https://www.cjr.org/special_report/ag-sulzberger-new-york-times-journalisms-essential-value-objectivity-independence.php
Journalism’s Essential Value
May 15, 2023
The debate around “objectivity”—if that’s even the right word,
anymore—has become among the most contested in journalism. In recent
years, CJR has served as a forum for that discussion, through numerous pieces, and even a conference, last fall, exploring approaches to the question. This essay, from the publisher of the New York Times, and the chairman of the New York Times company, is the latest in that ongoing conversation. Email us your thoughts at editors@cjr.org.
As long as independent journalism has existed, it has angered people
who want stories told their way or not at all. But I can pinpoint the
moment when I realized how contested the very idea of journalistic
independence had become.
It was the fall of 2018, my first year as publisher of the New York Times.
I had spent my career until then as a reporter and editor steeped in
the methods, values, and stylistic quirks of traditional journalism,
covering small towns for the Providence Journal and local government for the Portland Oregonian before joining the Times.
Even after years of watching these traditions come under intensifying
pressure from the internet and social media, I was struck by how
frontally the old journalistic model was being challenged by the
dynamics of covering a new president unconstrained by precedent and
social norms—sometimes even reality itself.
At the time, the country was waiting for the results of Special
Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the
2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign. Many of the
president’s critics believed that the investigation would force the
removal of a man they regarded as unfit to lead the nation. They were
also convinced that the last safeguard against the president’s
relentless efforts to undermine the investigation was Rod J. Rosenstein,
the second-highest-ranking official in the Justice Department, who had
assumed oversight of the investigation when the attorney general recused
himself.
After months of careful reporting, two reporters in the Washington bureau of the Times,
Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt, uncovered a startling story. The
previous spring, Rosenstein himself had been so concerned about Trump’s
erratic behavior that he had suggested secretly recording the president
and even raised the possibility of invoking a constitutional mechanism
contained in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that had never been used, to
declare Trump unfit and remove him from office.
There was no question about whether to publish the story. It was
based on extensive interviews with high-level players in the
administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI and backed up by a
paper trail. It seemed like exactly the type of journalism the public
should expect from an independent press.
The article
appeared on September 21. Given that the reporting raised profound
concerns about the president’s ability to serve—from one of his own
appointees, no less—the swift and angry response from the right was not
at all surprising. Some saw our reporting as a validation of their
theories about a “deep state coup.” Many others dismissed the reporting
as entirely untrue and attacked us for publishing the story. Senator
Lindsey Graham tweeted
a response to the piece that proved typical: “When it comes to
President @realDonaldTrump….. BEWARE of anything coming out of the
@nytimes.”
What caught me by surprise was the outrage from the left. Here the
criticism was not so much that the reporting was untrue—though some did
jump through hoops to make that assertion—but that the information was
too dangerous to publish.
From Twitter to magazines to cable news, these critics charged that
our reporting had effectively armed Trump with the pretext to fire
Rosenstein and end the inquiry into his own conduct. On her show
that night, Rachel Maddow attacked the credibility of the story at
length before warning: “They have provided President Trump this headline
and this fully cooked, fully baked New York Times–approved headline inviting the president to fire Rod Rosenstein and thereby end the Mueller investigation.”
Even those who regularly espoused support for independent journalism
suggested that in this case our values had led us to a misguided
neutrality that jeopardized democracy. Readers accused the reporters of
journalistic recklessness and even of treason. “I suppose you would
argue that your job is to print the news, whatever it is,” one reader
wrote in one of the thousands of online comments and letters to the
editor protesting the article. “However, thinking so narrowly is an
abdication of your responsibility, and I’m not sure this was really news
anyway. To ignore the consequences of your stories is not ethical and
is no service to democracy. You have a profound duty to consider whether
the news value is worth the damage the reporting will do. In this case,
I do not believe it was.”
As I watched the reaction unfold, I found myself increasingly
concerned not just by the growing pressure on independent journalism,
but by the troubling demand implicit in the criticism. A leading news
organization had discovered that a top law enforcement official had such
profound concerns about the fitness of the president of the United
States that he discussed whether unprecedented steps should be taken to
remove him from office. And many people, even some journalists, wanted
this information actively hidden from the public.
The Challenge to Independence
American journalism faces a confluence of challenges that present the
most profound threat to the free press in more than a century. News
organizations are shrinking and dying under sustained financial duress.
Attacks on journalists are surging. Press freedoms are under
intensifying pressure. And with the broader information ecosystem
overrun by misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and
clickbait, public trust in journalism has fallen to historical lows.
There is no clear path through this gantlet. But there will be no
worthwhile future for journalism if our profession abandons the core
value that makes our work essential to democratic society, the value
that answers the question of why we’re deserving of the public trust and
the special protections afforded the free press. That value is
journalistic independence.
Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to
following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth—and the search
for it with an open yet skeptical mind—above all else. Those may sound
like blandly agreeable clichés of Journalism 101, but in this
hyperpolarized era, independent journalism and the sometimes
counterintuitive values that animate it have become a radical pursuit.
Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather
than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the
world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to
exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a
hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of
whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be.
Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to
favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying
ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are
unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting
readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.
This approach, tacking as it does against the with-us-or-against-us
certainty of this polarized moment, requires a steadfast, sometimes
uncomfortable commitment to journalistic process over personal
conviction. Independent journalism elevates values grounded in
humility—fairness, impartiality, and (to use perhaps the most fraught
and argued-over word in journalism) objectivity—as ideals to be pursued,
even if they can never be perfectly achieved. And crucially,
independent journalism roots itself to an underlying confidence in the
public; it trusts that people deserve to know the full truth and
ultimately can be relied upon to use it wisely.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched the arguments against this
model of independent journalism become more widespread and more
insistent, even within the ranks of established news organizations,
including the Times. This critique has been accompanied by
calls to instead embrace a different model of journalism, one guided by
personal perspective and animated by personal conviction.
Many have made thoughtful arguments in favor of this shift. Some say
that journalists are incapable of controlling for their own biases and
hide behind a false objectivity that masks, for instance, liberal
worldviews (the critique from the right) or privileges a straight,
white, male perspective (the critique from the left). Others suggest
that the model leads journalists to make unequal things seem
equal—sometimes to the point of rationalizing nonsensical or dangerous
positions—in performative displays of balance, often mocked as “false
equivalence” or “both-sidesism.” Some argue that the posture of
journalistic independence has evolved into a self-serving justification
for powerful gatekeepers to protect business as usual, including the
invisible assumptions and biases that prop it up. Still others assert
that this model of journalism is poorly matched for the perils of the
moment, arguing that more than just describing the world, journalists
should do everything in their power to fix it.
In responding to these arguments, let me first acknowledge that my
background may make me uniquely, perhaps even comically, unpersuasive as
a participant in this particular debate. I am the publisher of one of
the most scrutinized media institutions in the world; a wealthy white
man who succeeded a series of other wealthy white men with the same
first and last name; and someone whose family has starred in a full
century of shadowy media conspiracy theories. At the same time, the Times
is a 172-year-old human enterprise that publishes more words every week
than Shakespeare wrote in his entire life. Despite our best efforts, it
will not be hard to find examples where the Times has fallen painfully short of the independent ideal I defend here, from our early coverage of the Soviet Union to the run-up to the Iraq War. And I can also already hear critics dusting off their arguments about whether we wrote too much about Hillary Clinton’s emails, or too little about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or whether I personally mishandled my response to a now notorious opinion essay by Senator Tom Cotton.
On the other hand, there may be few people for whom this subject is
of greater personal and professional concern. My
great-great-grandfather, the founder of the modern New York Times,
helped establish the model of independent journalism—“without fear or
favor,” in his now famous motto—and entrusted his successors “to
maintain the editorial independence and the integrity of the New York Times
and to continue it as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free
of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.”
For more than 125 years, generations of my family have made it our
explicit mission to promote and defend that vision of independent
journalism.
I hung our century-old mission statement on my office wall on my
first day as publisher. In the years since, it’s become clear that
maintaining journalistic independence through this polarized moment will
be as difficult and unpopular as any challenge I will face in this
job—and, I believe, as urgent as any challenge the broader news industry
faces. Indeed, even as I prepared this essay for publication, three influential figures
in the profession separately published major explorations of the topic,
most recently a piece in these pages by the Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist Wesley Lowery.
My own view is illustrated using examples from the Times.
But there are many outstanding news organizations that exemplify the
type of independent journalism I’m describing, from newspapers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to wire services like the Associated Press and Bloomberg News to broadcasters like the BBC and NPR to digital publishers like ProPublica and Politico.
My defense of journalistic independence doesn’t come from reverence
for some golden age of journalism. Each generation transforms journalism
and the institutions that make it, almost always for the better, and
I’m proud to have played a part in some of those transformations.
It is certainly not rooted to a belief that journalism should be
unmoored from values. Independent journalism has a natural and welcome
affinity for the classic tenets of liberal democracy—the rule of law,
honest governance, equal rights, free expression—as well as universal
principles of human dignity, freedom, and opportunity. That’s why
journalists tend naturally toward stories that shine a light on
injustice, especially as they pertain to the most vulnerable among us.
But independent journalism also rests on the bedrock conviction that
those seeking to change the world must first understand it—that a fully
informed society not only makes better decisions but operates with more
trust, more empathy, and greater care.
In this way, independent journalism is the exact tonic the world
needs most at a moment in which polarization and misinformation are
shaking the foundations of liberal democracies and undermining society’s
ability to meet the existential challenges of the era, from inequality
to political dysfunction to the accelerating toll of climate change.
When the stakes feel highest—from the world wars to the red scare to the
aftermath of 9/11—people often make the most forceful arguments against
journalistic independence. Pick a side. Join the righteous. Declare
that you’re with us or against us. But history shows that the better
course is when journalists challenge and complicate consensus with smart
questions and new information. That’s because common facts, a shared
reality, and a willingness to understand our fellow citizens across
tribal lines are the most important ingredients in enabling a diverse,
pluralistic society to come together to self-govern. For that, as much
as anything, we need principled, independent journalists.
How We Got Here
It is no coincidence that maps of the world’s healthiest democracies
and maps of the world’s freest press environments are essentially
identical.
The press plays a straightforward informational role: who’s running
for office, how tax dollars are used, what legislation aims to achieve.
It plays an accountability role, exposing corruption and incompetence,
ensuring that the law is administered evenly and justly, and shedding
light on institutions that don’t want their secrets out in the open.
In a pluralistic democracy like ours, an independent press plays
another crucial role. It binds society by providing the connective
tissue of a common fact base that can be discussed and debated and by
exposing people to a wider range of experiences and perspectives.
“Democracy’s legitimacy and durability depend on dialogue and
deliberation, on process as much as on outcomes,” Carlos Lozada, a Times columnist, wrote in a recent piece on this topic.
The history of the Times is intertwined with this vision of
an independent press. For much of the early life of the country the
press was, in the main, openly partisan, with newspapers aligning with
various factions, ideologies, and politicians, championing supporters
and attacking opponents. The Times itself was part of this
tradition when it was cofounded, in 1851, by one of the men who helped
form the Republican Party three years later. That changed when the
small, struggling newspaper was sold out of bankruptcy to my
great-great-grandfather Adolph Ochs in 1896. He embraced a journalistic
model that contrasted sharply with the sensationalistic (and much more
financially successful) newspapers of the era, like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Ochs vowed to his readers that the Times
would instead be fiercely independent, dedicated to journalism of the
highest integrity, and devoted to the public welfare. His vision for the
news report: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor,
regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” His vision for the
Opinion report: “to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of
opinion.”
This approach helped lay the foundation for the model that became
known as journalistic objectivity. The most prominent champion of this
approach was the journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann,
whose writing almost always makes an appearance in pieces like this. He
argued that journalists “ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how
good.” Recognizing that journalists inevitably carried personal biases
and blind spots, Lippmann called for controlling them by
professionalizing journalistic processes and, in particular, embracing
lessons from the scientific method. He entreated journalists to focus as
much as possible on facts and to actively pursue evidence that could
challenge, rather than simply confirm, their own hypotheses. In this
conception, words like objective and impartial are not
a characterization of an individual journalist’s underlying
temperament, as they are so often misunderstood to mean, but serve as
guiding ideals to strive for in their work. “The idea was that
journalists needed to employ objective, observable, repeatable methods
of verification in their reporting—precisely because they could never be
personally objective,” Tom Rosenstiel, coauthor of The Elements of Journalism
and one of the leading defenders of the model, explained in 2020.
“Their methods of reporting had to be objective because they never could
be.”
In the decades that followed, this model would become the dominant
approach to American journalism, taught in universities and practiced at
news organizations from the local to the national level. Today,
however, the word objectivity is so contested inside the
journalistic community that it is viewed by many as self-discrediting in
the debate over the role of journalism. I continue to believe that
objectivity—or if the word is simply too much of a distraction,
open-minded inquiry—remains a value worth striving for. But
independence, the word we use inside the Times, better captures the full breadth of this journalistic approach and its promise to the public at large.
How Independence Works in Practice
What does independence look like in practice, and what choices does it require of journalists?
Prioritizing process. The most important ingredient
is treating independence as a discipline, backed by processes and ethics
designed to foster it. At the Times, as with many other
traditional news organizations, the commitment to independence is
reflected at every stage of our journalistic efforts. Our goal is to
only publish what we know; we would rather miss a story than get one
wrong. We correct our errors openly because mistakes should be
transparent and, honestly, painful. We talk to the people we write about
whenever possible and give those accused of wrongdoing the opportunity
to respond. We use multiple sources to confirm information and display a
healthy skepticism of everything we learn. We review pieces not just
for factual accuracy but for fairness. We enforce ethical guidelines
designed to prevent conflicts of interest (for example, we prohibit
supporting politicians and political causes) as well as stylistic
guidelines designed to minimize bias (for example, we avoid the use of
partisan terminology and provocative labels in our news pages).
Language is constantly shifting, and news organizations should shift
too. But one of the ways propagandists and advocates try to steer
coverage to advance their agendas is to win the battle over terminology.
For this reason we generally try to use the everyday language of the
public, what we call idiomatic English, rather than the specialized
language embraced by academics, activists, and marketers. That means
typically waiting until specific terms have gained broad societal
acceptance (generally using the widely recognized terms “Latino” or
“Hispanic” over the little-used “Latinx”) and trying to avoid
market-tested phrases that have been designed specifically to shift
public opinion (generally avoiding terms like “pro life” or “pro choice”
and instead describing such views as for or against abortion rights).
This can be contentious—when a Palestinian carries out an attack in
Israel, the Times generally calls this person a “militant” and
often hears protests from one side that considers the attacker a
“freedom fighter” and another that considers the attacker a “terrorist.”
As with other professions that have adopted explicit systems and
ethical norms to support independence—science, medicine, and the
judiciary, for example—the journalistic process described above doesn’t
guarantee perfect results. Personal biases and agendas can still distort
the work reporters and editors produce—just as people’s personal
experiences and backgrounds can elevate it. But good journalistic
processes reduce the frequency of mistakes and create mechanisms for
self-correcting when we err. That stands in contrast to alternate models
guided by political objectives, partisan loyalty, or, most obviously,
self-interest—all of which are more vulnerable to mistakes, hypocrisy,
and corruption. As with scientists, doctors, or judges, it is far better
to have journalists imperfectly striving for independence backed by a
defensible process than choosing not to bother because total
independence can never be fully achieved. “Failure to achieve standards
does not obviate the need for them. It does not render them outmoded. It
makes them more necessary,” wrote Marty Baron, former executive editor
of the Washington Post, in a recent essay on this theme. “And it requires that we apply them more consistently and enforce them more firmly.”
Following facts. Independent journalism can be
morally straightforward and satisfying. Journalists hold power to
account by exposing corruption and abuse. Journalists reveal injustice
and inequality. Their work regularly leads to a society that is freer,
fairer, and more just. This is the type of journalism seen in movies
like All the President’s Men, Spotlight, and She Said.
Independence protects journalism from being distorted by business
incentives. The fact that Harvey Weinstein was a longtime advertiser in
the Times didn’t keep us from revealing the abuses that set off
a cascade that ultimately landed him in prison. Independence protects
journalism from being distorted by government pressure. The fact that
China promised severe repercussions not long after we spent millions to
launch a new Chinese-language website there did not keep us from
publishing a major investigation into government corruption. And
independence protects journalism from being distorted by various forms
of self-interest. Even our own leaders, investors, and journalism are not immune from receiving unflattering coverage in the Times.
These protections are not simply a matter of ethics and values; they
are rooted in systems and processes and are reflected in the structure
of the company itself—by ensuring, for example, that journalists are
walled off from advertisers or that reviews of books by Times journalists are written by independent freelancers.
These commitments are widely accepted as necessary principles of an
independent news organization. But a true commitment to independence—and
the insistence on putting journalistic process ahead of a preferred
outcome—isn’t always easy or comfortable. One of the surest signs of
independence is that readers are frequently told things they don’t
expect and would prefer not to hear. Take two recent examples:
For years, the Times has documented the brutal persecution
of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar, that human rights
experts have called a genocide. This was the story one of our reporters
was prepared to tell when she interviewed four young sisters in a
refugee camp, who recounted how soldiers burned their home, killed their
mother, and abducted their father, who was now feared dead. But days of
additional reporting revealed
that little of what they said was true. The girls had shared
heart-wrenching stories to compete for the limited attention of aid
groups. In an overcrowded camp, four orphaned sisters were more likely
to win sympathy than an intact family that lost all its possessions. In
this case, following the facts didn’t simply confirm the larger moral
truth but also exposed a smaller, less expected one: these refugees were
incentivized to one-up each other in suffering to get much-needed
support. And not without a cost. The reporter, Hannah Beech, later
explained in her searching piece: “Such strategies are a natural
survival tactic. Who wouldn’t do the same to feed a family? But false
narratives devalue the genuine horrors—murder, rape and mass burnings of
villages—that have been inflicted upon the Rohingya by Myanmar’s
security forces. And such embellished tales only buttress the Myanmar
government’s contention that what is happening in Rakhine State is not
ethnic cleansing, as the international community suggests, but trickery
by foreign invaders.”
A year later, on the other end of the world, an American aid convoy
headed to Venezuela erupted in flames after being blocked at the border
by the country’s repressive security forces. The idea that the
government had ordered the torching of desperately needed supplies in
the midst of a devastating famine appeared to fit the narrative of
President Nicolas Maduro’s brutal authoritarian rule. Many prominent
global leaders quickly denounced him. But as we reported
on the calamity, video footage revealed the fire had apparently not
been carried out by Maduro’s security forces; it had most likely been
caused by an anti-government protester throwing an errant Molotov
cocktail.
That’s the counterintuitive commitment of independent journalism. It
must be open to the idea that a suffering refugee child may not be
telling the truth, or that a tyrant who is persecuting millions may be
accused of a crime he didn’t actually commit. In both cases, critics
asked who could possibly benefit from such journalism. Society benefits,
of course, since it depends on credible information to make any number
of related decisions, from distributing aid to relief organizations to
imposing sanctions for human rights violations. The truth benefits, too,
as does the credibility of those sharing it. The next time the Times reports on Maduro’s offenses (as we’ve done here, here, and here) or the horrors that the Rohingya suffer (as we did here, here, and here), readers can be sure that those are the facts as best we could ascertain them.
This commitment to putting facts above outcome is easy to caricature
as amoral, perhaps even as nihilistic. But it is grounded in a
foundational optimism about people and democracy. Independent journalism
is predicated on the belief that democracy is stronger when people have
trusted sources for reliable facts. And that people should be trusted
to comprehend these facts, process their complexity, and make up their
own minds. Information empowers, and empowered people are more likely to
make better decisions.
Covering uncertainty. Even if it’s not always
popular, the discipline of following the facts wherever they lead is far
more straightforward than grappling with the tricky questions that
emerge when the facts cannot be fully established. The number of topics
that are factually or morally unambiguous is dwarfed by the number of
topics marked in some way by uncertainty, where facts are unresolved or
questions are still subject to debate. The role of independent
journalists in such cases is to help the public understand and examine
the broadest possible range of intellectually honest positions.
In cases in which the facts have been established beyond reasonable
dispute, journalists should not quote a fringe position to check a box
or shield their work from accusations of bias. There is, for instance,
no serious debate in the scientific community about the reality of
climate change. The world is warming, with devastating consequences.
There are plenty of other examples: The Holocaust happened. COVID
vaccines work. Trump lost the 2020 election.
But even in moments when the facts are beyond reasonable dispute,
there can be reasonable differences of opinion about how society should
interpret and act on those facts. What specifically should be done to
mitigate the effects of climate change? Should people espousing
anti-Semitism be barred from social media? Should vaccine requirements
be linked to employment? Should specific legislative measures be taken
to safeguard elections? Independent journalism should not shy away from
fully examining such contentious questions, even if some insist that the
truth has already been established.
There are also some moral issues that we, as a society, have rightly
come to view as settled and beyond reasonable debate: Racism is wrong.
Women deserve equal rights. People shouldn’t be tortured. At the same
time, there are many related questions society is debating and
independent journalism must explore, even if the larger principle is
beyond question. Should race be a factor in college admissions? Under
what circumstances should abortion be allowed? What methods of coercion
are acceptable in a war zone?
There can be a temptation to attempt to steer these debates based on
our personal views or our sense of how history will settle the matter,
thinking that represents a more honest and authentic form of journalism.
However, independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy,
should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest
as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry. (And even in cases
where debates are broadly recognized as closed, there is often added
benefit to understanding the motivations and tactics of those who
continue to push the issue to the fore.)
Prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate forces disagreements to
fester beneath the surface. In even more damaging cases, it allows
conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society. Deference to
such popular narratives—as the Times has learned the hard
way—is as dangerous as any personal bias: Saddam Hussein has weapons of
mass destruction; Trump has little chance of winning a general election;
inflation isn’t a significant risk in modern economies. The problem in
each case, and many more like them, was that conventional wisdom isn’t
always right, and even when it turns out to be, it benefits from probing
and testing.
Evaluating these debates is one reason why the journalistic process
is designed around hearing from a diversity of voices. That’s most
obviously true in reporting, which requires talking to people and
representing a range of perspectives. But it also is why reporters
benefit from the additional eyes of editors, not just for style and
accuracy, but to ensure the issues they include are fairly represented
and contextualized. When journalism succeeds in illuminating questions
and debates, it not only helps people better understand those with whom
they disagree, it helps them better recognize the differences they have
with people they thought they agreed with—and it can help society move
conversations about these issues toward resolution.
Navigating criticism. Criticism is a natural and
important part of the journalistic process. That’s partly because
independent journalism, with its commitment to exposing problems and
holding power to account, often upsets the people it’s about, as well as
their supporters. It’s also because the business of making these types
of editorial decisions, especially on deadline, is imperfect work.
Intense barrages of criticism were once reserved for a handful of the
most polarizing topics in public life, like presidential politics,
abortion, and the Middle East, where every word and image was tracked
for signs of bias and loudly contested as inaccurate or harmful. Now
nearly every issue sets off that level of reaction. The dynamics of
social media have enabled pushback to be quicker, louder, and better
organized, as supporters and opponents become more entrenched in their
narratives and more aggressive in assailing anything that runs counter
to their views or objectives.
This often reflects genuine anger and disappointment. Even those who
appreciate the vast majority of our reporting often feel that our
coverage is uniquely off the mark in its portrayal of the very subject
they care most about—and where they naturally have the strongest views
on how the story should be told. But such frustrations are often
harnessed by interest groups in an effort to make coverage more
favorable and to make it uncomfortable to report things these groups—or
subsets of these groups—don’t like.
In the past, most of those without access to a printing press or a
presidential pulpit could only hope that a news organization would
police itself through corrections or letters to the editor. Today anyone
with a Twitter handle or an email address can have their concerns
heard. That shift has brought a welcome increase in accountability, but
it has also created a challenging dynamic. Journalistic decisions are
continually being criticized in public by leaders, activists,
journalists, celebrities, and influencers speaking for themselves or,
just as often, for a broader community. These communities are often tied
to personal identity, whether it’s derived from race, religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality, or partisan affiliation. But the same dynamic applies to groups of all types, like climate activists, Silicon Valley rationalists, economists, and Taylor Swift fans.
Even those whose identity centers on warning about the dangers of
tribalism sometimes succumb to their own forms of groupthink. Navigating
such criticism has become among the most challenging parts of the
practice of independent journalism.
Journalists are often accused by these groups of misrepresenting
their communities, perpetuating stereotypes, or increasing risks for
people who already have good reason to feel vulnerable. Sometimes these
criticisms have merit—a look back through the archives of any news
organization will find a wealth of examples that were bad in the moment
and look worse today. Many minority groups continue to think mainstream
news organizations do not fully capture their communities and too often
focus on moments of controversy or tragedy. And it is understandable
that anyone who has personally experienced particular hardships—from
enduring anti-Semitism or racial discrimination to fleeing one’s
homeland or terminating a pregnancy—would have strong views about how
these issues should be covered and what downstream consequences of that
coverage they’d like to see.
Sometimes such groups will entreat journalists to lift up their
communities by focusing on positive stories. Sometimes they will assert
that their community can only be fairly covered by a member of it.
Sometimes groups will offer to retrain reporters on what language and
framing to use in covering their communities. And many times they will
look past an entire body of coverage that addresses many of the issues
they raise to instead find fault with a single article, headline, image,
source, or phrase—sometimes a single word. (Even our personnel
decisions are at times read through an ideological lens, with a
departure taken as a sign that we’re caving to a progressive mob or a conservative one, or a hiring offered as evidence that we can’t fairly cover one side of a conflict or the other.)
Often the central criticism is not so much about the accuracy of the
coverage itself, but whether it could be misused. Recently, for example,
the Times described how scores of Hasidic Jewish schools were
failing to provide students a basic education. The coverage was called
anti-Semitic and dangerous even before it was published because it could
be misused to demonize a highly visible population at a moment when
they already faced rising prejudice. A group representing Orthodox Jews
highlighted this line of criticism in a recent letter,
arguing that “a free press can be an incredibly powerful force—for good
or otherwise. Particularly so when these words appear, sometimes on the
front page, of a prominent newspaper. The Times has misused
this incredible power. And the victims of this reporting—Orthodox and
Hasidic Jews in New York—are a marginalized minority already subject to a
rising, frightening number of hate crimes.”
Independent news organizations should strive to cover every community
with respect, nuance, and sensitivity. That is especially true in the
context of the risks and prejudices marginalized communities or
vulnerable people in particular face. But even when doing so, journalism
will not always reflect the way these groups want to be seen or
emphasize the issues they would prefer to talk about. When coverage
features different groups engaged with directly conflicting
narratives—for example, the anti-Muslim violence coming from Hindu
nationalists in India today—it’s easier to see the impossibility of
covering each group exactly as it would like to be covered.
And the care independent news organizations should take in reporting
on every such group doesn’t overwhelm the value to the public—and often
to the community itself—of reporting difficult but important facts and
issues. In the example above, we also heard from many Hasidic readers
who felt their school system had failed them and their children and were
relieved that future students may be better served because of our
reporting.
The attacks on this type of work sometimes take aim at the natural
fear of journalists that their work, often called “the first draft of
history,” will later be regarded as on the wrong side of it. But these
attacks also confront journalists whose work explores subjects that
divide the public or upsets a specific interest group with more pressing
concerns. In this new environment, journalists—in particular female
journalists—routinely receive threats of rape and death. Menacing visits
to their homes and offices. Campaigns to get them fired. Harassment of
family members. And a never-ending stream of insults and personal
attacks, from racial slurs to accusations of bigotry, that can arrive by
the thousands in a single day. With such a high price to their
reputations and sense of security, journalists often wonder whether
pursuing a given story would be worth the potential backlash. The
silence that can stem from these fears is, of course, the goal of these
attacks. The responsibility of independent journalists is to not be
intimidated and to continue to report without fear or favor.
Critiques of the Model
The arguments against this model of journalistic independence have
become far more persistent in recent years amid the reshaping of the
journalism industry and the broader information ecosystem.
Inside the industry, newspapers continue to shutter and the number of
working journalists has dropped by tens of thousands over the past
fifteen years. The newspapers that endure, embracing the approach of
many of the digital news organizations that have emerged, have often
felt compelled to shift increasingly scarce resources away from
expensive original reporting to far cheaper but less journalistically
nutritious efforts like punditry, aggregation, and clickbait. As a
result, the journalists who managed to keep their jobs now often find
themselves stuck at their desks aggregating and opining on others’ work,
instead of coming face to face with new people and perspectives through
on-the-ground reporting.
At the same time, newsrooms have become more diverse, with far
greater numbers of women, people who identify as LGBTQ, and people of
color—though there is far more progress still needed. As this has
happened, there’s been an overdue reckoning with the dominance of
straight white men in our industry, a dominance that has long
contributed to missing and distorted coverage. As a result, minority
groups often carry deep skepticism that the same institutions and
institutional values that badly served them in the past can now do
better and actually capture the breadth of the world they live in. The
conversation about those failures has left lingering uncertainty inside
newsrooms as to whether those failures should be blamed on lack of
representation or on outmoded values that may no longer fit the moment.
The shifts for the public have been no less dramatic. The fracturing
of the media’s gatekeeper role, in which a handful of outlets in print
and television were able to set the national agenda, means that
proliferating publishers and individual commenters are increasingly
built around specific niches and more focused on catering to their
audiences’ identities, passions, and politics. The gatekeeper approach
was far from perfect, but the unmediated nature of the internet has led
to a surge in content aimed at driving engagement by playing to people’s
hopes and, especially, their fears and resentments. The more
conversational style of writing for the internet and the obvious
dissonance between the carefulness of some reporters’ published work and
their informal, sometimes injudicious social media commentary have
exacerbated the sense that standards are shifting. These trends further
confused the public’s understanding of the role of the press, making
journalism seem partisan and unreliable. Today, barely over one-quarter
of Americans trust the news, according to a Reuters Institute report, a
figure that now ranks lowest of the countries they surveyed. The numbers
from a Gallup survey were even more abysmal, with 16 percent expressing
a high degree of confidence in newspapers and 11 percent in television
news. In many studies like this, journalistic bias was a top concern
cited.
The current pushback to the model of journalistic independence typically takes three main forms.
“Objectivity” as a myth: One of the most persistent
critiques asserts that journalists should own up to their biases rather
than pretending to be able to meet an impossible ideal of being truly
objective or impartial.
The primary argument from the right, a staple of Republican stump
speeches and conservative media for decades, alleges that reporters and
editors use statements of journalistic independence to disguise a
consistent bias against conservative views and more negative treatment
of conservative leaders. This stretches from long-standing critiques of
coverage of topics like gun rights and rural America, same-sex marriage
and faith, and it extends to the ongoing national conversation about
slavery’s role in our history that was, in part, sparked by the Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project.
It’s true that the two populations that make up the vast majority of
journalists—college graduates and people who live in big cities—have
become more likely in recent decades to hold liberal views, particularly
on social issues. These groups tend to be more secular and less likely
to own guns; they engage with a different mix of culture and hobbies;
they are typically more embracing of racial, gender, and
sexual-orientation diversity. Those qualities—everyday assumptions in a
place like New York City, our hometown—are why my predecessor, even as
he pushed back on accusations of political bias, sometimes talked about
the Times having a metropolitan sensibility.
This type of journalistic culture, the norm in most large newsrooms
today, sometimes leads to journalistic decisions that many conservatives
regard as picking a side in what they consider to be open debates, like
the existence of climate change or the frequency of voter fraud, but
which newsrooms treat as settled. On the many more issues that are
obviously unsettled and subject to robust debate, the model of
journalistic independence is explicitly designed to help correct for the
narrowness of a journalist’s own experience and worldview, including by
intentionally seeking out and attempting to fairly convey a much
broader range of views. It doesn’t deny personal experience; it provides
a method not to be trapped by it. If you look at coverage of abortion,
as an example of an issue where society has been conflicted for decades
but where the urban professional class has been disproportionately on
one side of the debate, you’ll see the Times grappling with a fair representation of views from across many backgrounds and political orientations.
It is also true that the MAGA-era Republican Party has become more
challenging to cover in a way that the party and its supporters would
recognize as fair. On some subjects, a significant portion of the party
has become untethered from fact and science, and it has made startlingly
direct attacks on democracy and its foundations. Journalists have an
obligation to report on this shift plainly, even if that leads our
coverage to be accused of bias. If a majority of Republican voters
believe—as polls have consistently shown—that Trump won the 2020
election, it’s safe to assume that those same voters would be skeptical
of a news organization that clearly labels that belief false. But this
heightened skepticism can at times go too far, and that risk can be
compounded in moments of premature consensus among experts journalists
rely on. Here the early coverage of the COVID pandemic is instructive.
The press was confronted with the challenge of the president and others
in his party sharing inaccurate information about the disease and the
toll of the pandemic while also undermining the efficacy of vaccines and peddling sometimes dangerous alternatives.
Those stories required the press to be intensely skeptical of the
administration’s claims and actions. But there was insufficient
skepticism of an emerging scientific and bureaucratic consensus that
presented itself as more settled than it actually was. That combination
sometimes created blind spots, like an overly quick dismissal of the lab
leak theory or insufficient questioning of the wisdom of extended
school closures.
Critics on the left also argue that supposedly objective journalists
are anchored to a point of view, but in this case one that privileges a
straight white male perspective and the status quo. This critique takes
many forms, but often centers on the belief that notions like
objectivity—the very idea of it, not just the failure to achieve
it—exist to maintain and insulate existing power structures from change
or scrutiny.
The assertion that newsrooms, like virtually all of the nation’s
institutions, have long been overly dominated by straight white men is
obviously true. Even with significant progress
in diversifying in recent years, few newsrooms look like the
communities they cover, leaving gaps in the stories they find and the
insights journalists bring to them. That’s the case not just with race
and gender, but with groups like evangelical Christians, military
veterans, or people who attended community college. It is also true that
at times, news organizations have wielded the objectivity label to
wrongly suggest that minority journalists couldn’t fairly cover issues
crucial to their own communities, even though they rarely questioned
whether white men could fairly cover white men.
These shortcomings should be seen as a failure of independence rather
than an indictment of it. In all kinds of coverage, reporters bring
their experience and expertise to bear. More diverse newsrooms—armed
with a broader range of backgrounds, experiences, relationships, skills,
and expertise—spot more stories and imbue them with greater nuance and
insight. A reporter who studied physics will be a better science
reporter for it. An editor who grew up in the Great Plains will have a
sharper eye for nuance in a story that takes place there. And a
journalist from an underrepresented group can bring life experience and
direct knowledge to stories involving that group. “Our eyes are
connected to our bodies, which often shape the way we experience the
world and how the world experiences us. My eyes will see some things
yours never will,” as Lowery put it in his recent CJR essay. “The
‘story’ we seek to tell is in fact a mosaic that must be filled in piece
by piece. While one journalist may supply many tiles, seeing the entire
scene requires others to fill in the rest. Thus, understanding
objective reality requires a diversity of contributors.”
It’s striking how often these two ideals—a diverse newsroom and an
independent newsroom—are pitted against each other, as if one or the
other must be chosen. What’s clear is that representation alone is not
enough; it needs to be backed by a culture that invites a broad range of
views into conversations about story choice and story framing. Many
journalists from underrepresented groups have stories about being
recruited in part because of the different perspectives they bring but,
once on board, being told to put aside those perspectives to avoid being
dismissed as biased.
Independence doesn’t mean that a reporter has to be a blank slate. A
reporter who grew up in a neighborhood where racial profiling or police
violence was a daily concern can bring an invaluable depth of knowledge
and understanding to those topics. That experience might lead to a
healthier dose of skepticism of police accounts or a greater
understanding of the ways these injustices damage communities.
Independence is only compromised if a reporter’s preconceptions undercut
the goal of genuinely open-minded inquiry, like dismissing all police
statements or downplaying rising crime. The public is best served when
journalists—regardless of personal identity, personal political views,
and personal life experience—approach each story with an open mind,
ready to seek out information that might upend expectations or present a
more complicated picture.
Both-sidesism: One of the most common criticisms of independence is that it leads journalists to treat unequal things equally.
False equivalence—today often derided as “both-sidesism,” a phrase
popularized by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU—is when
journalists make opposing views appear similarly credible, even when
they are not, to leave the impression of down-the-middle reporting that
doesn’t take sides. Once again, it is not difficult to find historical
grounding for this critique. News organizations long included comments
from outlier scientists casting doubt on the reality of climate change,
even after the vast majority of scientists had concluded it was real.
Several factors drove such failures. Newsrooms often cared not just
about being independent but about being perceived as independent, by
readers and sources alike. The mechanics of deadline journalism also
played a role, as inserting a quote from all sides was a quick and
simple way to signal both fairness and completeness. There is good
reason to disparage a model that elevates a pantomime of fairness over
demonstrations of good judgment. It’s lazy journalism that fails readers
and is easily exploited by bad-faith actors. As a previous publisher of
the Times remarked: “Although I favor the open mind, I
certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the
brains fall out.”
But this line of criticism misses the profound ways that traditional
news organizations that believe in the independent model have shifted.
Journalists today use plainer language, show a greater willingness to
expose lies, and produce more analytical work grounded in their own
reporting and expertise, even when doing so opens them up to calls of
bias. While that shift was already well underway, it was solidified
through the norm-shattering presidency of Trump, whose
statements—whether they were about crowd sizes, the birthplace of his
predecessor, the COVID pandemic, or election results—were often
demonstrably untrue and were typically called out as such without
euphemism or counterpoint.
Today, the both-sidesism argument thus has the feel of media critics fighting the last war.
But the both-sidesism line of attack has been happily embraced by
activists and partisans who want to pressure the media to minimize any
alternative to their views. By demanding that journalists treat a topic
as settled fact, they attempt to win a debate by avoiding one. This is
why people often invoke both-sidesism when journalists interview a voter
for a candidate they oppose, explore the opposite side of an issue to
the one they hold, or take the journalistically responsible course of
giving those accused of wrongdoing a chance to explain themselves.
This charge is particularly common on issues where participants have
staked out zero-sum positions—as with abortion rights or the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in which open-minded coverage of each side
is seen as undermining the other. For example, despite Russia’s attempts
to make it a criminal offense to report the truth, it is undeniable
that Russia invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked act of war and that its
troops have carried out a huge number of shocking atrocities. It is also true that Ukrainian forces appear to have used internationally banned cluster munitions.
Reporting this does not amount to a moral judgment asserting “on the
other hand, Ukrainians do bad things too,” but reflects an attempt to
fully capture the conflict. Without such independent assessments it
would be impossible for Ukrainians, Russians, foreign leaders, or
ordinary people to understand the true state of the war and its costs.
As that example shows, the both-sidesism argument is wielded most
powerfully when the stakes are highest. We often hear a version like
this: Trump is a threat to democracy, and you’re asking about his
opponent’s age or emails? Or, the world is facing a climate catastrophe
and you’re wondering if gas prices are too high? Or, the human rights of
my group are under systemic attack and you’re focusing on one bad actor
on our side? In the end, these efforts attempt to reduce wide-ranging
lines of coverage into a single statement about what is most true and
important, rather than to reflect the reality that many things can be
true and important at the same time. Journalists should be alert to the
risk of false equivalence. But today I believe the greater journalistic
risk is for reporters to close themselves to the possibility of new and
evolving facts that may reveal other aspects of a story or, worse, to
actively embrace a journalistic one-sideism to signal that they are on
the side of the righteous.
Bad outcomes: Another line of criticism asserts that
when journalists report information that makes a negative outcome more
likely, they are complicit in that outcome. This argument typically
takes two forms: that news organizations should not publish information
that bad actors might misuse and that they should not offer airtime to
views that should be excised from the public square.
It is true that journalists should not be blind to the potential
impact their reporting may have. And in limited cases we do change a
specific story or alter our approach to a broader area of coverage with
an eye toward minimizing any resulting danger. For example, we are
careful in quoting dissidents in countries where such an action may lead
to reprisal, particularly when it comes to ordinary people who may not
fully appreciate the risks they are taking. Similarly, our coverage of
subjects like mass shootings and suicide has been informed in part by
research looking at how media attention can inspire others to do the
same thing. And on rare occasions, we will hold publication of a
national security story when we are told the release of certain secrets
could directly endanger lives.
But, in general, independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it
true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes,
journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors
censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view
about whether it may yield a damaging outcome. Do we overlook the
corruption of a US ally because it could embolden an anti-American
opposition? Do we fail to explore legitimate questions about the
physical or mental health of a political candidate because some believe
the other candidate might be worse? Do we not report that the government
has been secretly wiretapping US citizens without warrants because the
Bush administration argues the disclosure would put lives at risk by
undermining a critical antiterrorism tool? That last argument succeeded
in delaying a story for the better part of a year—a decision many
now view as the wrong one—but its eventual publication made clear that
this information was needed to open up an important debate about how the
country was balancing national security and civil liberties.
More recently, we’ve heard similar arguments about journalism putting
lives at risk emerging from our coverage of the debates inside the
medical community over care for transgender children. Critics have
accused our work of “‘both sides’ fearmongering and bad-faith ‘just
asking questions’ coverage” and have suggested that even acknowledging a
broader range of views on this topic has legitimized—wittingly or not—a
repressive legal effort to undermine the rights and the safety of a
group that faces significant prejudice. “The pretense of objectivity—the
newsroom ideal that all ‘sides’ of an issue should be heard—often harms
marginalized people more than it helps them,” wrote one critic of our
coverage. “If you say ‘I want to live,’ and I say ‘No,’ what happens
next isn’t a debate; it’s murder.”
The Times has covered the surge of discrimination, threats,
and violence faced by trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people,
including the rapidly growing number of legislative efforts attacking
their rights. We’ve also covered the many ways in which people
challenging gender norms are gaining recognition and breaking barriers
in the United States and around the world. Yet our critics overlook
these articles—and there are hundreds of them—to
instead focus on a small number of pieces that explore particularly
sensitive questions that society is actively working through, but which
some would prefer for the Times to treat as settled.
In the long run, ignoring societal disagreements or actively
suppressing certain facts and viewpoints—even with the best of
intentions—turns the press into an overtly political actor, encourages
conspiracy theories about hidden agendas, and validates accusations that
the media is dishonest. That, in turn, undermines trust in journalism
and limits its ability to have an impact when we reveal injustice,
corruption, or other wrongdoing.
The second bad outcome that is often raised is “platforming,” the
concept that including people with bad or dangerous views in articles—or
allowing them to write guest essays in the opinion section—makes the
world a worse or more dangerous place. The central concern in this
argument is that the very act of examining or sharing disliked or
repugnant opinions, without explicitly condemning them, amounts to
promoting and legitimizing them.
This reflects the heated societal debate about what to do about views one finds questionable, offensive, or dangerous. The Times
has been criticized along these lines for everything from a profile of a
Nazi sympathizer to an opinion essay from a Taliban leader, not to
mention the essay “Send in the Troops” by Senator Cotton that roiled the
Times like nothing else that has happened in my tenure. It is
true that a soft feature or an unrebutted essay can effectively
misinform by failing to provide needed context and thus obscure a larger
truth. And it is certainly true that news organizations don’t serve
readers well by flooding them with a cacophony of information and
perspectives in the hope that they stumble upon the truth on their own.
Everything we publish should meet basic standards of verification and
intellectual honesty. Exercising journalistic judgment about which
voices to include and how does not amount to censorship.
But there is just as much risk to a journalistic model that
aggressively narrows the field of acceptable speakers and comment. When
we err, we would rather err on the side of inclusion, not exclusion. For
example, as part of our extensive coverage of COVID vaccines, we
published an article about vaccine skeptics, which clearly stated that
the vaccines were safe and gave careful context about conspiracy
theories. But why bother to understand skeptics’ views at all if they
are wrong, even dangerous? The United States has the lowest
full-vaccination rate of any of the world’s wealthiest democracies, and
the anti-vaccine movement was strengthening in ways that raised profound
public health questions that society continues to grapple with.
It’s also worth briefly noting two more criticisms that are more specific to the structure of the Times, though they are shared by many other news organizations as well.
The first is that the existence of our opinion section can appear to
be in direct tension with our promise of independence. It’s easy to see
why some people would make this argument, given that every opinion piece
promotes a personal point of view. But opinion journalism can actually
represent another valuable way to meet this core commitment to
independence by helping readers explore ideas and develop and challenge
their own views on important subjects. That’s why we employ a diverse
group of columnists who bring a range of backgrounds, interests, and
political leanings to their work. And it’s why we make a point to
solicit guest essays from an even wider range of perspectives. For many
of our readers, the voices and pieces they’ve come to appreciate most
are the very ones they agree with least.
Indeed the original
goal of inviting outside writers and experts onto our pages was based
on the belief that exposing readers to a diversity of opinions would
have the effect of “stimulating new thought and provoking new discussion
on public problems.” Even if each piece, including our editorials, is
rooted to an individual view, reading across the section offers a broad
and diverse collection of views that together should serve as a guide
through the big debates in society. The best opinion writing embraces
many of the same values as an independent newsroom—with columnists and
other opinion writers using reporting, analysis, and expertise to inform
their work and editors holding it to high standards of accuracy,
fairness, and intellectual rigor.
Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most
popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices,
we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and
should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet. For that
reason, we’ve long kept the opinion department intentionally small—it
represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff—and ensured that
its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom. In
recent years we’ve also gone to increasing lengths to make its work both
less prominent on our homepage and more visually distinct from news
reporting to avoid confusing readers about the difference between news
and opinion.
The second criticism centers on our subscription-based business
model. In this time of institutional skepticism, it’s easy to assume
cynical business motives when executives espouse high-minded ideals.
Conservative critics assume we are incentivized to cater to a liberal
audience. And progressive critics assume that our insistence on
independence is motivated by a desire to acquire more conservative
subscribers. In truth, the value of a fair representation of the
world—and the people and ideas shaping it—isn’t just for the believer,
it’s for the skeptic. A diverse society should aspire to understand the
lives and motives of all people, as well as the range of arguments
shaping the public debate. Thankfully, we’ve found that readers
generally agree. Though I’m often asked about the cancellation campaigns
led by interest groups upset with our coverage, the actual numbers are
vanishingly small. Instead, studies of our readers show that across all
their diversity, their most consistent shared quality, compared with the
broader public, is a desire to be challenged, confronted with
information, ideas, and perspectives that expand rather than merely
validate their sense of the world. Even as our coverage has upset every
part of the political spectrum, the number of people who value
independent journalism enough to engage with it and pay for it has grown
significantly at the Times and elsewhere.
The Risks of the Alternatives
Much as with democracy itself, to borrow a quip from Winston
Churchill, the case for independent journalism is made stronger by the
weakness of the alternatives.
Independent journalism is not a neutral platform. Rather than simply
deluging readers with a cacophony of voices and hoping the most valuable
rise to the surface, it makes countless journalistic choices, large and
small, that aim to actively guide readers to a fuller, more nuanced
understanding of the world grounded in fact. These choices include
contextualizing information, discerning which voices would be most
relevant in capturing a debate, and helping people put the significance
of an event in perspective.
But independent journalism is also not advocacy journalism. To be
clear, the model of advocacy journalism—whose practitioners wear their
leanings openly—has shown its value in a long and honorable history.
News outlets focused on specific ethnic or racial groups, for example,
have played an essential role for more than a century of forcing
attention on issues, celebrating people, and championing reforms too
often ignored by the mainstream press. Today many high-integrity news
organizations are open about their politics and objectives, from Mother Jones on the left to The Dispatch
on the right to a host of podcasts and newsletters catering to every
imaginable subject and viewpoint. The Marshall Project has not let its
core goal of remaking the criminal justice system allow it to skew the
facts. CoinDesk broke a story that threatened the very cryptocurrency
industry it was launched to support.
But this advocacy model is dangerous when treated as independent
journalism’s replacement rather than its supplement. The revelations
from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News underscore the dangers of the
advocacy model when fully unchecked. In trying to satiate its
audience’s desire for validation—or to advance its preferred political
outcome—Fox and those who have embraced its model ultimately unhinge
themselves from a fair-minded pursuit of the truth. Facts that match
their ideological leanings or preferred political outcomes are often
hyped up while those that undermine them are downplayed. Instead of
broadening understanding, this model misleads its audience—seen in the
fact that Fox News viewers are more likely to believe, incorrectly, that
Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11, Barack Obama wasn’t a US citizen, and
the 2020 election was stolen.
Putting ideology front and center is frequently promoted as more
honest (isn’t it better to announce one’s biases than to hide them?) and
more honorable (isn’t it better to push for solving problems rather
than just describing them?). But this can stoke false confidence that
one’s personal opinions are actually fundamental truths. What it means
to fight for justice is different for everyone. For some it means
defending the right to openly carry a weapon, for others the right of
migrants to cross unfettered into another nation. But what are the facts
about whether carrying guns makes people safer? What impact has
tightening or loosening immigration laws had on people, jobs, and
culture?
Journalists, no matter how wise and well intentioned, who believe in
their own righteousness can find their conviction hardening in ways that
obstruct rather than illuminate the world they cover. Even if
journalists can navigate all these hazards, journalism driven by a
desire to shape outcomes struggles in the inevitable moments when the
facts they discover sit in conflict with a larger political goal that
they—or their employer—is committed to advancing. And there are further
risks when those views are motivated not by genuine principle but by
self-interest or partisan advantage.
Contrast the advocacy model with the independent model and you’ll see how different the approaches are. The same Times
reporter who broke the story that Donald Trump had asked the director
of the FBI to pledge his personal loyalty also broke the story that
Hillary Clinton used her personal email account as secretary of state.
Similarly, just months after a Times investigation revealed
large payouts to silence sexual harassment allegations against Bill
O’Reilly, a leading conservative commentator, we published a similar
investigation into Harvey Weinstein, a leading liberal donor. And we’ve
vigorously reported on everything from personal misconduct to
gerrymandering efforts by both Republicans and Democrats. We didn’t
write these stories to balance a ledger; we wrote them because each one
was individually true and individually important.
The pushback we get on every such piece makes clear that one of the
most profound journalistic choices of the era is to either pick a tribe
or prepare to upset people. A commitment to independence means the
latter is the only defensible option, even though it comes at a
substantial short-term cost. At a moment in which forces are attempting
to exploit classically liberal ideals—like the journalistic model I am
defending here—toward illiberal ends, independent news organizations
shouldn’t do their work for them by forsaking those values ourselves.
The Path Forward
How do we protect independent journalism, as challenges arrive from nearly every corner?
The most important safeguard of an independent press is a strong and
sustainable press. We need to build up the business model for reported
journalism, particularly at the local level. We need to secure legal
protections for reporters and their sources to ensure the free flow of
information to the public. We need to address the deepening crackdowns
against journalists overseas—like Russia’s recent arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—and the growing harassment of them at home.
But focusing more narrowly on the question of independence, a few
steps are clear for journalists and leaders of journalistic
institutions, the Times very much included.
First and foremost, journalists should remember that our core
purpose, as I have been saying, is to follow the facts wherever they
lead, even when we would prefer for them not to be true, and to fairly
represent people and perspectives, even when we disagree with them. Any
compromise on this is likely to further erode the public’s already shaky
confidence in journalism and ultimately hobble the ability of
journalists to serve a society desperately in need of reliable
information. I’ve seen countless instances in which people want
journalists to bury reporting, twist the facts, or embrace
speculation—all to demonstrate allegiance to some higher cause. Instead,
journalists should interrogate the world with curiosity, not certainty.
We should remain skeptical, humble, searching, as we explore every
story, no matter how well we think we know a topic. We should complicate
seemingly tidy narratives, embrace nuance, and continually question
what we find.
Second, journalists should recommit to reporting as the most valuable
service we provide to the public. Reporting—not commentary or
aggregation—is the essential ingredient of new ideas and new insights
and allows every part of the journalism ecosystem to flourish. This
requires journalists to get out of our bubbles. One insidious side
effect of the collapse of local news is that journalism jobs are increasingly dominated by highly educated people living in blue coastal cities: according
to the Pew Research Center, more than one in five journalists lives in
New York, Los Angeles, or Washington. And far too many over-rely on
Twitter, mistaking it for a public town square rather than a
journalistic echo chamber. Reporters need to work harder to go to
unfamiliar places, meet with unfamiliar people, and challenge our own
assumptions with unfamiliar perspectives, experiences, and ideas.
Third, journalists need to better recognize how public criticism can
manipulate coverage. In today’s hyper-connected environment, the
response to our work is more immediate and intense than ever. The
increase in transparency and greater accountability for our mistakes and
missteps is a welcome shift. But the reaction to our work now often
arrives through attacks designed to intimidate by questioning
journalists’ legitimacy or morality. The critics here don’t want to set
the record straight; they want to cajole, shame, and scare journalists
into providing more favorable coverage. At the same time, cheers, like
jeers, can be used to co-opt. Self-respecting journalists don’t take
marching orders from politicians and corporations; they need to equally
resist shaping their coverage to win the praise of activists and
interest groups, even those engaged in admirable work. As Dean Baquet,
the former executive editor of the Times, often says: Watchdogs cannot allow themselves to become lapdogs.
Finally, journalists should more actively reckon with the
uncomfortable reality of widespread distrust in the media. It will take
years, if not decades, to win over people who have been told again and
again by those they admire and trust—including a former president of the
United States—that the media hates them and hates this country. But
news organizations can’t act as if they are powerless to reverse the
growing distrust in journalism more broadly. They need to do a far
better job fighting for their reputations and explaining how they make
journalistic decisions. Many of the profession’s conventions—the
inverted-pyramid article structure, datelines and bylines, and
contortions to excise the writer from the work— are relics of an era
when faith in journalistic institutions was assumed. I’m not convinced
people ever really understood these conventions. But today we can say
with certainty that they don’t. The Times’ own research
suggests that even many loyal readers did not understand that our
journalists—who, in a normal year, report on the ground from more than
160 countries, often in difficult and dangerous conditions—actually go
to the places they write about. That is a failure not of readers’
understanding but of our communication. We haven’t consistently and
clearly shown what goes into our reporting, adequately explained our
process, or fully clarified how we view our role.
Beyond the journalism industry, others must do their part if we are
to protect independent journalism and the role it plays to nurture an
informed society. Three groups stand out.
Search engines and, especially, social platforms—most notably
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok—have played an outsize role in
creating the conditions that threaten independent journalism. I’m not
talking about the shift of advertising dollars from news organizations
to tech giants, though that hasn’t helped. I’m talking about the
profound shifts in how people find and engage with information, shifts
that have exacerbated groupthink, fostered antipathy, and fractured
people’s understanding of reality. These platforms and others have
largely treated facts as indistinguishable from opinions, allowed
reality to mix with conspiracy, and given propaganda equal footing with
journalism. And the use of likes and shares to assess engagement and
determine promotion has incentivized publishers to produce content that
affirms rather than informs, that inflames divisions rather than
promotes understanding. I’m sympathetic to the challenges the platforms
face in regulating their environments, but they will continue to foster
misinformation and polarization until they do more to both differentiate
and elevate reputable independent news sources, even if it comes at the
cost of user engagement or political backlash.
If journalism was the unintended casualty of the platforms, it’s been
the political establishment’s explicit target. Our country’s founders
largely defended the free press, even as they knew that its scrutiny
wasn’t always comfortable. But particularly in the past few years, a
sustained and escalating campaign from the American right has focused on
attacking the press to win votes and inoculate itself against criticism
or scrutiny. Rather than responding to the substance of unflattering
reporting, they’ve labeled reporters “enemies of the people” and our
work “fake news.”
This campaign has widened what was long a modest partisan gap in
trust in journalism to a chasm. Today, 70 percent of Democrats say they
have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media; 14 percent of Republicans do. The anti-press rhetoric has also inspired legal action. The Times
has faced four times as many libel suits in the six years since Trump’s
election than in the six years before—many from right-wing activists
who want the Supreme Court to overturn what were long assumed to be
bedrock legal protections for the press. A not-so-subtle goal of this
effort is to make it easier to sue news organizations and, as a result,
harder for journalists to bring information to the public.
This may be an effective tactic. Few professions today evoke more
widespread scorn than journalism. But attacking the free press is
reckless and unpatriotic. In countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia,
similar anti-journalism rhetoric and action have presaged broader
dismantling of democratic norms, efforts made far easier without the
transparency and accountability provided by a free and independent
press. In the United States, this amounts to a dangerous incursion not
just on the spirit of the First Amendment, but on the special formula
that has made this country the most successful on earth. Our nation’s
history shows independent journalism not only makes our society more
informed, it makes our nation more secure, our economy stronger, our
people healthier, our society more just. Systematically undermining
independent journalism—and seeking to replace it with self-serving propaganda from powerful interests—weakens the nation.
No one stands to lose more from these trends than the American
people. For decades, spreading a newspaper on the kitchen table or
gathering to watch the nightly news was an essential part of being a
good citizen. The rituals may have changed, but the need hasn’t.
Citizens still benefit from a shared set of facts. They still benefit
from understanding their neighbors and their nation and caring enough to
peek beyond the boundaries of their own lives to engage with the larger
world.
It is Americans themselves who will need to insist that there is a
future for independent journalism. Amid all the distraction, confusion,
and chaos of the digital world, it’s more important than ever that
citizens develop relationships with news organizations that inform and
challenge them, commit to finding a daily place in their lives for
independent journalism, and use it to expand, not merely reinforce,
their worldview. If the press holds fast to journalistic independence, I
am confident that over time more people—of all backgrounds and
perspectives—will come to see the value of journalists serving as
fair-minded guides through a complex world at a consequential moment.
A.G. Sulzberger is chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of the New York Times.
