Here is a tweet from Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowrey that's made me rethink things:
American view-from-nowhere, "objectivity"-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020
I'm really hung up on his usage of "moral clarity." In that same blog post, I also wrote a lot about formative institutions, but I didn't spend a lot of time writing about the most prominent, yet declining, institution: religion.
If you can excuse my stereotyping for a moment, I would guess that most of the people who are happy to see James Bennett resign in the wake of the Tom Cotton brouhaha are under forty, coastal-living, well-educated, mostly white people who do not attend church.
They likely have not been a part of any formative institution. And this is why that matters:
Everybody worships...
I imagined taking my objections to these reactions and placing them in the context of a Catholic Mass. The priest gives his homily, then he invites his Hindu friend to tell the congregation about why they should worship Shiva. Then a Muslim cleric comes up and tells them they need to pray to Allah.
When the congregants object, the priest responds: "Hey, we're just trying to give both sides!"
The response of the hypothetical priest is so absurd, and would fall so flat on the ears of the people in that church, that I think I finally understand how these activists must feel. The New York Times is the place where they come for
When a priest gives his homily, he will often talk about current events and how the community of believers should approach them, how they should respond as people of a particular faith. He gives them moral clarity.
In the absence of such an institution, people are forced to look elsewhere for morality and community. Many of them have placed that need at the alter of the NYT op-ed page.
I chastise this type of purity and promote diverse viewpoints in institutions. But sometimes exclusion seems like the only logical conclusion. If it doesn't make sense for churches to promote both sides of a religion debate, then why should newspapers present both sides of a topic?
A moral community seems like the one place where we can all agree that outsiders have no right to intrude. Just as Christians agree that Jews should be able to have their own temple to worship, woke NYT readers would have no problem with the National Review running the Tom Cotton piece. It's not that the column was wrongthink and harmful to minorities, it's where it appeared, in the sacred New York Times.
I want to believe that the objections to the Cotton op-ed are just about preventing harm to black people and not a quest for ideological purity. Heather Mac Donald tried to make the case that the supposed "War on Cops" was preventing them from doing their jobs and driving up crime, leading to an increase in violent crimes in black neighborhoods. Predictably, things did not end well with her on the college tour since her solution was to stand up for cops.
Choose your God
The problem I have is that these activists have taken an institution, which plays a valuable role in society, and are trying to turn it into a moral community without replacing the institution they are attempting to usurp.
I understand your need for "moral clarity" but what about society's need for the institution of journalism to inform our citizenry?
So where does that leave the rest of us who hold onto the traditional view of media? I hate to keep coming back to it, but I think Jonathan Haidt is right. We can adapt his proposal for higher education to news.
Newspapers should choose their telos: social justice/antiracism/moral clarity for liberals, or a more traditional objective and curious approach that seeks to put events and facts into context. And they should be upfront about what their mission is and let the readers decide.
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