This isn't neutrality. This isn't objectivity. This is appeasement.
Well. As I wound down my teleworking day, I was greeted with this tweet from one of the reporters of the Paper of Record:
Needless to say, I may have lost it a bit.
ATLANTIC CITY, Nov. 13. -- Chancellor Adolf Hitler is not the "altogether bad man" he is frequently reported to be, but, like several men who have occupied the White House, he has some poor advisers, according to Bishop R.J. Wade of Stockholm, Sweden, in an address at a reception tonight for the Board of Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which is holding its semi-annual conference here.Notice the date. Nov. 13, 1935. This was two months after the Nuremberg Race Laws had been enacted, stripping Jews of all citizenship rights in the Reich.
The fact that Adolf Hitler's regime had stripped an entire class of people of citizenship should have clued the Times' editors to spike this story. But they didn't. And the credulousness continued, until Hitler set the world on fire.
Now, full disclosure, because I feel I need to do so: the Times does some very good work. Its foreign reporting is nonpareil. Which makes takes like Lipton's so infuriating.
As I tweeted, too much of our media has no idea how to confront Trump. You have the standouts like Yamiche Alcindor. (No surprise that she's a Black woman.) But journalists like her are not thick on the ground. Too many journalists cling to the fake standard of "objectivity", not wanting to be "seen as the story", and allow the Trump regime to get away with lie after lie, in their write-ups couching any disagreement in "both sides say". For example:
But more than that: it's a dereliction to the truth.
Objectivity is an illusion. Objectivity only works, if it ever does, when all sides agree on a shared reality. We don't have that. Trump and his sycophants operate on a plane unrelated to the real world. To treat them as if they have valid points is not to present objective evidence, but to elevate their delusions to a place of prominence they don't deserve. It's the opposite of objectivity. It downgrades observable fact to just another "opinion". People who believe in a flat earth don't have a differing, valid viewpoint. They're loons who are shunned from any serious discussion. Likewise with Trump and his coterie. They're actually worse than flat earthers or anti-vaxxers, as they control a branch and a half of government. But because they occupy that unearned perch, too much of the media feels it has to accord them a respect which their words and actions don't merit.
At some point, the cult of objectivity is just a cop-out so as to not make hard decisions. It's a cop-out so that you don't have to burn those in power, on whom you rely for stories and Twitter clicks. It's a cop-out so that you can keep going to the same cocktail parties and not have awkward moments.
Journalists should never be friends with those in power. They should hold them to account. Neither should they be harder on some than on others depending on who's in the White House. Again, no one here needs reminding of the scabrous treatment meted out to Barack Obama. Imagine if a President Hillary Clinton had muffed the coronavirus response so awfully. Editorial pages across the nation would be calling for her resignation.
Mr. Lipton again shows that too much of our media is not, as our British friends say, fit for purpose. It's too concerned with its own place in the class system. It can't see that it's job is to afflict the comfortable. And of course it can't see that: they themselves are the comfortable.
We will survive this. But it will be in the face of a failure of many of our institutions. The media has learned too little from 2016. This time, thousands of lives will be lost.