Donald Trump and the decline of objective journalism

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 3.)

One consequence of the Trump presidency is that it has accelerated the decline of detached, objective journalism.

Most people outside America, me included, despise Donald Trump. This has apparently made it permissible for the media to abandon all pretence of neutrality and to treat him as fair game for contempt, disgust and ridicule.

An example was an article on Monday by Paul McGeough, the chief foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. The SMH is a paper that could once be relied on for balanced reportage, but McGeough’s report on Trump’s decree banning immigration from seven Muslim countries was drenched with emotive rhetoric and hyperbole.

It began with the words: “This is the face of selective, lily-livered hate.” It went on: “Donald Trump holds it in his heart, but he manufactures it too, masking state-sanctioned religious persecution as a national security endeavour – all to stoke the ‘us and them’ hysteria that drove his election campaign”.

McGeough’s article continued in similar vein, telling us that Trump had severed the torch-bearing arm from the Statue of Liberty and plunged America into darkness. (I presume he meant in a metaphorical sense.)

You didn’t need to read far to realise that this wasn’t a classically restrained piece of reportage. But mixing comment with fact, to the point where the two become almost indistinguishable, is already routine in media coverage of the Trump presidency.

When a man is as widely loathed as Trump, journalists feel safe putting the boot in. But these may be the very times when we most need sober, cool-headed journalism that reports the facts without further inflaming already overheated passions. There’s enough hysteria around already without over-excited journalists heaping petrol on the fire.

In any case, much of the rage about Trump overlooks a couple of important points.

The first is that he was fairly elected according to the rules of the US Constitution. We might view those rules as flawed, since Electoral College votes can outweigh the result of the popular ballot, but they were deliberately designed that way to protect smaller states from being disempowered by more populous ones.

Protest banners shrieking "Dump Trump", just because the presidential election delivered a result some people didn't like, are not only spectacularly pointless after the event, but indicate contempt for democracy.

The other point is that nations are entitled to protect their borders against possible external threats – in this case, a very real one. People might dislike the brutal, pig-headed manner in which Trump has gone about this, but the principle is unarguable.

Now, back to that McGeough piece. There has always been a place in good newspapers for robust, provocative editorials and opinion columns, but traditionally they were kept separate from news. That’s no longer necessarily the case.

Editorial bias has so pervasively invaded the news columns of once-esteemed papers like the SMH, its sister paper the Melbourne Age, Britain’s Guardian and even the redoubtable Washington Post, that they can no longer be regarded as reliable papers of record. Much of their reportage is coloured by the journalist’s personal perception of events or by the paper’s editorial stance. 

But the mixing of news and comment isn’t a phenomenon that suddenly materialised with Trump’s emergence. It’s a trend that has been gathering momentum for years.

Its origins lie in journalism schools, where ideologically motivated tutors tell students that objectivity – the professional obligation to remain impartial and tell both sides of the story – is a myth promulgated to protect the wealthy and powerful.

Many of the journalists now working in newsrooms here and overseas have been taught that their mission is not so much to report events as to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – often using exactly those words.

This is activism, not journalism. Journalism can and often does produce outcomes that afflict the comfortable, but that is not its primary purpose, which is to inform people on matters that may be of interest to them.

But there’s another factor, besides the politicisation of journalism training, that has led to the increasingly opinionated tone of news coverage. The internet, by giving people instant access to an almost infinite range of news and opinion outlets worldwide, has imperilled the traditional “broad church” newspaper – the one where you could expect to see a wide range of views expressed.

News and information junkies now gravitate to the websites that most closely reflect their own world view. News outlets on both the Right and the Left have responded by taking on a tribal character, promoting opinions that parallel the views of their followers.

After all, it’s easier to have your prejudices confirmed than to be challenged by unpalatable new ideas. Not so good for democracy, though.