Terrible Takes on Journalism From America’s Beltway Elites
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This is terrible.
Journalism isn't activism; it's presenting the facts, honestly and objectively. It's this mentality that's killing trust in our profession. https://t.co/32AWo9E7q4
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) March 25, 2018
Let’s even set aside the fact that Kraushaar decided to make this point talking against the editors of the Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper. I mean, talk about insensitivity. But, no, let’s not even mention that anymore. Kraushaar is just massively, irredeemably wrong. Unless you think Ida Tarbell was a disaster for journalism. Or Ray Stannard Baker. Or Jacob Riis. Or Lincoln Steffens. Or Mary Heaton Vorse. Or Seymour Hersh. Or any number of journalists in the past and present. Kraushaar has evidently been trained by a high school teacher who saw Voices of God such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow Telling the News As It Is (TM) without opinion or partisanship. What we really need is more David Broder and David Brooks!
not to single out the Parkland student journalist, but a) this wasn't what I was taught from a world-class high school journalism teacher; b) this mentality, at least from my experience, is more common among younger journalists.
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) March 25, 2018
Forgive me for disagreeing with your high school teacher, and as we all know, high school teachers are the ultimate arbiter of our values, but, no. This is just wrong. The entire vision of the 50s as Voices of God journalism is nothing but an artifact of early TV, a relic that had nothing to do with journalism in the decades before that or in the present. The problem here is that a journalism that claims objectivity and moderation is a journalism that is still making a political statement–one that accepts the status quo as something that is OK and acceptable. That’s as much a political statement as any left-wing or right-wing journalist could make. It’s just that it’s surrounded in a bullshit myth of objectivity–which does not exist. There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all shaped by our own personal experiences. Just because those personal experiences reinforce power in this nation doesn’t make us any more or less objective. That’s not to say there aren’t professional standards; hate my political writing if you want but if you come after my historical methodology, that means war.
But this is how you end up writing for a Beltway elite publication like National Journal, attacking Democrats for caring about economic issues that don’t matter to elite men like himself. True objectivity!