The newly announced resignation of Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron, the abrupt stepping-down of Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine in December, and the highly anticipated departure of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet (one hopes imminently) combine to create an epic moment of reckoning for these highly influential news organizations.
A new generation of leaders is coming! And they have a lot of urgent repair work ahead of them. That includes abandoning the failed, anachronistic notions of objectivity under which they have operated for so long, recognizing and rejecting establishment whiteness, and finding dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate.
Nowhere are those challenges more critical than when it comes to reporting about politics and government. So as my way of helping out, I've written a speech for the next boss to give to their political staffs. It goes like this:
Hi!
It's so nice to be here. I'm looking forward to working with all of you amazing reporters and editors. You've all shown you're capable of incredible work, and I respect you enormously.
But at the same time, my arrival here is an inflection point.
It's impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate.
It's impossible to look out at the looming and in some cases existential challenges facing our republic and our globe — among them the pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, the rise of disinformation and ethnic nationalism — and think that it's OK for us to just keep doing what we've been doing.
So let me tell you a bit about what we need to do differently.
First of all, we're going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That's an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.
Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.
Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today's Democrats and today's Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I'm against that.
Defining our job as "not taking sides between the two parties" has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.
While we shouldn't pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don't know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent and write up what you've learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?
And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need — and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.
Political journalism as we have practiced it also too often emphasizes strategy over substance. It focuses on minor, incremental changes rather than the distance from the desirable or necessary goal. It obfuscates rather than clarifies the actual problems and the potential solutions.
Who's winning today's messaging wars is a story that may get you a lot of tweets, but in the greater scheme of things it means nothing. It adds no value. It's a distraction from what matters to the public. It also distracts you from more important work.
Tiresomely chronicling who's up and who's down actually ends up normalizing the status quo. I ask you to consider taking as a baseline the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding climate change and pollution, racial inequities, the broken immigration system, affordable health care, collapsing infrastructure, toxic monopolies and more.
Then you get to help set the national agenda, based on what your reporting leads you to conclude that the people want, need and deserve.
[ed. Another call for more professionalism, which we definitely need. But how did good journalism become so rare that it needs this kind of reminding (over and over)? Shouldn't this be like, basic? As long as media business models rely on clicks for revenue it'll always be a race to the bottom, and good journalism, even in the idealized version imagined above, has to compete with a diverse (and expanding) media landscape, across multiple platforms. We'll see.]
A new generation of leaders is coming! And they have a lot of urgent repair work ahead of them. That includes abandoning the failed, anachronistic notions of objectivity under which they have operated for so long, recognizing and rejecting establishment whiteness, and finding dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate.
Nowhere are those challenges more critical than when it comes to reporting about politics and government. So as my way of helping out, I've written a speech for the next boss to give to their political staffs. It goes like this:
Hi!
It's so nice to be here. I'm looking forward to working with all of you amazing reporters and editors. You've all shown you're capable of incredible work, and I respect you enormously.
It's impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate.
It's impossible to look out at the looming and in some cases existential challenges facing our republic and our globe — among them the pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, the rise of disinformation and ethnic nationalism — and think that it's OK for us to just keep doing what we've been doing.
So let me tell you a bit about what we need to do differently.
First of all, we're going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That's an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.
Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.
Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today's Democrats and today's Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I'm against that.
Defining our job as "not taking sides between the two parties" has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.
While we shouldn't pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don't know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent and write up what you've learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?
And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need — and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.
Political journalism as we have practiced it also too often emphasizes strategy over substance. It focuses on minor, incremental changes rather than the distance from the desirable or necessary goal. It obfuscates rather than clarifies the actual problems and the potential solutions.
Who's winning today's messaging wars is a story that may get you a lot of tweets, but in the greater scheme of things it means nothing. It adds no value. It's a distraction from what matters to the public. It also distracts you from more important work.
Tiresomely chronicling who's up and who's down actually ends up normalizing the status quo. I ask you to consider taking as a baseline the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding climate change and pollution, racial inequities, the broken immigration system, affordable health care, collapsing infrastructure, toxic monopolies and more.
Then you get to help set the national agenda, based on what your reporting leads you to conclude that the people want, need and deserve.
by Dan Froomkin, Salon | Read more:
Image: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images[ed. Another call for more professionalism, which we definitely need. But how did good journalism become so rare that it needs this kind of reminding (over and over)? Shouldn't this be like, basic? As long as media business models rely on clicks for revenue it'll always be a race to the bottom, and good journalism, even in the idealized version imagined above, has to compete with a diverse (and expanding) media landscape, across multiple platforms. We'll see.]
