Uri Berliner’s exposure of National Public Radio, James Bennet’s truth-telling about The New York Times, and the recent outrage at CBS News over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview are just the latest signs of something we’ve all been seeing for over a decade.
Online newspapers and other electronic outlets that used to speak with authority are broken. Americans aren’t paying attention to any of them anymore. And the legacy media isn’t coming back.
It’s no longer a matter of hiring more independent-minded and conservative journalists—or, in language the heads of journalism schools might be more accustomed to: hiring journalists that look more like America.
Hiring decisions aren’t going to redeem the news media, because it hasn’t abandoned conservativism; it has abandoned journalism.
In the minds of today’s young reporters, our very idea of journalism is flawed—because it seeks to be objective. Objectivity, they contend, is a tool of white........