Re: Advocacy journalism

On Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:37:09 -0400, Wilson <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
>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.

The latest news from the far right advocacy journalism group.

>https://www.malone.news/p/saving-democracy-from-democracy
-- 
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away