During a decades-long career in the news, Michael Tomasky has identified two principal values guiding traditional “objective” journalism: truth and fairness. In general, he said, those principles work in concert. But in the United States’ current political ecosystem, where one of the two frontrunning presidential campaigns has repeatedly issued statements with no factual basis, truth and fairness “are frequently in conflict,” the New Republic editor told an audience at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) Thursday.
“Bending too far in the direction of fairness doesn't serve democracy,” Tomasky said. “I believe a distressing number of outlets choose fairness over truth, and I think we should choose truth over fairness.”
Tomasky visited SMPA to discuss journalism’s responsibility to democracy, joining a panel that also included SMPA adjunct professor Jeanne Cummings, former deputy bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal; Jesse J. Holland, SMPA associate director and associate professor; and Lydie Lake, a senior undergraduate student in SMPA majoring in journalism and mass communication with a minor in political science.
The question of whether journalists have any responsibility to serve or defend democracy at all is not a settled one. Tomasky referenced a May interview with The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn in which Kahn told an interviewer that democracy is “not the top [issue]” in the current election and that the paper’s chief responsibility is to inform readers, not to preserve the democratic system itself.
“I don't agree—I think we do have a responsibility to democracy, and I think it’s historic and I think it's pretty profound,” Tomasky said. For instance, when Donald Trump repeated false statements targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during the most recent presidential debate, journalists repeating those statements in the name of fair reporting could simply amplify racist misinformation.
Panelists’ views were nuanced. Cummings, who was editing political copy at The Wall Street Journal during the 2016 election, pushed back against the idea that news organizations should “defend” democracy, saying rather that journalism “has a role in helping our democracy work and function,” by, for instance, exposing political corruption. But she agreed with Tomasky that Trump poses an increasing challenge to traditional political reportage, as his campaign increasingly veers away from concrete issues on which voters might disagree into bizarre rhetoric with no basis in reality, like turning on a “very large faucet” to combat drought in California.
“There’s so much untruth it’s almost hard to quote him, because if you do a direct quote, you’re repeating something you know isn’t true,” Cummings said. “It’s a very big challenge for the news media today.”
But even that characterization elides the fact that Trump was never running purely on issues, Holland said, having introduced untruths about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and the criminality of immigrants even in the earliest days of his first campaign. “He’s been challenging the norms, as far as journalism goes, from way before he became president,” Holland said, making “journalists question what they can and cannot say without seeming to be advocates rather than reporters.” Trump also mainstreamed the position that journalism itself is an illegitimate industry, a notion Holland said he encountered firsthand as a reporter at Trump rallies in 2016. Any discussion of journalistic responsibility needs to distinguish between individual reporters and news organizations, he said.
The panel turned to Lake as a representative of Generation Z, asking her about the role of TikTok and other social media platforms in disseminating news and, conversely, spreading misinformation. She characterized these platforms as a mixed blessing, pointing out that, especially in authoritarian societies without robust independent media, they can amplify “citizen journalism” and stories that would otherwise be censored. But they can also spread misinformation out of context, as in a recent TikTok trend featuring influencers dancing to a sound clip of Trump’s claim about animal cruelty by immigrants. In any case, Lake said, these platforms and the algorithms that shape them aren’t going anywhere. Voters of the future will use them; journalists of the future will need to know how to use them too.
“As social media adapts and journalism changes, all journalists need to be on this kind of social media,” Lake said. “They might not be able to combat every single thing that is being spread on social media because it's such an instantaneous atmosphere of information, [but] they need to build a platform for themselves and combat these things right away, in real time. And it's going to be really hard.”
The panel also discussed the gutting of local news organizations over the past few decades and the way billionaire-funded right-wing media organizations like Sinclair have swept in to fill that gap. In response, most if not all journalistic organizations are struggling with the question of how to get readers to pay for news. Part of that may mean balancing the need to inform with the need to entertain.
Although this historical moment does feel like an inflection point for American democracy, panelists said it’s not the first and (probably) won’t be the last. “Objective” American journalism is a relatively recent invention, panelists said; in the republic’s earlier days, political advocacy was an understood aim of news organizations.
“Our democracy survived [advocacy journalism] before, we can survive it now,” Holland said. “It's just different from what our generation, all of our generations, have grown up with.”
