What does journalism mean to you? More precisely, what does “journalism” mean to you, as a word?
Probably it has more to do with abstract ideas about civics and movies about Watergate than about “journals” in any literal way. If you look into the history of how people talk about the trade, there’s a lot of jargon to parse and a rash of clichés that are supposed to define what the thing is.
Good journalists take the world seriously and themselves unseriously, and the not-so-good journalists do the reverse and encourage readers to do the same. These two faces of the popular understanding of journalism are recorded in how we talk about it and teach it. There are ready-baked clichés one learns as a young journalist to explain the responsibility of the press. There’s the idea of ”speaking truth to power,” of course. And the chiasmus, “comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable.” The Atlantic promises to be “of no party or clique.” The Washington Post changed its motto after 2016 to the incomprehensibly self-aggrandizing and emo “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as though without that paper, the entire idea of majoritarian self-government falls apart.
But nothing holds a candle to the highfalutin’ language surrounding the New York Times. There’s its Grey Lady nickname, its “paper of record” status, and its absurd claim to feature “all the news that’s fit to print.” As if all of this sloganing were not enough to imbue the idea of journalism with self-regard, we have also jettisoned that venerable chestnut of editorial advice, “Don’t make yourself the story.” Time’s person of the year was “The Guardians” — aka journalists under threat worldwide.
All of this contributed to a climate in which the supposed media-friendly side of the political aisle pitched a fit about a New York Times headline, released online before its next-morning print run, reading “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.” Even if you don’t believe Trump was being genuine in his speech, it’s not a literally inaccurate headline. But what happened next bespeaks a change in what “journalism” means to many Times readers. The comfortable, in their online masses, rose up and afflicted the Times with such a clamor of complaints that the “paper of record,” well, changed the record. Twice. They updated their own headline that had passed through editorial scrutiny.
If journalism means anything, it means an editorial process that will sometimes result in telling people things they don’t want to hear, and it means speaking to the readers rather than merely pandering to them. But a certain type of Times reader sees the paper as belonging to them, rather than informing them. For them, encountering disagreeable things in that paper is less like hearing someone say something you disagree with and more like hearing your church flipped its position on a core theological issue. It’s no coincidence that, upon being elevated to Times executive editor, Jill Abramson in 2011 remarked, “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” Some people want a paper of record. Others need to hear their own opinions parroted back in print so badly that what they crave is a paper of broken record. It’s bad religion, and it’s no journalism at all.
