Journalist Derangement Syndrome
How Journalism, the Fifth Estate in Democracy, gets perverted
It’s not an exaggeration to claim that we’re living through a serious eclipse of proper journalism. On the eve of a solar eclipse, it seems timely to delve into why that is. First, let’s define what journalism is, and we’re not going to ask AI this time. Instead let’s look for a quote. And already, we’re in trouble because the quotes I was able to find are mostly negative. But Walter Cronkite, the most trusted journalist America ever had, supports the theme I’m developing:
If they’re preordained dogmatists for a cause, they can’t be very good journalists.
Thank you, Walter!
Journalism is not ‘speaking truth to power’ as you may have been told. If you do that, you will inevitably become a dogmatic activist, someone who uses their superior skills at using words like weapons to skewer whatever he/she thinks is worthy of getting knifed. Walter knew what he was talking about. Truth gets short shrift in that kind of enterprise. But in the febrile atmosphere of our angst ridden time, this seems like the right and proper thing to do. There are a number of writers calling themselves journalists who are doing that. I would put Max Blumenthal in that group, because of his careless use of a loaded term—genocide. Also, the local celebrity writer John Vaillant, who fell from the high achievement of The Golden Spruce to Fire Weather, a screed about a devastating fire in Fort McMurray which he uses to promote his version of The Climate Crisis. I can see how he got there: I used to believe what he so fervently defends as the truth about Climate Change because I was an activist myself. Alas.
I can also relate to losing it on the page; when I read propaganda about Mark Carney, I’m extremely likely to lash out, as fellow Substacker Elizabeth Nickson recently did. But I do not call that ‘journalism’. That’s just writing a heated rant, sometimes politely called an ‘opinion piece’. When the editor of an entire news outlet writes an opinion piece, it’s called an Editorial and carries more weight than my ramblings, but it’s still simply an Opinion. Someone who has stuck to his journalistic ethics of reporting the Truth and nothing but the Truth, is Sam Cooper. His book Wilful Blindness is one of the most shocking tales of corruption in Canada that I have ever read. He is slowly getting some recognition for his years of sleuthing and may yet have some influence on the election. He is now writing for his own platform, The Bureau. He’s always worth reading because so far, he has not succumbed to the lure of dogmatism.
Speaking as the survivor of seven years of hacking out a living as a freelance writer for various outlets in Canada, allow me tell you what a journalist should be: First and foremost, she should combine the mind of a sceptic with the charm that makes people tell you secrets. Second, she should not swallow the obvious story but sneak behind the curtain and dig into the cellar for the hidden one. Third, she should not just revise and use the propaganda emanating from governments and institutions but actively question it. Finally, she should beware of letting her own bias creep into how she frames the story she finds. Writing that kind of journalism teaches you that ‘reality’ is opaque, people lie, and we are always deceived about what’s really happening. Being that kind of journalist is exhausting and it was never well paid though at one time, it was considered a career worth having. Not any longer; journalists are now regarded with the same level of suspicion as politicians.
The reasons are many and the death of real journalism is playing out in some convoluted ways. To begin with, we’ve been fed negative tropes about journalists and journalism for years. Trump used to call them out as ‘nasty people’ and herd them into enclaves during his rallies. He did that because he knows how powerful a really skilled journalist is in swaying public opinion; calling the entire group nasty was his way of admitting that they had power and he wasn’t putting up with that. Since then, the so called ‘Legacy Media’ has been called out as abysmally biased and corrupt and not just by Trump: the propaganda coup of the pandemic was so egregious that a good portion of the public stopped listening altogether. They ended up on Substack, which is why this platform continues to thrive. Also, Substack isn’t caving in to pressure from nefarious actors who want it to become as heavily regulated by so called fact checkers and ‘disinformation czars’ as everyone else. Real journalism is possible on Substack.
But the death of legacy journalism is imminent. Judging from events in the ‘public square’, something is about to give: For example, the US Congress is grilling the head of NPR about left wing bias in a publicly funded news outlet, the BBC in the UK is axing its best journalist, Stephen Sackur and head of HardTalk, Matt Taibbi is discussing the insanity of seeing everything through the lens of racism at NPR, and most alarming Jeff Goldberg, the Atlantic Mag editor and no friend of Republicans, somehow gained access to a high level political chat about bombing Yemen. These meshing events all point to an inflection point in The Fifth Estate from which there is no return. Once you see the rot, you can’t unsee it.
Ever alert to the Zeitgeist, Bill Maher, who became a sort of ersatz journalist because actual journalists were dropping the ball, discussed the increasing drift into extremist views worthy of North Korea, by warning his audience that he is calling out both sides for being extremists as far as Trumpism goes: he says that he used to call out people on the Left for having Trump Derangement Syndrome but is now calling out the Right for having Trump Devotion Syndrome. He regards both as dangerous to democracy. And he is absolutely correct about why extreme views aren’t just wrong; they debase our public life and in fact, destroy democracy as we currently know it. Maher is notable for not following his own advice on occasion, but at least, he is attempting to make Americans see more than they want to.
What then, if not speaking truth to power, is the job of a journalist?
Instead of trying to describe it as ferreting out the truth, which is true enough, let me introduce you to a vanishing breed, Stephen Sackur, a lifelong Top Tier Investigative Journalist, newly fired from the BBC. Asked by Freddie Sayers of Unherd why he thought he was fired and his highly esteemed show with a global audience of millions shuttered, he said: I think they are suffering from a lack of nerve.
He meant that the BBC brass is terrified of being called ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ etc, just like the NPR is. This public failure of nerve is what’s behind a lot of the failures of journalism. To his credit, Sackur refused to condemn or smear his former employer of some thirty years, pointing out that he wasn’t your typical BBC journalist at all. And that the institution was not just a communist bloc of idiots. Instead of just indulging in his undeniable feelings of frustration, he chose to do what he’s been doing his entire professional life: understanding a situation instead of simply condemning it even when his own head was on the chopping block. He is only human though; elsewhere he called the decision ‘incredibly dumb’ and described himself as ‘really really cross’, which is almost comical. The one thing Sackur never does is confuse activism with journalism. He knows the difference. The entire conversation with Sayers is like a masterclass in what makes for good journalism and just how fiendishly difficult that can be.
When Sackur made that comment about a lack of nerve at the top driving bad decisions, it rang true for me and not just in the BBC context. I have always believed that fear driven agendas are truly destructive and when you widen that lens, you see nothing but fear—-and also loathing—-driving our public discourse. The problems at NPR sliding from a beloved and trusted public broadcaster in the US into a grotesque organization that chooses to present all reality as somehow tainted by ‘racism’, is a sad example of how the fear of being called ‘racist’ is driving the public discourse in the US. Bill McWhirter, one of the card carrying far left Democrats in the US and incidentally, a black man, said on the same Maher show, that his nine year old daughter asked him recently why NPR was ‘always saying you can’t do something’. Bingo. Out of the mouths of babes…etc..
Which brings me to the extremely odd ‘chatgate’ incident with Jeff Goldberg. Matt Taibbi quotes a highly sophisticated PR man, who said that this event, which I’m choosing to call a ‘construct’, was almost certainly a psyop in the same vein as Russiagate and other attempts to smear Trump. The fact that the Democrats in the US find their ratings at historic lows doesn’t stop them from this kind of nefarious activity that can then be used to spin all kinds of bad journalism to a still gullible and often confused and alarmed public.
My conclusions are neither new nor exciting: we depend on highly trained, talented and hard working journalists to untangle the truth from propaganda and activist articles and tell us what is actually happening. We need that information desperately if we want to elect the ‘right’ Prime Minister, or the Good President instead of someone who is only pretending to be those things. It’s been said before and I will say it again: we have to find solid well researched and well written journalism if we want to live in a democratic system. The Fifth Estate is vital and the first step to getting it back is to know the difference between journalism, propaganda and activism on the page. And only you can decide which is which.