Must the Justices Create a Trustworthy Press?
Why not just hire smart people and ask them (or free them) to do honest reporting?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
April 9, 2021 6:39 pm ET
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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
No writ exists in the Constitution for journalism’s holy of holies, the 1964 Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court ruling that allows us falsely to defame public figures as long as we do so without “actual malice.” Such is a longstanding argument given new currency by veteran federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman in a dissenting opinion already covered repeatedly in these pages.
And yet constitutional matters aside, the Supreme Court in 1964 defined a pretty good standard if journalists cared to adopt it. It requires them really to care whether what they are reporting is true.
Alas, counterexamples are a daily occurrence. The now-independent journalist Andrew Sullivan details the media’s insistence on characterizing, without evidence, the Atlanta shooter as racially motivated. The now-independent journalist Glenn Greenwald dismantles a Vox journalist’s video clip suggesting a sheriff’s deputy flippantly said the shooter “had a bad day.” (The full video shows he was faithfully conveying what the shooter himself had stated.)
The now-independent journalist Bari Weiss examines the media’s concealment of the fact that many “racist” assaults on Asian-Americans are carried out by blacks. Mr. Greenwald returns to the fray to eviscerate journalists at CNN, MSNBC and NBC for claiming a U.S. intelligence report showed the Hunter Biden laptop story to be Russian disinformation (the report made no such claim).
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Here’s an example of my own: NPR’s Tom Gjelten, in an unctuous sermon in which he lets us know he prefers what he imagines to be Joe Biden’s refugee policy to Donald Trump’s , intones, “In 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency, the United States resettled 85,000 refugees in this manner. But under Trump, the resettlement program was nearly shut down. Last year, fewer than 12,000 refugees were admitted, the smallest number in the history of the U.S. refugee program.”
You have to be some kind of journalist not to notice an intervening variable that might mess up the comparison, namely a global pandemic. In fact, the 12,611 who were admitted in the 2020 fiscal year were out of a mere 30,113 who applied, a 71% drop from the previous year for reasons enumerated in an annual report to Congress: “travel restrictions in and out of refugee processing sites worldwide,” “reduced flight availability,” a U.S. economic lockdown and school closures that made transferring to the U.S. less urgent.
The honest comparison would be to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when the Trump administration admitted 92,623 refugees (i.e., human beings fleeing violence), a number the Obama team never approached in its best year.
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We should understand: In its currently diminished state, journalism’s narrative-itis is partly an economizing move. When a new story emerges, multiple reporters and editors have to invest in understanding its essence and details; they have to reach a consensus on how it should be reported. This takes time. People need to be paid. Good people cost more. Whereas no recrimination is possible if a narrative of racism is claimed or implied. That’s the great thing about “systemic racism.” We can assume its presence and never be wrong. No need ever to run a correction. No need to fall afoul of woke colleagues, which might cost us our jobs.
And journalists wonder why their work is so little prized by consumers. They wonder why their pay isn’t higher.
Whenever I touch on these subjects, readers email me to say journalism doesn’t pay; the smart kids go to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, medicine or law. An economist of international renown emails to say the same “brain drain” also afflicts teaching, politics and government. A reader scoffs that being a member of a profession means “accepting liability for one’s professional actions with appropriate levels of malpractice insurance. . . . Modern journalism is an industry, not a profession.”
And yet when it comes to CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post, these are good jobs. They could attract good people if publishers decided they want independent, careful thinkers, not incurious conformists. Amid the travails of our industry, The Wall Street Journal never had to lower its hiring standards, though I understand the same might not be so of struggling regional papers like, oh, the Miami Herald.
An uninvited email arrived from the Society of Professional Journalists. It went: “To all journalists, everywhere, thank you, for your work, your dedication, your patience, your care, your camaraderie, your amazing ability to set aside your own emotions and pain [over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot].”
This absurd vanity is the flip side of a lack of courage. To be any kind of professional means being willing to tell the client a truth he doesn’t want to hear. All it would take to put our business back on track is a few top editors saying, “Let’s pride ourselves on the intellectual quality of our work—on putting only rigorously vetted factual and logical claims in front of the public.”
