Andrew Mir:

The media also have contributed to their own decline. How? “Some of the wounds are self-inflicted,” writes Rosen. In particular, he refers to the struggle of the newsrooms to increase diversity while maintaining the “view from nowhere.” “See the contradiction?” asks Rosen. “Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it—in order to prove their objectivity,” he complains. While tendentious, Rosen’s argument is interesting for what it reveals about the industry.

Journalists once considered objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality as cardinal virtues. Now professors at top journalism schools treat these as false standards. The flip happened during Donald Trump’s first presidency, when top editors concurred with rank-and-file journalists that they must not give equal consideration to views that clashed with “democratic” values. For example, there could be no legitimate opposing perspective, they argued, on matters of sexual abuse. There could be no “other side,” they insisted, when fascism loomed. Journalists must not seek false balance in their coverage.

The command to disregard the “wrong side” soon extended to politics and social issues. Objective reporting, on this view, demonstrated a false “view from nowhere,” while stories that tried to reflect competing views indulged in “bothsidesism.” Each term carried a pejorative connotation.

Behind this change of labels is an epistemological shift in discourse production. For most of the twentieth century—from the muckrakers of the Progressive Era and pioneering investigator Ida Tarbell to Walter Cronkite’s Vietnam War coverage—journalism’s theorists and practitioners fought for their duty to report the news. Today, journalists often get criticized when they cover, investigate, and discuss certain events. Indeed, media critics and journalism professors often urge that journalists not report certain events.