Thursday's postcard, and Ari Melber's surprising guest

March 16, 2023

Natural monuments of basalt pillars in the scablands south of Ewan, WA

How journalism ethics became a casualty in the war against truth, and democracy

A month ago, I started writing here about the stunning (though not surprising) corruption inside Fox News coming to light in the Dominion lawsuit discovery. I characterized the story as a “runaway truck of lies.”

The details that have emerged in the weeks since only add to the emphasis. It’s a real problem when perhaps the most influential and profitable media outlet on the planet becomes corrupted to its core, so much so that it insists on lying to its audience in order to fulfill its central purposes: greed and power.

One reason I return to this horrifying story is that it reverberates with my experience. I started work as a journalist when I was a teenager in large part because I come from a line of journalists on my mother’s side. I have national awards for my work, but the most important decisions I’ve made are resignations—leaving jobs rather than compromising ethics, and fighting, sometimes to exasperation, to protect the integrity of the reporting process. I’m not alone in this, my partners and peers all have their own stories about the tension between the journalism and the power/money dynamics that affect publishing.

The Fox News scandal, by its extremes, puts the major weakness in a spotlight. Compliance with journalism ethics is merely voluntary.

We legislate and license so many other things that are important for public safety and civic well-being. Yet journalism is not regulated. But for rarely-filed civil claims (like Dominion’s defamation suit) we’re on the honor system. A sharp contrast embedded in the Fox disaster is that many of the lawyers who appeared on the network to spread lies about the 2020 election are facing suspensions and other professional sanctions —including disbarment—for lying. Not so the hosts who invited them on Fox air to spread what the hosts and their producers knew to be false. The Fox talent not only avoided censure, they got richer.

This flies in the face of how we like to believe a progressive, civil society operates. I was thinking, last night, of the Challenger disaster—the space shuttle that tragically blew up shortly after launching from Cape Canaveral 37 years ago, killing seven astronauts including the New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Of course we would get to the bottom of that, and we did, with a high-profile commission and the nation’s most famous physicist, Richard Feynman, famously demonstrating to a live TV audience why the O-ring on the right solid rocket booster failed, causing the explosion. We expect this. When even small planes go down, the National Transportation Safety Board investigates and, if the problem is discernible, it gets fixed, by official mandate.

That’s not true in journalism. Because of the broad First Amendment protections securing freedom of the press, you don’t need a license to be a journalist, or to be a publisher. To return to my runaway truck analogy, the brakes on the process—to encourage fairness, probity, accountability—are only professional guidelines and compacts, such as the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. They’re good rules, and they help reporters and editors stand their ground to help ensure accuracy and ward off pressures to kill or skew important stories.

Yet, if it wasn’t clear earlier, it’s clear now: the voluntary approach to journalistic standards is just not good enough to protect our democracy. Not any more.

Fox keeps proving that. What continues to emerge in the Dominion filings—including the deposition of Fox’s founder and hands-on leader Rupert Murdoch—is that Fox is in a long-term, power/money/political partnership with the Republican Party, where coverage is skewed and favors beyond journalism are extended to help advance partisan interests in elections. It is highly unethical, and presently perfectly legal.

Last week, the top-rated Fox prime time host, Tucker Carlson, (with help from GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who supplied Carlson with thousands of hours of surveillance video from the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol) began airing the latest chapter in his bizarre contention that the insurrection was not really an insurrection but a relatively peaceful event. It was quickly denounced by, among others, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.

You would expect the torrent of criticism that followed from Democrats, print pundits, and from hosts at MSNBC, the cable network that many regard as the liberal alternative to Fox News. Yet, Ari Melber, the MSNBC legal analyst did a remarkable thing. He brought in Tucker Carlson. Not the Tucker Carlson of today, but via videotape the Tucker Carlson of a decade ago who once denounced and warned about the lack of institutional commitment to accuracy in right-wing media like Fox. It’s truly astonishing footage—including the younger Carlson standing up to a hostile audience of conservatives to decry the lack of editorial standards at Fox et al. You can watch it here.

As media scholar Nicole Hemmer points out—the rise of right-wing media in the U.S. arrived with a fundamentally different mission than the traditional norm of American journalism. The agenda is to promote conservative policies. It’s not about trying to be objective, because that’s not the purpose. It’s purpose is to actually push back on non-partisan journalism, to provide a partisan counter-narrative. You start with the message you want to deliver, and cherry pick the facts to try to support it. It’s actually the reverse of journalism, a fraud, and it fueled the trend toward catering to an audience that tunes in for what it wants to hear, and wishes to believe.

For a century, now, we’ve held onto the dream that the ownership of American and western media, as a whole, would be morally and ethically beneficent—that we could rely upon them to police themselves. But it’s clearly not working now. If anything the trend is in a worse direction— toward more corporate and hedge fund ownership of journalism outlets. It will increasingly squeeze good editors and good journalists out of the profession.

I can’t prove it, but I doubt the January 6th insurrection would have happened without Fox News knowingly promoting the lies that the election was stolen. The insurrection nearly succeeded, and with the leader of the rebellion—Donald Trump—leading in early polls to be the GOP candidate for President in 2024, we’re not out of the woods. Not yet.

It’s possible that the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit will make a difference. We’ll see. If they do it will only be because the leaders and abettors of the coup attempt defamed a private entity large enough to bring a civil suit to seek redress. Even if the sanctions—with punitive damages— exceed the $1.6 billion sought, I doubt it will end Fox News, or even put a dent in its modus operandi.

That’s not much consolation for Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the two Georgia election workers defamed by Donald Trump and his lawyer side-kick Rudy Giuliani. The two women were targeted, by name, with false accusations that they were professional vote stealers working to divert Trump votes to Biden. The result is that they were mercilessly hounded and threatened, often with racial slurs, by Trump supporters.

There is no federal criminal statute against defamation. There should be. Federal prosecutors should be able to bring criminal charges to protect people—including valuable public servants who are only doing their jobs—against malicious defamation like that to which Ms. Freeman and her daughter were subjected.

That’s a simple thing we could do. The harder mission is to re-instill journalism ethics and create new media platforms with ethical moorings that are financially viable and publicly accountable. Your ideas on that are most welcome.

—tjc