How American journalism lets down readers and voters
TO HEAL THE rifts in American politics in the lead-up to next year’s crucial election, American journalism urgently needs renewal. Instead, in much of the mainstream media, journalism is in the grip of an illiberal bias. That includes the New York Times, which is best-placed of any of the country’s newspapers to establish a common set of facts and frame of debate.
In an essay James Bennet, The Economist’s Lexington columnist, and a former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, argues that its pledge to pursue the news “without fear or favour” is no longer being honoured. Neither is the promise of the paper to “invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion”. Instead, pressure from left-leaning journalists and commercial staff who “do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts” is undermining the Times’s claims to independence.
For the Times to assert that it plays by the same rules it always has “is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole,” Mr Bennet writes. “It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”
2023-12-14 04:32:09
Source from www.economist.com
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