This is really good. And I have some thoughts about it -- thoughts that are, if possible, even more pessimistic than Jay's about the prospects for better political media.
First, I agree on the key point that "neutrality" has become a kind of tic for the press that allows it to be easily exploited. As the subhed of this post said: "Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible."
vox.com/policy-and-pol…
vox.com/policy-and-pol…
Journalism in a democracy can work only if it explicitly & purposefully abides by particular values: respect for truth, anti-authoritarianism, pro-democratic participation. It cannot be neutral toward those values & do its job properly; they make its job possible.
Jay makes a distinction between political acts/values and *politicized* acts/values. The latter is what we think of as partisanship -- preferring, and working for, particular parties or policies. The former is a broader category that includes the act of journalism itself.
As Jay says, there's nothing wrong with journalism being *political* -- in fact, there's no way to avoid it. Fealty to evidence & democracy are political values. But that's fine: those values apply to all parties & policies equally, so they are not *politicized*.
I understand the distinction. For a modern liberal democracy to work, it needs to have a bedrock of values that run deeper than any party or faction -- values that bind everyone equally. And every institution within it should hold those values as sacrosanct, transcendent.
That basic model (though idealized) describes political disputes that take place within a democracy. People have their differences, but they are all bound by the same rules & norms & it is the press's job to serve as referee, holding all parties to account on those rules & norms.
The problem is that we are currently drifting out of that context. We're not experiencing a dispute between two parties, both of which accept the premises of liberal democracy. One party is more & more openly rejecting those premises.
The zone of the politicized has metastasized. It has subsumed everything. The value of evidence & accuracy, the validity of majority rule & democratic participation -- it's all contested now, all politicized. On a Venn diagram, political & politicized now overlap.
If the press stands up for the values Jay laudably recommends -- citizen participation, evidence-based debate, anti-authoritarianism -- it will, in practice, put them on a side: against the party led by the guy who said to drink bleach. Those values are anathema to today's GOP.
In practice, journalism can not adhere to its fundamental, constitutive values without running headlong into a party that is abandoning those values at an accelerating pace. The same could be said of other institutions -- law, science, democratic politics itself.
Not just in journalism but more broadly, we've got to find some way past seeing paranoid anti-intellectualism, ethnocentrism, cruelty, and lawlessness as one side in a legitimate two-sided political debate. If democratic institutions remain neutral in that fight ...
... it's entirely possible that the crew running things will establish a durable & enduring autocratic regime enshrining minority white rule. They are moving in that direction, right in front of us. It could happen here. Free & fair journalism becomes impossible in that scenario.
Standing up for those values means learning to withstand the giant gaslighting machine conservatives have been building for decades. It means being more consciously committed to those values internally & thus steadier about them in the face of ref-working -- not such suckers.
I'm rambling on & need to stfu. Anyway, I know Jay knows all this and, rereading his post, I see he's exactly as pessimistic as me. Guess I just needed an excuse to vent. So, in conclusion, uh ... journalism is a land of contrasts. </fin>
