Journalist pushes activism over objectivity
Quin Hillyer
A Jan. 30 opinion piece by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. unintentionally shows why journalism rates among the least trusted trades in the nation.
It also shows why the Washington Post’s news pages, which for years have been less balanced than its liberal but thoughtful opinion section, so long have amounted to molten garbage piles of left-wing agitprop.
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The headline accurately captured the oxymoronic depths of Downie’s column: “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust.” Never mind that the major reason so many people do not trust journalists is precisely because so many reporters clearly believe their job is to interpret the “truth” for readers rather than mightily try to provide objective facts and unbiased context.
Downie literally argues that the very notion of “objectivity” is a white, male construct, and, thus by its very nature, is a “distortion of reality.” (Seriously.) In what sounds like an over-the-top parody of woke hokum but which he actually means as earnest advocacy, Downie writes that today’s more enlightened journalists “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
The column then devolves further into the left-wing’s obsessive field of nightmares against which reporters must battle: “persistent racism and white nationalism … the treatment of LGBTQ+ people; income inequality … the causes and effects of climate change; voting rights and election inequality; and even the very survival of our democracy.”
Therefore, today’s crusading avatars of truth, justice, and the nonbinary anti-colonialist planet-saving way, all of them denizens of “increasingly diverse newsrooms,” believe “that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view.”
Downie’s solution, of course, is more “diversity” as the Left defines it, complete with “affinity groups or caucuses of staff members — for women, Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and LGBTQ+ people,” with “personal identities” considered so central that newspapers now publish “first-person essays on the front page” about the struggles of their particular “communit[ies].”
Of course, that list of “diverse… identities” on whose sake objectivity should be rejected somehow does not include whites or men, whose identities apparently don’t matter.
The problem here, though, is not that Downie ignores white male identities but that he believes “identities” create truth in news rather than that readers can be trusted to decide “truth” on their own once provided with objective facts and unbiased context.
Who made these young radical reporters the arbiters of “truth,” anyway, and why should a single reader believe that the exterior “identity” of the reporter should make any difference in the value of news?
What Downie advocates is, by any measure, an abandonment of “news” for pure advocacy while disguising it as unvarnished “truth.” From the standpoint of journalistic ethics alone, it is anathema.
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Moreover, there’s a problem with Downie’s essay even wider than journalistic ethics. In all his endless twaddle about “diversity,” Downie never once mentions the only diversity that should matter, which is diversity of views. All these woke hordes of supposed truth-tellers marinate in their own bubbles of alleged victimhood while imagining, literally, that they are “protect[ing] democracy.” Their arrant arrogance is stupefying.
Fortunately, polls consistently show the public overwhelmingly rejects Downie’s weird ideal of nonobjective journalism. The woke mania for “affinity groups” is something for which the public has no affinity.