Advocacy journalism

A large part of the mainstream press no longer seems to believe that its 
primary responsibility is to report what happened, present competing 
arguments fairly, investigate the powerful and allow readers to reach 
their own conclusions. Increasingly, journalists have assigned 
themselves a different job. They aren’t merely reporting on society. 
They are helping society move toward what they believe it ought to become.


Modern advocacy journalism has increasingly attached itself to a 
collection of moral and political causes: climate activism, transgender 
ideology, racial equity, DEI, expansive immigration, abortion rights, 
hostility toward traditional religious morality, suspicion of 
nationalism, and enthusiasm for international institutions and 
technocratic government. These positions differ from newsroom to 
newsroom, and certainly not every journalist subscribes to all of them. 
But taken together, they form a remarkably consistent worldview.

The problem isn’t that journalists hold these beliefs. They are entitled 
to them. The problem is that many journalists have ceased to recognize 
them as political beliefs at all. They have been elevated into moral 
truths. Climate policy isn’t a political dispute; one side is “denying 
science.” Gender ideology isn’t a political or scientific dispute; one 
side is attacking “trans rights.” Mass immigration isn’t a legitimate 
disagreement over national interest, labor, culture and sovereignty; 
opposition becomes “anti-immigrant.” Traditional Christianity isn’t 
simply another moral framework; increasingly it becomes “Christian 
nationalism.” National sovereignty becomes “nationalism.” Populism 
becomes a “threat to democracy.”

Once you have classified your own political preferences as morally 
correct rather than politically contestable, objectivity becomes almost 
impossible. Why would you give equal consideration to people who are 
wrong? Worse, why give a platform to people whose ideas you believe 
cause harm?

There is an arrogance buried inside advocacy journalism that rarely gets 
discussed. It assumes that the journalist is not merely better informed 
than the reader, but morally better equipped to determine which 
political outcomes are acceptable. The reader becomes less a citizen to 
be informed than a subject to be guided.

And that is precisely where the intellectual justification for advocacy 
journalism enters. The old journalistic aspiration toward objectivity 
has increasingly been attacked as “bothsidesism,” false balance or the 
“view from nowhere.” Prominent journalists and journalism scholars have 
argued instead for “moral clarity,” an explicitly “moral voice,” and 
journalism committed to defending an egalitarian conception of democracy 
and confronting structural inequities.


Whether immigration levels are too high, whether biological sex matters 
in women’s athletics, whether national sovereignty should supersede 
decisions made by unelected transnational institutions, whether energy 
policy should favor nuclear power, whether parents should have greater 
authority over schools, whether marriage and family deserve special 
protection, or whether a nation’s government owes a greater duty to its 
own citizens than to people who arrived yesterday are political 
questions. They are supposed to be debated.

Instead, an extraordinary number of these questions have migrated from 
the category of political disagreement into the category of extremism. 
That migration may be one of the most consequential stories American 
journalism has failed to cover, perhaps because journalists themselves 
helped make it happen.

Consider Germany. Pick up almost any Reuters or Associated Press story 
about Alternative für Deutschland and you do not merely encounter the 
party’s name. You encounter “the far-right Alternative for Germany.” 
Again and again. Reuters used the formulation this month while reporting 
that AfD is polling around 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in 
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The label arrives before readers learn what the 
party actually proposes.

Think about what that language tells an American reader before he or she 
learns anything else about the party. Germany. Far right. Rising 
rapidly. You do not need a degree in neurolinguistic programming to 
understand the association being planted. AfD becomes associated first 
with extremism, and only afterward with policy.

When Reuters calls a political party “far-right” in virtually every 
article, most readers are not reaching for Cas Mudde’s academic 
definition of the European populist radical right. They hear something 
much simpler: extremist.

And then something remarkable happens. Policies that would have been 
recognizably conservative, or even mainstream, within living memory now 
serve as evidence for the label. Now, policies such as reducing mass 
immigration, deporting people who are in the country illegally, 
protecting the traditional family, restoring nuclear power, resisting 
further transfer of national sovereignty to the European Union, 
preserving German culture, and putting German national interests first 
all become “far-right.”


Again, proportionality matters. Journalism is not obligated to pretend 
that every fringe theory has equal evidentiary support. But who decides 
when a political view no longer deserves equal coverage? The reporter? 
The editor? The owner? The journalism professor? The NGO that has 
labeled an organization extremist? The government agency supplying the 
reporter with information?

This becomes particularly dangerous when journalists overwhelmingly 
inhabit the same political, educational and cultural ecosystem. They 
cease to recognize their worldview as a worldview. It simply becomes 
reality. Everyone else has an ideology. They have facts.

Two events happened that the transatlantic political and media 
establishment clearly did not expect: Brexit and Donald Trump. Millions 
of ordinary people rejected policies endorsed by nearly every 
prestigious institution available to instruct them. The newspapers told 
them. The economists told them. The universities told them. The 
celebrities told them. The NGOs told them. The intelligence 
establishment told them. The European establishment told them.

And the voters said no.

That should have produced a period of intense institutional 
introspection. Why don’t these people believe us? Why don’t they want 
what we are selling? What are we missing?

Instead, much of the establishment settled on another explanation. The 
voters had been manipulated. Russian disinformation. Facebook. Cambridge 
Analytica. Fake news. Misinformation. Disinformation. Malinformation. 
Algorithms. Populism. Extremism.

Suddenly, the problem was not that citizens had looked at establishment 
policies and rejected them. The problem was that citizens had been 
exposed to the wrong information.

This distinction matters enormously. Once the political problem is 
defined as bad information causing bad democratic choices, information 
control begins to look like defending democracy. Journalists become 
natural partners in the project.

The change in language is impossible to miss. Protecting democracy 
increasingly came to mean protecting institutions from the choices 
voters might make. There is a rather large philosophical problem hiding 
in there.


The purpose of a free press is not to ensure that citizens reach the 
correct political conclusion. It is to give citizens the information 
they require to reach their own conclusions.

If you believe people are entitled to vote only after receiving 
information curated to produce an acceptable result, then what you 
actually believe in is something quite different. You believe in managed 
democracy.

The institutions decide the acceptable boundaries. The media enforce 
them. The fact-checkers police them. The algorithms amplify them. The 
public gets to choose from what remains. Then everyone congratulates 
themselves for having saved democracy.

https://www.malone.news/p/saving-democracy-from-democracy