The Mission of American Journalism

"With every public lie that is merely weighed and rated for its cleverness by our Beltway media and every fraud that flies into the American marketplace of ideas {goes} completely unchallenged, our capacity to govern ourselves grows that much weaker, the price we will soon have to pay for our folly gets that much higher, and the mainspring of a terrible machine is wound that much tighter."

— Driftglass

By Dan Hagen

I once visited an executive of one of the biggest newspaper companies in Germany.

Their soaring skyscraper HQ overlooked rubble. I told him I found that odd. He said that down there was what had been the Fleet Street of Berlin, back before Hitler. His company wanted to rebuild there, as a constant reminder of what can happen when the press doesn't do its job and lets fascist propaganda rule the day.

What he said haunts me just about every day. That is the mission American journalism is facing, and failing at.

That mission is more necessary than ever, and harder than ever.

“Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the (Gulf oil) spill and the clean-up efforts,” Glenn Greenwald said. “She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who — after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because ‘BP didn’t want him filming’ — was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official.”

And because of police arrest, harassment and suppression of reporters during the Occupy economic protest coverage, the U.S. has now fallen to 47th in the Reporters Without Borders world ranking of press freedom.

The battered institution of American journalism is also reeling from technological change. The center point of the journalism of the future has emerged, and it is the individual news feed.

I mean that thanks to the digital hive mind, we are not all our own journalists now, as some predicted. That's not possible. We are all our own EDITORS, and determine our individual news feeds. The challenge for journalism is to offer news streams that will be selected by many people and will nevertheless offer verified, factual information that those people need even if they don't necessarily want to hear it.

Many of the problems in contemporary American journalism and in the nation itself can be resolved if journalists would — and could — fulfill their primary ethical duty, which is NOT to massage their sources or their employers. It is to provide accurate, relevant, verified, credible facts to the public — the truth, or something as close to it as you can honestly get.

Unfortunately, the American mass media is now either purely corporate or overwhelmingly corporate-dominated (as is the case with PBS and NPR).

Corporations, which exist only to make the maximum amount of profit possible, really don’t like journalism, and never have. Unexpected spasms of truth are inconvenient for the bottom line.

What corporations like are information-manipulated audiences who wear corporate-supplied blinders. And now that corporations have almost complete control of American journalism, they seem intent on eliminating it. They want to keep nothing but the name “journalism,” which they'll hang on something else entirely.

“On television, the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps,” Lewis Lapham wrote.  “What we now know as the ‘news media’ serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless.”

Despite the odds against them, some journalists still have no agenda but the factual, verified truth — C-Span, for example. And while journalists may never be able to be purely objective, they can and should try to be fair to all sides in a news story.


Even advocacy journalists, while admittedly biased, can do some good by exposing truths other journalists have failed to expose — for example, that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Tobacco use is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. and smoking is the most preventable cause of death in our society, according to the American Cancer Society. And for many years the American press just let them die because it was addicted to tobacco company advertising contracts which forbid discussion of the issue.


Although bias, a tendency to lean in one direction, should be avoided by rational people who are seeking the truth, some practices are far worse than bias, and those include the willingness to LIE to support your cause. The party man is of necessity a liar, as Nietzsche observed.


People who are biased blind themselves to certain aspects of the truth. Propagandists who lie work actively to kill the truth. And yes, Fox News, I do mean you.

Even advocacy journalism frees no one from the responsibility to adhere to the factual truth. Bill O’Reilly is certainly not a reporter, but he is still a journalist, God help us. A commentator, like a newspaper columnist, is a journalist. And no one, whether reporter or commentator, is permitted to LIE ABOUT FACTS, as O’Reilly does.

In fact, if lying about facts were a capital crime in journalism, the halls of Fox News would be festooned with funeral wreaths.
We have reached the point where a right-wing American political leader like Todd Akin can get the plain scientific facts of biology dead wrong, and be protected by a cowed corporate media that fears to say so.

Entertainment values, driven by corporate greed, have smashed all but the pretense of professional journalism on television. Remember Balloon Boy? The cable news channels DIDN’T WANT to reveal the truth, even when the lie was thrown right into their faces. The lie was too lucrative.

Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House dinner.

And if they can't even expose the truth concerning an absurd hoax about a boy in a balloon, what kind of unmitigated, dangerous nonsense are they feeding us about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Wall Street and health care. "In fact, the 'war on science' has ballooned long past any mere attack upon the credibility of researchers and professors," wrote David Brin. "It now manifests as a general 'war on all knowledge castes' — including teachers, economists, journalists, civil servants, medical doctors, skilled labor, judges, diplomats... everyone (in other words) who actually knows a lot. All are routinely attacked on you-know-which-murdochian-'news'-network."

Precisely as predicted in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network, entertainment values have subverted American journalism. But they’ve also helped sneak a new and useful form of journalism criticism in the back door. It’s exemplified by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

In his finest hour, a courageous 2006 take-no-prisoners performance at the White House Press Association Dinner, Colbert insulted President George W. Bush to his face and delivered a stinging rebuke to the fawning press corps, reminding them, “Your job is to copy down what you’re told to write, then go home at 6 p.m. and play with your kids.”

The Washington crowd — politicians, press and pundits alike — don't want democracy or a republic. All they want is the “perception of legitimacy.” That's why none of them laughed when Colbert whipped aside that illusory veil of perception in front of Bush and the nation.

And Stewart, in his passion for and seriousness about real journalism, is a far more important and serious journalist than most of those who operate under that title in the corporate media. He understands that without open, honest, factual information, we've had it, and his satire makes that point day after day.

The fact that he must do so in the guise of a clown is no reflection on him, but on the deep corruption of our society, a neo-feudal land in which only a jester may speak the truth to the king.
It's a sad day when we can seriously discuss the emerging Age of Post-Truth Journalism.