Journalism Is Not A Neutral Act

Lies Journalists Tell

This week saw Pierre Poilievre share some information on social media claiming there was no health necessity to the travel restrictions on the unvaccinated imposed by Justin Trudeau – a blog post written by a Canadian convoyist not worth naming for Bari Weiss’ Substack, which is as good a sign as any that it’s about to be some bullshit.

It turned out to be some bullshit, which led to Stephen Maher wonder whether “Poilievre is thinking carefully about the long-term implications of the messages he is sending during the CPC leadership race,” as if this was the first moment when it’s been unclear what Poilievre’s long term strategy is. Oh, wait, I’ve been writing about it for months, nevermind.

I’m not going to re-make a point I’ve made a lot in the last months in this piece – it’s abundantly clear that Poilievre has no long term strategy or ability to do anything except maximize the audience he is currently screaming to, and if he fails to change this, this will hurt him in a General Election – but it is worth thinking about the consequences of this. Maher ended up in a debate about the role of journalism with Emmett Macfarlane, where he expressed the view that journalists shouldn’t come to conclusions.

And at that point I almost yeeted my phone into the wall.

…

Journalism is not a neutral act.

It has never been a neutral act.

People thought it was back in the day because there were so few news outlets, and such limited news time, that there was little to no way of knowing if the way a story was being reported was true or not, because you got maybe two versions of it.

The biases of the media are a lot more exposed now, with different news organizations and the rise of explicitly ideological and partisan media organizations, but even still, these biases have always been there, it’s just that we have been taught that they aren’t.

You think this is opinion? From the Washington Post, on the Vietnam War: “Until 1968, network news operations tended to edit out the blood and gore and avoid direct criticism of military operations while American lives were on the line.” The way the war effort was most hampered was, yes, Cronkite’s famous op-ed at the end of his nightly broadcast where he said that the only way out was negotiation, but the whole way they staged the “news” of that broadcast, the reporting, was all lined up to make that the inevitable conclusion. Had he wanted to tell a better, more rally the flag opinion, the entire rest of the show is different.

This is the thing that I keep coming back to – there isn’t a truly unbiased way to do journalism, because most stories do not have black and white. It lives, as an industry, on the shades of grey, on close calls, on gut experience and ephemeral senses of whether they “got it” or not. Journalism and reporting is always held up as a neutral act – reporting facts – but most of the time, it’s not that clear cut.

So why is Maher claiming that in his ideal world, nobody would come to conclusions? Because to him, he wants to be absolved of responsibility for the potential of a Poilievre government, which he, and I, and Emmett, and everyone else with a blue check on Canadian Twitter knows would be a fucking disaster. The media thinks they’re smarter than all of us and think that Trudeau is DOA, and so they don’t want to take any blame when Poilievre wins, or piss off what they think is the emerging governing movement and party. It’s all spineless bullshit, but let’s go beyond that.

Why did Maher think it was okay to come to the “conclusion” that either Bill Blair or Brenda Lucki lied when the initial reporting around the RCMP “scandal” came out? Why did he feel it okay to tell Lucki how she should have acted around the RCMP, and that it was hard-hearted to yell at people who completely and utterly fucked up? Because there, the consequences of being very, very, very wrong – as Maher was when his entire case collapsed – doesn’t matter. The damage is done to the Liberals, sure, but there’s no accountability for horrendous bad takes. (Yes, I know that helps me, Mr. “Del Duca will win”, I know, but there’s a key difference – I don’t pretend to be unbiased.)

The problem with all of this is that the news media pretends that they’re the umpire when they’re a player on the pitch, and it’s as intellectually dishonest as it is morally bankrupt. The problem is, the only people who can change this are the journalists – not the columnists, but the hard news journalists – who decide whether or not it is newsworthy to, say, point out that the Nova Scotia RCMP are known liars when they’re writing about the claims of political interference. Whether or not to report on those inconsistencies at the same time as reporting their claims is a crucial choice which has the effect of completely changing whether or not you believe the claim.

If you merely report the what each side says without context, that’s often described as the neutral way of reporting, but if one side says something that is demonstrably untrue, what’s the “unbiased” way to report on that? Because let’s be very clear – whether you put that context in or not is absolutely going to make the determination for the readers.

Journalism is the art of storytelling, and as someone who has literally written a novel before, I know how the way you lay out your story matters as much, if not more, than the story itself. Story telling is an art built around persuasion, and around making a case, and that is what every piece of journalism is trying to do – it’s trying to make people care about a thing. Be it mass shootings or an F1 story, every piece of journalism is an effort to make people care about a topic.

The idea that journalism isn’t about conclusions is bullshit, and always has been, but we didn’t know that then because three channels meant that my parents didn’t have the ability to know the other way a story’s fact could be spun. It’s all a series of choices – choices that, to be clear, this site engages with all the time – but presented as the obvious and only option. They’re not, though.

The press core refuse to accept responsibility for the power they have for reasons passing understanding – they have a lot of power in how people who pay much less attention to the news than the average journalist or political tragic see the world. They assume that the journalist has done their job properly and is telling the truth, and therefore that the implied conclusions of journalistic output is correct. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to all of this, and certainly not to contextualize every story. Reporters do that, and they have to. But to pretend they’re not players on the pitch is absurd.

They’re active participants, and their job isn’t neutral. And honestly, all I want is one journalist to admit it, because if not, the industry will continue to die a slow death.