an explosive report, only weeks before the election, about Hunter Biden’s computer, which he’d left at a Delaware repair shop. Its contents included lurid photographs and incriminating emails detailing his shady dealings with overseas businessmen who wanted access to the “big guy,” his father and then Vice President Biden (for which Hunter has since been indicted on tax-evasion charges).
“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner writes. “But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
“When the essential facts of the [New York] Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.”
Third, politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. Whether the virus had occurred naturally (as U.S. government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, maintained) or had escaped from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan (which may have had funding from the U.S. government), quickly became the source of much speculation, which NPR squelched in its public reports on Covid.
“One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines,” Berliner writes.
“Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak [theory]. But at NPR, we weren’t about the swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. … Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”
Like Christian churches that no longer preach biblical truth – seeking to water down the gospel to appeal to a changing culture and the latest fad – the news media has also gotten submerged by its failure to adhere to basic news standards.
As a result, due to this – and also the rapidly changing economics of the news business – newspapers have become dinosaurs in a fast-paced digital news age.
According to this 2023 report by the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University (my graduate-school alma mater), the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005 by the end of this year if current trends continue. That’s a terrible trendline for not only keeping politicians honest but keeping citizens informed, especially in smaller markets where there are fewer news alternatives.
“Discouragingly,” the Medill report writes, “the growth in alternative local news sources – digital and ethnic news outlets, as well as public broadcasting – has not kept pace with what’s being lost.”
What the profession is seldom willing to admit to itself, however, is that much of that harm has been self-inflicted. Again, when you lose the trust of your audience – whatever medium the information is transmitted in – it’s hard to recapture that trust. People go elsewhere for their news and information. And for the mainstream news media especially, they’ve done exactly that, in droves.
And that loss of trust is at the heart of what Berliner describes in his essay, the headline of which was, “I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost America’s trust.”
In particular Berliner details attempts by senior NPR management following the death of George Floyd in 2020 to fix racism in America – as if any news organization could do such a thing, let alone have such aspirations – rather than to report on the subject, fair and square. The consequences of this misguided mission were devastating to the radio network, Berliner maintains. As a good (classic) journalist, he provides copious evidence and detail to support his assertions.
“Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death,” Berliner writes, “it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s – in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
“But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it. … And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem.”
Berliner then quotes from the companywide commique in which then CEO John Lansing, “in confessional language,” said the leaders of public media, “starting with me – must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves – body and soul – to profound changes in ourselves and in our institutions.”
Powered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, diversity, equity and inclusion was now the “North Star” of the organization. “Phrases like that’s part of the North Star became part of meetings and more casual conversation,” Berliner reports.
A growing DEI staff offered training. Staffers were herded into “unconscious bias training sessions,” where they were encouraged (if white) to admit their white guilt. The staff was segmented into groups based on every conceivable identity. A DEI Accountability Committee was established which would adjudicate disputes between the union “and the diktats of [identity] groups.”
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Berliner writes. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system.”
What was the result of this? Berliner asserts that it yielded considerable tension in the workplace and bizarre stories which aired such as “on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.”
What occurred at NPR was the journalistic equivalent of the cultural revolution under Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong.
In the process, NPR took what was a national treasure – whose reports I once used as brilliant audio tutorials for my university students during classroom dissections – and turned it into a caricature of what’s wrong with so many institutions in modern America, post-Covid, post-George Floyd and post-Donald Trump’s presidency. The list of institutions that have been infected by the DEI craze includes the church, the news media, entertainment/comedy, public and higher education, medicine and the law (just to name a few).
I dare say there’s scarcely an institution in America I can think of that hasn’t been touched by the same infection that went viral at NPR.
And of course, listeners noticed. They began to defect. I was among those who defected. Berliner notes that the impact these changes had on the composition of the audience was swift and clear. Back in 2011, while the NPR audience tilted a bit to the left, it still resembled America at large (important for a taxpayer-supported news enterprise). But by 2023, the ratio of listeners identifying themselves as conservative had fallen to 11% from 27%, while the proportion of liberals rose to 67% from 33% earlier.
Berliner relates his own deflating experiences with listeners he encountered.
“For nearly all my career,” he writes, “working at NPR has been a source of great pride. … I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, I love NPR! And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those driveway moments where a story was so good, you’d stay in your car until it finished.
“It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial I love NPR, there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, I don’t listen as much as I used to. Or, with some chagrin: What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
Why indeed.
Berliner concludes his disturbing but highly illuminating essay with this coda. In February, he writes, the NPR audience insights team sent out an email which proudly announced that the radio network had a higher trustworthy score than either CNN or the New York Times. But the Harris Poll research was hardly reassuring, he writes. It found that 3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they consider it trustworthy.
“Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about,” he concludes.
I concur.
I was going to end my report here, but after looking it over, I think a postscript is needed which answers the obvious question: If the traditional news media sources are so suspect, what am I to do?
Fortunately, many reliable digital alternatives have emerged to fill the news void. You have to subscribe to them, as you would have for traditional sources. But the options are out there. A surprising number of people now get their news exclusively from social media feeds such as those provided through Facebook and Tik Tok, which I would not recommend. They are highly selective in the information they feed to you.
Instead, I would opt for the Wall Street Journal as a primary source (which is the best news organization in journalism, in my opinion). But wherever you get your news, I would opt for sources that are curated and run by people whose perspectives you trust.
There are two new digital platforms in particular that I think are generally excellent. The Free Press (mentioned above) is one of the best sources of uncensored, relatively unbiased, intelligent information (not on abortion and gay rights, however).
I also strongly recommend The Ben Shapiro Show, from the Daily Wire.
Each week Shapiro conducts penetrating interviews with fantastic subjects. Two that were excellent recently were his session with author and journalist Abigail Shrier, on her new book Bad Therapy; and a prior episode with the famous Dr. Phil McGraw, on how radicals erode reality. I had never paid much attention to “Doctor Phil,” but I found his analysis of what’s wrong with America to be spot on, very balanced and very persuasive.
The process of finding reliable information is certainly more complicated than it was a half century ago, when television viewers had three choices in their evening news. Most turned on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Below is the link to Cronkite’s signature signoff on his final March 6, 1981 broadcast.
It’s a stroll down memory lane for old geezers like me who actually recall watching his final broadcast, and for the youngsters amongst us who may not even know who Walter Cronkite was. But it’s a reminder of a time, not that long ago, when journalists were perceived as more trustworthy than they are now.
Figuring out what’s happening in the world may be more complicated today than it was then, but that’s liberating too.
As is the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’ll close with a passage I was reading just this morning from Hebrews (part of our daily Bible challenge here at the church). Hebrews is a challenging book, but the beginning of the penultimate chapter is about as good as it gets (ESV translation).
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hallelujah! Amen. Keep on keeping on.