Re: Advocacy journalism

On Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:28:57 -0700, dart200
<[email protected]> wrote:

>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

Ancient rightie trick.  Accuse the left of what the right itself is
doing.  And doing more effectively.
-- 
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