NBC/MSDNC Amp Up Anti-Constitutional Pandemic Lockdown Lies And Disinformation

jonathanturley |  For four years, I have written about the alarming loss of neutrality and objectivity in journalism — a trend that is reflected by many polls showing that the majority of the public no longer trusts the media for fair and honest reporting. While I have regularly criticized President Donald Trump, I have also objected to unrelentingly biased reporting as well as embarrassingly soft coverage of former Vice President Joe Biden. Now, Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking “social justice.”

In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.”  Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Dressing up bias as “advocating social justice,” does not remove the taint of yellow journalism.  It is the same rationalization for shaping the news to fit your agenda and treating readers as subjects to be educated rather than informed.

While other professors in The Stanford Daily disagreed, Wesley Lowery, who has served as a national correspondent for the Washington Post, also rejects objectivity.  In a tweet, Lowery declared “American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment…The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”

These are major voices in media.  Glasser is a Stanford Department of Communication professor emeritus and served as the director for Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. He is also the former president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.