Earlier today, Dan Gillmor, whom I admire and respect a great deal, tweeted the following: “If I ran a news org and 46 percent of audience believed a lie, it would be a mission to make them know the truth” and provided a reference to Steve Benen’s “Confusion-based rage” piece for the Washington Monthly. Benen’s article was a response to Denis Boyles’s “We Are All French” in the National Review questioning the credulity of President Obama’s claim to have cut the taxes for 95% of working families in the US and analysis of a CBS News poll finding that 46 percent of the Tea Party supporters believe taxes to be the same and 44 percent believing taxes have gone up.
Gillmor’s tweet, “to make them know the truth,” took my breath away. Literally.
So I tweeted back: “Really? You’d make them know the truth? Journalism or evangelism? Thin ice methinks, very thin.” Gillmor and I ping-ponged comments back and forth a couple rounds and it dropped.
But this “make them know the truth” stuff is important. Just who’s truth are we talking about here? Yours? Mine? Theirs? Thanks, but no; I’m capable of thinking for myself and I’m almost always more comfortable with my truth than yours. That’s not the job of journalism. Journalism’s job is to report. Accurately. And to call bullshit when seen, even if it means—especially when it means—calling out individuals when they lie. They used to call that speaking truth to power. Journalists, for the most part, don’t do much of it any more and would be well served by following the Quakers’ lead.
To be clear, Obama did, in fact, lower the federal taxes for most US citizens. But the cuts were small—less than US$15 per week for the average worker—and in many cases offset by rising state taxes. To be even clearer, I’d gladly support higher federal and state taxes proportional to the positions on which Obama campaigned and was elected. Except Afghanistan.
At the same time though, we need to agree that journalists of every stripe must return to reporting and calling bullshit when appropriate. But please, leave the evangelism to the evangelists.
