The comfort of turpitude is easier and greater

From Integrity Lost: The Journalism Chronicles by Scott H. Greenfield, lamenting the loss of viewpoint independence and integrity in the media. He starts with:

Michael Goodwin was weaned on Abe Rosenthal’s New York Times, rising to City Hall Bureau Chief before becoming Executive Editor of the Daily News and, now, chief political columnist for the New York Post. He’s been around, so when he says this, it comes from experience:

It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government—and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.

This is the sort of statement that really needs context, as the left-leaning of the Nixon era wasn’t the same left as today. There were similarities, of course, in that Nixon was viewed as inherently evil and must be taken down. The lives of young men in Viet Nam depended on it, so the platitudes were born.

During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.

And concludes with:

Goodwin offers three ways in which journalism could recapture its status as a legitimate source of news.

The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Goodwin’s third ingredient, dependent on the other two, is for readers to support the media it likes.

As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy.

Feel free to hit the tip jar on the right (and I appreciate your support), but frankly, this strikes me as the problem more than the solution. It’s not about what we “like,” which is the bubble that confirms beliefs and desired outcomes. It’s about what’s real, even if we don’t.

The evil of advocacy journalism, masquerading as news reporting, has been the subject of my invective for a while. But so too has the point that integrity, once lost, cannot be regained. Once the news media has joined a team, it can’t be trusted again to be the honest broker of news. That isn’t a problem so easily solved, and it may not be fixable at all.

From the comments, there is this important observation that there have been past cycles of advocacy and integrity.

The notion that integrity is like virginity is false. Integrity CAN be restored. It just ain’t easy. Journalism used to be yellow, then it cleaned up. Mostly. Now it’s gone yellow again, but it can recover. To do so it has to ditch that evil bromide about comfort and affliction.

I would add one observation - there are at least two tropes of the sixties and seventies which have been highly corrosive of public discourse. One is the claim that "the personal is political" from the feminist movement in the 1960s and the second is, as noted by Greenfield, the belief that the raison d'être of the news media is "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

The first claim, that "the personal is political," obliterates privacy. It is a totalitarian's worldview. It coercively dragoons all private activity into the public debate. From "the personal is political" comes doxxing, social media mobs, deplatforming, suppression of speech, virtue signalling, and all the many other wretched excesses of modern discourse. "The personal is political" is an invitation for the majoritarian mob, incendiary advocates, and the state to coercively intervene in a person's private domain via the claim that "the personal is political" and it's modern attendant claim that "words and thoughts are as harmful as physical action."

Greenfield elaborates on the claim that the role of the media is "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I would add that the plank "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is even more rotten than Greenfield describes. He is correct as far as he goes, but there is more.

The afflicted can be afflicted by circumstance or they can be afflicted by the consequences of their own decisions and actions. In the West, we tend to be sympathetic to those who are afflicted by circumstance (drought, disability, natural disaster, etc.). Our sympathy tends to be markedly more constrained when it comes to those who are afflicted by the consequences of their own decisions and actions.

It reminds me of Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper which was always ambiguous, subject to both moral and tragic interpretations. Undoubtedly, the grasshopper was in the wrong and seeking to sponge off the ant, on the other hand, you don't want to see someone suffer extinction from their own indolence, ignorance, stupidity, and bad decision-making.

The trope "to comfort the afflicted" falsely conflates the two concepts, airbrushing the real moral tension: what do you do when someone's suffering arises from their own decisions and actions, particularly if the amelioration of such suffering harms or threatens those not responsible for that suffering?

Likewise with afflicting the comfortable. It sounds simple and straightforward, but like most simple tropes about complex issues, it is incomplete, moot, irrelevant or wrong. Is it a moral imperative of the media to afflict those who are harmless and also comfortable through their own efforts and decision-making? Surely, you only want to afflict only those who have achieved comfort through deception, coercion, or crime?

I think the latter point is the correct one and a great and useful function of the media. And yet, in modern times, the media afflicts the honest comfort of the middle class while turning a deliberately blind eye to the comfort of the elite who achieve their success via deception, coercion, and crime. Weinstein is only the topical example of a much deeper and long running blindness in the media. The Fusion research, Clinton's perennial plague of bimbo eruptions, the insistence that the email erasures weren't an issue, and the refusal to investigate pay-to-play charges that were right out there in the open are all examples of the longer running issue.

The conviction on the part of recent generations of journalists that the personal is political and that the media's duty is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable has, I suspect, contributed mightily to the collapse of the integrity of the media and the corresponding collapse of the public trust in the media.

That trust can re-earned by renewed integrity but it takes time, costs money, and is inherently difficult. They might not like the choices, but the media has a path to redemption. The problem is that they are unlikely to choose it because it is hard and risky. The comfort of turpitude is easier and greater.