For the Record: What's Wrong With Journalism?

Via Santa Clara Univiersity.

Had an interesting back and forth with the artist formerly known as Thornton over a thing about journalism, whether we can manage to agree about it or not—where we do agree that "objectivity" and "impartiality" are bad ideas, but I insist it's not a bad thing for a newspaper to make an effort to be truthful, and he says look at the great old days when journalism knew what kind of business it was in and pleased its partisan readers and I say yeah and competed to help the imperalist swine start the Spanish-American war ("You supply the pictures, Mr. Pulitzer...") and so on:

The normative “should” as applied to for-profit ad platforms remains mysterious. https://t.co/aBhIGkC7VU

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) April 6, 2020

When it profits them to do so, sure.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) April 6, 2020

And I know WSJ makes more money for Murdochs than New York Post partly on its reputation for reliability in spite of the garbage on its op-ed page. Their readers love the op-ed page, but they base investment decisions on the news page.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 6, 2020

I don't know that NYTimes loses any money by these awful things it keeps doing, and I know they're deadly serious about "ethics", it's just that they have such a stupid and trivializing concept of what it is.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 6, 2020

That’s interesting.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) April 6, 2020

It was fun to get to that point, as it always is in a Twitter thread when you land more or less by chance on a quote that's going to make your point for you—I really wasn't expecting it.

You can make a commitment to do the news right, which in part means accurately, without doing pure "View From Nowhere", as Wall Street Journal and The Guardian both manage to do in their own ways without communicating, as The New York Times in particular does, that you hate your readers and will spare no effort in making them feel abnormal (neither normally rich like the incredible inhabitants of the Style section nor normally miserable like the members of the White Working Class in its breakfast spots), delusional (thinking it's a problem to have a criminal president), and horribly limited by ridiculous prejudices (acting as though it's an imposition to be treated to the opinions of David Brooks).

I don't think it's necessary for a new organization to be a profit-making enterprise in the first place; BBC has a really good financing model as a self-funding statutory entity that isn't concerned with profits at all. But I don't think it's wrong to make a profit either. I do believe that newspapers ought to be compelled by social pressure (not by government watchdogs), and maybe by their own foundational documents. like The Guardian, to be truthful. It's not impossible.