Marching blindly into the post-journalism era

Herewith, two unrelated (or perhaps not) examples of the insidious bias that pervades the mainstream Western media. Neither is necessarily of any great consequence on its own, but each is telling in its own way.

■ In a 470-word story on the jailing of former US senator Bob Menendez following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges, the BBC could find no room to mention that he was a senior Democrat.

You can be sure that if he was a Republican, i.e. a Trumpist, we would have been told in the first few lines.

The BBC’s story did mention that Menendez’s son was a Democratic congressman, but that was all.

Inadvertent oversight? Hmmm.

We were told that Menendez, who accepted bribes from foreign governments, notably Egypt, was a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – but still no mention of his party.

And if you clicked on a link to the BBC’s earlier story about his conviction last July, you learned that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Menendez to resign. But even then there was nothing to indicate that Schumer was talking about a member of his own party, and readers could have been excused for assuming Menendez was a Republican. 

The headline read Senator Bob Menendez found guilty in bribery scheme. It’s dollars to donuts that if he was from the other side of the aisle, it would have said: Republican senator found guilty in bribery scheme.

Only towards the bottom of that 687-word story was there any indication that Menendez was a Democrat, and even then it wasn’t explicit.  

There are two possible explanations here. One is that the BBC’s stories were written and edited by journalists so incompetent or amateurish that they didn’t think Menendez’s party affiliation was significant.

The other is that the BBC (which is taxpayer-funded and therefore has a special obligation to be politically neutral) decided the Democratic Party should be spared the embarrassment of being associated with a corrupt senator. Either explanation is unacceptable, but the second is the far more plausible one.

■ An Associated Press report refers to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and other technology companies “trying to ingratiate themselves” with the Trump administration.

I’m sure that’s exactly what the loathsome Zuckerberg and other tech titans were doing, but it’s not the function of an AP reporter to tell us. There should be no place in a straight, factual news account for a loaded word such as “ingratiate” unless the reporter is quoting someone.

A competent reporter, by simply conveying the facts of the story, can leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether Zuckerberg is cravenly sucking up to the White House. Readers are capable of drawing their own conclusions and should be left to do so without being led by the nose. But news stories are now often fatally contaminated by casual, pervasive bias and the intrusion of reporters’ personal judgments.

When I read any “news” story about American politics, my eye goes straight to the bottom to identify the source. If it’s from AP, the Washington Post or the New York Times I know not to assume that it’s balanced and accurate (and by “accurate”, I mean not distorted by the omission of any relevant facts or background information that might not align with the reporter’s perception).

The Washington Post and the New York Times are entitled to spin the news as they think fit and accept the consequences, even if they compromise their credibility in the process. Their subscribers can always opt out if they don’t like what they’re reading. But wire services such as AP operate in a different context.

Because they are usually co-operative enterprises that supply news to media outlets from all points of the political compass, wire services have traditionally been careful to avoid any hint of bias. New Zealand’s own much-lamented NZPA was always rigorous in observing editorial neutrality. But that rule has been jettisoned at AP, whose reporters clearly feel no compunction about feeding the news through an ideological filter. AP political stories come heavily larded with journalists’ own perceptions which are invariably hostile to the political Right.

Stories about Trump, for example, routinely refer to his “lies” and “falsehoods”. These are terms that previous generations of news reporters would never have used unless they were quoting someone. They would have presented the facts and left it to readers to decide for themselves whether the president had a flagrant disregard for the truth (which is clearly the case, but I’m permitted to say that because this is an opinion piece).

The frequent use of the disparaging terms "far right" and "extreme right", to denote all but the mildest and least threatening politicians on the conservative side of the spectrum, is another means by which leftist journalists reveal their ingrained priggishness.

The now-habitual intrusion of personal opinion into “news” coverage isn’t just a breach of traditional journalism rules. On a purely pragmatic level it’s crazy because it accelerates public distrust of an already failing media industry.

It appears not to have registered with American journalists that Trump won the presidency despite overwhelming media opposition. The message was clear: the US mainstream media have rendered themselves largely irrelevant.

When journalists have fallen so clearly out of step with the public mood, they need to re-evaluate themselves. But there’s no sign of that happening, and so journalism blindly continues its determined and suicidal march into the post-journalism era.