Objectively Speaking — July 1, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Media Bias 📰
Rudy’s Sandals 🩴
Lack of Faith ⚖️

I’ve watched with interest the blowback against newspaper tyrant Gannett following its reminder to its journalists in the wake of the Supreme Court’s undoing of Roe v. Wade that they are not to take sides on social media.

“You cannot use social media to take a political position, criticize or attack a candidate, or express personal feelings about an outcome or ruling. (If you notice a newsroom colleague posting inappropriate comments, immediately alert your supervisor.)”
Gannett companywide email

The email went on to remind journalists to “refrain” from liking or retweeting posts “that could appear to indicate support for any side or group.”

This is all about maintaining some fairy tale notion that journalists are somehow born with an extra organ called “objectivity” that the commoners lack. I thought that was hilarious when I was a part of the newspaper industry, and I think it’s equally ridiculous today, though I appreciate its intentions.

I recently wrote about how I drove through a rural Arkansas town with a billboard promoting “White Pride Radio.” It was and is disgusting. But at least it’s honest. It’s good to know that the spirit of the KKK is alive and well in Zinc, Arkansas. Were I a person of color, I’d much prefer that than to accidently stumble upon a gathering of robed and hooded cowards who want to lynch me.

The same thing applies here.

One of the most influential people who taught me journalism was named Bob Woodward (no, not that Bob Woodward). He constantly drilled into us that being a part of the media was a privilege and cautioned us from living a public life in which we stated our opinions openly and freely (and this was before social media). He himself had never voted in an election because he never wanted anyone to see him or hear about him checking a box for a candidate of any particular party. It would diminish his credibility and his ability to do his job well, he reasoned.

I respected that.

I also was well aware that he leaned pretty far left. Anyone who knew Woodward knew that. It’s not that he was obnoxious about it. It’s that, if you spend time with anyone (and I spent a lot of time in Woodward’s classes) and you’re at all perceptive, you can begin to ferret out their biases.

And everyone has biases. Everyone. Even journalists.

The history of newspapers globally and domestically is based in a total lack of objectivity. Papers openly and brazenly supported politicians and causes important to their owners and operators. Journalists had agendas, and their coverage was slanted toward them. And everyone knew where everyone and every paper stood.

That was a good thing.

These days, we have Fox News, which held onto the motto of “Fair and Balanced” long after every single person in the United States and the world had every reason to know and believe that that was a bunch of bullshit. They only dropped it in 2017! CNN and MSNBC both blow into the objectivity trumpet with equal measures of incredulity.

If you pay attention to the modern media landscape, you know that The New York Times leans left and The Wall Street Journal leans right, yet both would claim that their journalists are grounded in objectivity.

Really? Then their newsrooms are a helluva lot different than every single other newsroom I’ve ever been in, because all of those were filled with human beings who have histories that helped mold their beliefs, which means they have beliefs, which means they have opinions, which means they have biases.

The pushback against Gannett came, not surprisingly for how people express their outrage these days, anonymously and on social media. Threads blossomed with anonymous Gannett employees saying things such as: “We’re not going to tweet out ‘Fuck SCOTUS’ – it’s more like ‘this happened to me and this is important to me and it’s harmful to my healthcare.”

Which, of course, is just a different take on what bias is and proves my point: However you want to frame it, journalists are molded into who they are by their own histories.

Whether you say “Fuck SCOTUS” or you phrase it as “I had an abortion and this court decision really affected me” doesn’t matter. Both, under Woodward’s theory (and the dominant theory that remains in media today), would diminish your ability to do your job as effectively as if you kept your thoughts to yourself. And we as a nation suck at keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

Those pushing back against Gannett called it tone-deaf and seemed to try to draw a line between opinions about stupid things and opinions about issues of social importance.

But what’s an issue of social importance to you is such only because of your personal biases. Otherwise, there’d be universal agreement on what constitutes an important social issue, and, my dude, we can’t even agree on what the important social issue is after dozens of elementary school students are gunned down in their classroom. Is it guns? Is it mental health care being so god-awful? Is it the breakdown of the family? Is it violent video games? Is it the lack of God in our lives? “Thinking is hard! We’ll talk about this again after the next shooting that sparks our shock, outrage and prayers.”

I get what Gannett is trying to do, but it’s based on something that never existed and, even if I grant you that it once was a thing, it certainly is much less of a thing than when Gannett started swallowing up newspapers, cutting their staff and developing its social media policies.

Objectivity is a lie. So Gannetteers, identify yourself and post away! I’d have more respect for you if you did that than if you kept quite and let your opinion leak into your coverage under the guise of being unbiased.

No one in the 21st century has had a further fall from the good graces of sane Americans than Rudy Giuliani. The dude was perhaps the second-most important voice of the nation in the aftermath of 9/11, and he already was something of a local hero for how he helped clean up New York City.

Now, after humiliating himself as a Trumpeeter lapdog and having hair goop ooze down his face, he’s pushing sandals on Twitter. What the …

One of the main things that makes a society a society is shared faith in its institutions. If you want to mark Amuricah’s decline, one way to do so (and there are oh-so-many) is to chart the plummeting faith its citizens have in its foundational institutions.

According to a recent poll, 25% of Americans — a historic low — reported having confidence in the Supreme Court. That’s important because it’s the final check and balance in our theoretical three-branch democracy (though I’d put forward we have a two-branch democracy — money and military power). If three-fourths of the country doesn’t believe the Supreme Court serves as that final safeguard — and I’d argue that skepticism is more than warranted — it’s possible to make the case that societal collapse isn’t too far away.

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THE FOUR STEPSNo Axes 🪓Strengthen 💪Attack 🥷🏿Don’t Stop ⏳BONUS: 🥶🧊❄️ The go-to inevitabilities in American society tend to be death and taxes — and with good reason. After all, death is coming for all of us at some point, and income taxes were supposed to be a temporary fix to help fund the Union effort…

Objectively Speaking — July 1, 2022

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