I have followed and read James Fallows’ work as a reporter and a critic since at least the Carter administration. He has written for The Atlantic magazine for most of that period, but he has also served as a foreign correspondent, trying to understand China, and as a researcher looking for commonalities and conflicts among Americans from different regions and with different life experiences
In recent years, he has offered his perspectives at his own online subscription service, “Breaking the News.” He has recently written about the problems in America’s deeply divided electorate and elected officials. Politics has long been heated, but it has recently dissolved into insults, threats and violence. Fallows offered a number of reforms in government and at the individual level to calm the political storm and preserve America’s democracy.
America has become less democratic as restrictions on voting, including reducing the numbers and accessibility of polling stations, and gerrymandered election districts. The no-compromise, hate the other side attitude of many politicians and the willingness to dissemble and lie about issues makes already volatile political campaigns a witches’ brew that threatens the survival of American democracy.
I was surprised but shouldn’t have been that Fallows includes the news media among those institutions that need reform in order to salvage democracy.
His complaint is not about “fake news” or the demise of local newspapers. Fallows thinks journalists need to rethink the way they report the news. For most of the 20th century, most reporters and editors followed an unofficial code of ethics that demanded absolute neutrality. Throughout my career as an editor, as I followed the ethics code, I demanded that reporters not participate in politics, beyond voting in elections. Journalists could not remain neutral if they ran for public office or if they worked on or advised political campaigns. This neutrality served journalism well for nearly 100 years, defeating the 19th century system in which newspapers were openly partisan, even adopting a party’s name, such as the Arkansas Democrat.
The result, Fallows says, is a system that allows misconduct and outright lies to be used without any correction by the Fourth Estate. Reporters have been taught to report “both sides of the story.” This process has been extended to television interviews, where a panel of four or more commentators discuss an issue; the panel will be balanced, two on one side of an issue and two on the other.
But not all news stories come with two convenient sides. If a man is charged with kidnapping and child molesting and is convicted by a jury, would you need to call a psychiatrist to explain why the man is not really responsible? Similarly, if a political candidate declares before election day that if he doesn’t win, he will not concede and will accuse his opponent of voter fraud. If he then rejects the legitimacy of his opponent’s certified win and continues to claim his opponent cheated, even though a series of court decisions, in response to the aggrieved candidate’s claims, found no evidence of election fraud, journalists should point out the legitimate facts of election fairness.
With certainty that the aggrieved candidate has lied about election fraud, shouldn’t news outlets deny the suing candidate an implicit legitimacy by giving him/her an opportunity to tout his/her debunked claims?
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