The End of Unbiased Reporting

The Ubiquity of Advocacy Journalism

And the Elon Musk BBC Interview

Reporting the facts, and all the facts, fairly and impartially, was once the acknowledged standard of journalism. It wasn’t always met. But it was, at least, a standard that all respectable news media accepted.

To be sure, there has always been a secondary source of information that presented itself as news but was devoted to other objectives. I’m thinking of the supermarket tabloids, which were fun, but meant to be fun. Nobody with any sense took them seriously. And there have always been periodicals with political, social, and economic viewpoints, but they didn’t present themselves as reporting the news.

Such viewpoints could also be seen in the daily news, whether in print or on TV, but they were always relegated to the editorial and opinion pages. So, again, there was no question about the intent.

In the 1980s, those viewpoints began appearing not only on the editorial and opinion pages, but in the news reporting of some papers, too. The Washington Times, for example, was funded to provide a conservative counter-perspective to The Washington Post’s decidedly liberal slant.

And then, in 1966, Fox News was launched. In its first year, it was dismissed by the liberal media as an irrelevant and passing fad. But when its circulation skyrocketed to 17 million cable subscribers in a single year, and continued to grow, the mainstream press began to understand that holding to the old standard of fair and impartial reporting could not compete with this new strategy of curating the news to support social and political perspectives.

I got into the newsletter business in the late 1970s and was able to watch this change take place from the beginning. Until Fox came along, it was obvious that the mainstream outlets were making an effort to at least look unbiased. But as they lost market share, they began to study the way that Fox and other conservative platforms were gaining market share. And gradually, they learned to hold their noses while they adopted the same techniques.

By the time Trump was elected in 2016, the liberal mainstream media was every bit as capable as the right at employing advocacy journalism. And because Trump’s win was so shocking and scary to them and their audience, they began moving into it with a vengeance. Literally.

Today, the old standard is all but dead and forgotten. With the questionable exception of a few digital news feeds that have appeared recently, all the large media outlets – in print, on TV, and on the internet – are completely committed to promoting narratives that match their political, social, and economic views.

And most of the time, because the audience for news is split, roughly, in two, journalists are allowed to do and say just about anything, so long as it is something their audience wants to see. We saw an example of that with the leaked backroom conversations at Fox. And we saw it in the leaked backroom conversations on NBC and CBS about the BLM riots.

And you can see it here in the way this BBC journalist, in an interview about Twitter, tries to “catch” Elon Musk. (Warning for my Musk-hating friends: This will – or should – embarrass you.)

Click here.

Speaking of Musk… 

Yes, you guessed it. I am a huge Musk fan. I love that he spent all those billions to buy Twitter. I love that he turned over all its dirty underwear to three reporters that have been exposing the way the Justice Department and other federal agencies were colluding with Twitter to censor conservative content, including important truths about COVID. And I love that he fired 80% of the workers at Twitter and the business is still going strong.

And I love his latest move at Twitter: labeling government-funded media as government funded.

Click here.

I found this clip interesting, but I feel like I’m wrong…

There is athleticism involved. It is a kind of scientific experiment. It’s mildly dramatic. But it’s also much ado about nothing. Right?

Two questions:

* We have all spent time pursuing purposeless objectives like this. But in the past, it was usually done solo or with a small group of likeminded friends. This guy is broadcasting his to the entire world. Is that an unexpected consequence of the ubiquity of social media?

* Also – should I be worried that clips like this capture my interest? Should you be worried if you open this link to find out?

Click here.