Ask - Listen - Find Credibility - Report
All of these ideas below in just one day, in just one speech, can make for a pretty rough day. There was a lot to unpack. A lot of the following was in that speech. The primary motivator seems to be discrimination, the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.
prejudice - bias - bigotry - intolerance - narrow-mindedness - unfairness - inequity - favoritism - one-sidedness - partisanship - sexism - chauvinism - racism - racialism - anti-Semitism - heterosexism - ageism - classism - ableism
As journalist, what can be done? Stop giving credence to those who continue to speak falsely. The last five years we saw the culmination of extremist views supported by hatred and falsehoods and lies.
No Basis in Fact
Journalist and Columnist James Rosen put it this way:
Here’s the truth: Trump merely stated more loudly and more boldly what Republicans have believed for years. He pushed more brazenly policies they’d pursued for years. He unleashed ugly currents of hatred and racism that Republicans had, if not condoned, failed to condemn.
What’s left is a Republican Party that has finally arrived at the destination to which it’s long been headed: a party with no substantive policy agenda and no real positive beliefs.
Hatred of government is not a policy. Hostility to taxes is not a belief. A mélange of grievances real and imagined is not a political platform.
If the current Republican Party has anything else to offer, anything other than its years-long slide into a full embrace of nihilism, now is the time to show it.
If you're wondering who James Rosen is, he left Fox News after allegations of sexual harassment, although Fox News did not offer those allegations as a reason for his departure. He now works for Sinclair Media Group. Yes, a flawed individual, but that doesn't lessen his credentials as a journalist.
James Rosen isn't the only journalist speaking out about lessons from the past five years. Perry Bacon, Jr. wrote in FiveThirtyeEight:
What I learned and will carry forward is that journalism can’t really come from “the view from nowhere,” a term New York University professor Jay Rosen uses for the posture of neutrality that had become a norm in political journalism. As Rosen has said, that view, among other things, “places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position ‘impartial.’”
But journalism is a reality-based, evidence-based profession — it comes from somewhere! — so of course a person like Trump, who lies constantly, will be covered more negatively than Obama or Biden, who don’t lie as often. Journalism would be severely constrained without the First Amendment being protected by the government, so American journalists inevitably will be pro-democracy and wary of people who exhibit antidemocratic tendencies like Trump. What I am suggesting for myself and other journalists is not to be left wing (or right wing) but to prioritize accuracy, evidence and truth over appearing neutral and centrist.
“Strategy coverage, both sides do it, who’s up and who’s down, winners and losers, controversy of the day, access journalism …. all these forms were spectacularly ill-matched to Donald Trump when he emerged as a threat to American democracy,” Rosen wrote on his personal blog in mid-November.
As a journalist, we're the ones who should be asking the questions, but are the answers worth passing along? Perhaps we should take some advice from Fred Rogers.
In times of stress, the best thing we can do for our children (and for each other) is to listen with our ears and hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
- Fred Rogers, You Are Special (1995)
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