@froomkin
Dan Froomkin’s Jan. 31 column at Press Watch is worth your time and attention. Especially if you have torn out much of your hair over media practice/malpractice over the last couple of decades.
But first….
Media critic Eric Boehlert complains this morning that the moment Democrats are back in charge in the White House reporters find spine enough to think it troubling that “on occasion” communications staffers inquire in advance what questions they may have for new White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. One Politico reporter calls it “harassment.” Boehlert calls it out:
After four years of Trump’s White House spokespersons categorically refusing to answer questions with substance, and instead leaning into lies, obfuscations, insults, and empty promises to provide journalists with answers at a later date, it’s strange that Biden’s press team is being criticized for trying to be prepared.
The profession is enough of a mess that with the upcoming turnover in executive editors at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times, Froomkin offers advice in the form of a speech incoming bosses might give their political staffs. Consider the changeover an inflection point between the profession as it was and as it could be.
Among his recommendations:
First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That’s an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.
Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And, because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.
Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I’m against that.
Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.
While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?
The profession must learn from its mistakes, refuse to take government at its word, and challenge claims of secrecy. “The government routinely uses secrecy to protect itself, not the people.”
Habits developed in an era of loyal readers and limited space no longer apply – not when people land on our stories from who-knows-where and we can offer background and verification, through our writing and through supplementary links. What has been the unstated subtext of so many of our stories – that politics bends to the powerful, that bigotry blights so many American lives, that climate catastrophe is imminent – needs to be clear and obvious going forward. It needs to be in the headline.
The “view from nowhere” has to go. Moral clarity is in fashion again.
On diversity in the news and in newsrooms:
I look out at our profession, and I don’t see much of it.
Over time, that has to change. And it will change – but not overnight.
What we need to do, in the meantime, is recognize the effects of that: namely, that we have for a long time now operated in an atmosphere of establishment whiteness, where whiteness and white values are considered the norm.
This has corrupted what the previous generation of leaders considered “objective” journalism. Even if you value being “detached” or “above it all” – which, for the record, I do not — you are neither of those things if you haven’t recognized, not to mention rejected, white privilege and presumptions.
We in this business write and report, by default, from a position of whiteness. Our sources are too often white and male. Our presumed readers – the ones we worry about not offending – are white, male, affluent, and centrist (as if centrism were still a thing.)
We too often think of whiteness as neutral. What we have all witnessed so vividly in the last four years is what nonwhite people have experienced for decades: that it is not.
New rules
From now on, I’m the bad cop when it comes to dishy sources who want to talk to you anonymously. When you tell your sources “my boss won’t let me quote you unless you speak to me on the record,” that’s me.
Granting anonymity is a two-way contract and should only come in return for delivering accurate information of great value to the public. In its ideal form, it protects sources who tell secrets and would otherwise face retribution from the bosses who don’t want the public to know the truth.
But publishing what anonymous sources say is essentially vouching for their credibility, because readers have no way of judging it on their own. It also means the sources can avoid accountability of any kind for what they said, including if they lied.
So new rules:
- No anonymous sourcing unless you and your editor agree that the information is vital to an important story, otherwise unattainable, and you are either satisfied of your source’s altruistic motives or prepared to describe their more venal ones to your readers.
- Warn them that if they lie to you, you will out them.
I’m also abolishing the fact-checking department. Or rather, I’m turning everyone into a fact-checker. Fact-checks shouldn’t be segregated. If a lie is important, that’s a news story. If an entire political party is engaged in gaslighting, that’s a news story.
Even more importantly, we should pursue consequences for lying, because right now there are none beyond a “fact check” that nobody reads. That means interrupting known liars when they are repeating a known lie. That means demanding retractions, publicly and repeatedly. That means denying serial liars the opportunity to use the media – particularly live media — to spread their lies. That means whenever you quote a serial liar, even if they are not provably lying at the time, you warn readers that they lie a lot. That means openly distinguishing in your reporting between people who, regardless of their political views, can be counted on to be acting in good faith from those who can be counted on to be acting in bad faith.
This is crucial to our mission and our economic survival. In a world with no consequences for lying, fact-based journalism has little value.
The Columbia Journalism Review echoed the blogosphere’s assessment of “White House Watch blogger Dan Froomkin’s unceremonious dismissal from The Washington Post” in 2009 that Froomkin was “guilty of nothing more than BWL—blogging while liberal.”
Froomkin continues to believe that reporting from somewhere rather than nowhere is the way the news business stays in business in the 21st century.