Re: Advocacy journalism

On 8/16/26 5:37 PM, Wilson 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.
> 
> https://www.malone.news/p/saving-democracy-from-democracy
> 

trump is the swamp you stupid retard and way to post advocacy journalism 
pretending it's not advocacy journalism

-- 
hi, i'm nick!
let's end war 🙃