This morning I saw a post on LinkedIn about how journalists “speak truth to power” — which you hear from time to time. It made me wonder if that’s part of the cause of the mess in journalism today.
Think of it this way: what is the journalist’s orientation and mission? Is it …
(1) to educate / change / challenge those in power, or is it
(2) to inform subscribers about what’s going on in the world?
Maybe the grandiosity of #1 is leading journalists astray — to have agendas and messages, and to think of themselves as “fighting the power.” Maybe journalism would be better if they focused on telling us the truth and otherwise getting out of the way.
Sure it’s their job to speak truth to power. I don’t necessarily equate that with advocacy. There are all sorts of powers. Although the series was horrible in a way, the Narcos: Mexico season 3 had a story about some journalists at a paper in Tijuana that broke the story about how the general in charge of the drug war in Mexico was on the take from the Juarez cartel. A power might be a government official, or it might be a narco. In countries other than ours, speaking truth to power often has consequences–deadly consequences in Mexico.
Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. Was that speaking truth to power or not? If some corporation is polluting drinking water and people are getting sick, is it speaking truth to power to publish it? What if the employer is the biggest employer in town?
How many journalists at Fox can speak against Trump?
I bring up Fox, but ISTM that in our current situation, journalists are afraid of their audience. Fox can’t speak against Trump or Boebert, and MSNBC can’t speak against the so called left.
There’s certainly plenty of crappy stuff going on, and as I often say, power corrupts, and we have to have other powers to keep them in check. I’m not in any way denying that one role of media is to keep an eye on the people in power.
But consider two journalists. One of them goes to work thinking “my job is to speak truth to power,” and the other one goes to work thinking, “my job is to inform my readers of things that are important to them.” I prefer the second one. It includes keeping an eye on people in power, but it doesn’t have the same sort of holy zeal to it.
Ok, you have a preference for the second one, the one that says, “my job is to inform my readers of things that are important to them.”
I think journalists should do better than that. So, for Fox News that means waving the Trump flag and being the mouthpiece of the Republican Party.
And, so for MSNBC, if they get some good exclusive dirt on Biden, they should not publish it because it’s not what their viewers would want?
For that matter shouldn’t a politician go to work thinking “I’m going to promote policies that are in the interest of the people” and not “I’m going to fight the good fight”?
Yes.
What is going on in the world is often what people in power are trying to keep hidden. Hence the relevance of “speaking truth to power.”
Or to put it in a more colorful way: It is necessary to speak truth to power when power speaks falsehood to the powerless.
You can quote on that. 🙂