Viewpoint

Harry Rakowski: Is the media living up to its promises?

With press freedom comes a lot of news that's unfit for print. The demands on modern readers have never been greater
The New York Times building in New York. AP Photo

Where can you get unbiased, accurate reporting that informs, illuminates and guides our understanding of the world around us?

It is remarkable to see how today any action or event generates such polarizing interpretation and opinion. There is so much distrust and misinformation, particularly in the U.S. with each side claiming theirs is the only truth.

The New York Times has long been considered a bastion of free speech and honest reporting. In 1897 its founder Adolph S. Ochs created the famous slogan still used on its masthead “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” It was a challenge to the flamboyant press of the day. The slogan highlighted the need for reporting to be both factual and impartial.

In 1960 a U.S. congressman from Texas, Wright Patman asked the Trade Commission to investigate whether this claim represented false advertising as it made the paper seem superior to other publications. They declined to investigate saying “We do not believe there are any apparent objective standards by which to measure whether news is fit to print or not print”.

Has the Times lived up to its promise? Bari Weiss, a conservative writer, resigned from the paper after being badgered and demeaned by co-workers for her views. Her views didn’t fit with the promoted narrative and the paper’s fear of social media backlash for conservative opinions.

“I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative,” wrote Weiss in her resignation letter.

Recently Bret Stephens had a column killed about the forced ouster of senior Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. for inappropriately using a racial slur as a question, but without intent to be malicious. Stephens was not allowed to opine in his column that, “every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention”.

“We are living in in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it,” Stephens wrote in the column that was later pubished by the New York Post.

A survey by the American News Pathways Project taken in June 2020 showed that about one-fifth of adult Americans received their news primarily from social media and were more likely to be less knowledgeable about coronavirus and politics and more likely to believe unproven claims. Forty-five percent received news mainly from TV outlets. For anyone comparing the reporting of the same story by CNN and Fox News, it is hard to believe they are evaluating the same facts to come up with polar opposites of the truth.

While this polarization is rampant in the mainstream media it is even worse in other outlets. Conspiracy theories abound. Vaccination will turn you into an ape and is an attempt by Bill Gates to implant nanoparticles that will steal your money. A cabal of rich left wing elites have created a deep state to control the world. QAnon promotes the belief that Joe Biden and others are detaining children underground and sexually abusing them.

Social media companies are now trying to restrict posts they believe are malicious or dangerous. While this has some understandable merit it is also a slippery slope to censorship by powerful media groups who may want conformity to their bias.

Freedom of the press is a cherished and enshrined right that is essential to a free democracy. It is a check against abuse of power, corruption and malfeasance. In 1982 the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined the right to “freedom of thought, opinion, expression, including the freedom of the press and other media of communication.”

With that freedom comes the right, within reason, to publish all the news unfit to print. As readers we need to carefully weed out the fake and misleading news and focus on all the news that’s fit to read. The publication of thehub.ca gives us a greater opportunity to do so.

Sign up for FREE and receive The Hub’s weekly email newsletter.

You'll get our weekly newsletter featuring The Hub’s thought-provoking insights and analysis of Canadian policy issues and in-depth interviews with the world’s sharpest minds and thinkers.