Mainstream liberal media has learned little from failures highlighted by Trumpism; they're dying to revive pre-Trump bad habits — while social media apps amuse us into passivity
Nice and thought-provoking, as ever. Not to diminish your take, but it seems to me fairly predictable that when the Times abandoned its "objective" stance to take on Trump's existential attack on all good things, there would be confusion if a Democratic administration took over. Does one move permanently over to a more European sort of journalism, where you more openly write according to your institution's political preferences, or does one snap back in "objectivity" and pretend no preference now that that particular [Presidential] threat has subsided? Whatever else is involved in Wolfe's story, she clearly did not get the (unwritten) memo.
Thank you, David! I think there's something to be said about declaring your values - I don't think newspapers should ally with political parties or politicians, but they should declare the world view that shapes their coverage, in teh way the Guardian has tried to do over the years -- so it's not a Blairite or a Corbynite or even a Labourite paper, but it's a social democratic paper ,and measures all politicians against the concerns and values that flow from that. I think the problem in US journalism has been that it doesn't recognize the ideology to which much of it conforms as an ideology -- it imagines its underlying assumptions about the economy, for example, or about what role the US has and should play beyond its borders, etc as some kind of commonsense. And also an exaggerated deference to power...
Nice and thought-provoking, as ever. Not to diminish your take, but it seems to me fairly predictable that when the Times abandoned its "objective" stance to take on Trump's existential attack on all good things, there would be confusion if a Democratic administration took over. Does one move permanently over to a more European sort of journalism, where you more openly write according to your institution's political preferences, or does one snap back in "objectivity" and pretend no preference now that that particular [Presidential] threat has subsided? Whatever else is involved in Wolfe's story, she clearly did not get the (unwritten) memo.
Thank you, David! I think there's something to be said about declaring your values - I don't think newspapers should ally with political parties or politicians, but they should declare the world view that shapes their coverage, in teh way the Guardian has tried to do over the years -- so it's not a Blairite or a Corbynite or even a Labourite paper, but it's a social democratic paper ,and measures all politicians against the concerns and values that flow from that. I think the problem in US journalism has been that it doesn't recognize the ideology to which much of it conforms as an ideology -- it imagines its underlying assumptions about the economy, for example, or about what role the US has and should play beyond its borders, etc as some kind of commonsense. And also an exaggerated deference to power...