Classical liberal age of enlightenment is fueled by factual and honest reporting.

From It Only Counts When It Hurts by Freddie DeBoer.

I despair, a little more, every day. The way we talk about just about everything is broken. Today, the brokenness that saps my strength lies in this utter inability to see outside of anything but a pure binary of good and bad. If Jordan Neely was not a criminal who deserved to die, apparently, he must be a secular saint who could never have made anyone uncomfortable, let alone unsafe. And, again, the inherent and inescapable implied logic is that he must be that or else we could not mourn him and demand justice for his death. Well, here’s some moral simplicity of my own: mental illness is bad. People who have mental illness aren’t bad. But mental illness is bad. On the societal level it causes unspeakable harm. Mental illness ruined Jordan Neely’s life. He occupied the same reality where teenagers cosplay severe illness on TikTok for clout because we lack the integrity and courage as a society to acknowledge that mental illness is just bad. Many progressive people have decided that support for those with mental illness must entail insisting that mental illness makes you quirky and fun or else some kind of enlightened sage. They think they can be allies to the sick without acknowledging their sickness. And it is far past time that we disabuse them of that notion.

While the desire not to cause needless offense, that is an entirely different beast from not wanting to cause any offense. 

Reality is frequently offensive.  Or it at least offends our sensibilities.  

It is always paramount, though, to simply speak reality as it is seen, measured, understood.  Only by such traditional engagement can we progress and improve.

The journalists desire to shy away from saying anything which might cause offense necessarily precludes them from being reporter any longer.  Progress demands the truth of reality and we need journalists and reporters with the gumption to report those realities, that truth as it is understood at that moment.

Avoiding truth and reality out of excess politeness leads to tragic outcomes.