Bring Back the Fifth Estate

I used to be a journalist, so it’s disappointing to distrust the media as much as I now do. We thought journalism was a noble profession when I was in J-school. Our mission was almost biblical: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. A fierce critic of the US president, Jim Acosta did that on CNN. His reward is to be moved to a time slot out of prime time. That’s one truth-teller pushed aside, but it’s also a warning to the others: shut up or tone it down. Self-censorship and obeying in advance are dangerous to democracy.

Here’s what reporting looked like from my little corner back in the day:

When I worked in newspapers, people lied to me a lot. When I reported on drug raids, police tried to co-opt me. I didn’t fall for it. Firefighters are great, but when two fire departments nearly burned down the wrong house during a training exercise, I wrote the story. I chronicled the intersection of drug addiction and homelessness in Halifax. Then, I got angry complaints from a compromised party trying to slip the problem under the rug. I wrote as honestly as I could and got angry phone calls in return. I got shouted at a few times and threatened with bodily harm once. A letter to the editor seemed bent on burning me to get me fired. My editors, to their credit, didn’t order me to tone it down. They didn’t say a word to me about it. I wonder if they’d be so protective of their reporters today.

Further evidence on a grand scale:

Much of the mainstream media’s normalization of DJT is unconscionable. I know. He won. Now, his challenge is to lead, and it’s a journalist’s job to question the status quo and report the facts. There are still good journalists, but I don’t know the percentage or ratio. Coverage that conveys facts that result in justified outrage as norms and laws are broken is not biased. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Only monarchs can’t be questioned (and that was back when kings and queens beheaded their critics.) Today, we get too many tepid squeaks from mainstream journalists. Don’t leave all the heavy lifting to Jimmy Kimmel.

President Petulance keeps doing questionable, immoral, and imperial shit. Still, It won’t be long before we get another so-called think piece from Slate about how Democrats should have been nicer to right-wing fanatics in Tennessee.

(Hat tip to the Skepticrat Podcast for the second half of that last line.)