Media: Rush NOT to Judgement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xoqddL0zxw&app=desktop

On February 21, 2019, Fox News ran a segment entitled “Rushing to Judgement,” in which Host Sean Hannity declared: “According to the mainstream media, all Trump supporters are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — we’re all monsters.”

The segment was about stories the mainstream media had gotten wrong because journalists had rushed to judgment in two specific cases: 1. The alleged homophobic racist hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett (police now accuse him of staging the attack to make it look like he was the victim). 2. The media outrage at the video of Covington student Nicholas Sandmann, wearing a red MAGA hat standing close and smiling in the face of Native American activist Nathan Phillips (much initial coverage focused on the teen’s ‘smirk,’ and alleged disrespect towards Phillips). Indeed, in both cases the media quickly crafted a narrative of racial prejudice that turned out to be unfounded.

Hannity, however, paltered in the segment, making a few isolated but valid cases of rushing to judgement appear to be widespread abuses: “Time after time this mob get it wrong,” he told Fox viewers. “The media and their friends on the left are always happy to besmirch, smear and slander anyone, as long as it fits into their divisive political narrative. Now, this has been the case for decades, but it has never been this bad.”

“Journalism in this country is dead,” he added in a subsequent commentary.

Hannity’s own false narrative of widespread inaccuracy in news reporting was bolstered by one of his guests on the segment, former CBS journalist Laura Logan, who claimed “85% of journalists are registered Democrats. That’s just a fact, right? I always joke 14 percent are too lazy to register, and maybe one percent on the right.” She named no source for those numbers. The Indiana School of Journalism contradicts her assertion in their 2014 Survey of 1,028 journalists, whichfound 28% were registered Democrats, 7% Republican, and 50.2% described themselves as independents (“The American Journalist in the Digital Age: Key Findings,” School of Journalism, Indiana University. of Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver, 2014). While this shows a clear leftward leaning in the mainstream media, it is nowhere near as universal as claimed.

The charge of liberal media bias contains an implicit assumption that a journalist who “leans left” would therefore be motivated to cover the news in a way that benefits Democrats. According to the right-leaning Investor’s Daily Business: “The profound leftward ideological bias of the Big Media is the main reason why America now seems saturated with ‘fake news.’ Journalists, besotted with their own ideology, are no longer able to recognize their own bias (“Media Bias: Pretty Much All Of Journalism Now Leans Left, Study Shows,” November 16, 2018).

Of course, the craft of neutral reporting is Journalism 101. Neutral reporting is what gives the mainstream media, the Fourth Estate, the roles of referee and watchdog in democracy. These vital roles are undermined when reporters rush to judgement and their errors then get amplified by critics on the right. When Hannity says “Journalism in this country is dead,” the implication is the ref is sidelined and the watchdog neutered. So who is left to call out post-truth politicians when they lie to us?

What’s the lesson here for the mainstream media?

Rush NOT to judgement.

Journalists must become more conscious of their own liberal bias, especially when a story breaks that seems to fit a certain political narrative. Failure to determine the relevant facts before publishing is no longer just an individual lapse: it feeds the right-wing narrative that they are all “fake news.”

So reporters, please take the lesson of the Jussie Swollett hoax to heart, and heed with some humility the subsequent scolding of Fox News pundits. In the words of Lauren DeBellis Appell, from a Fox News opinion article (February 23, 2019): “The media put themselves on a higher pedestal than the rest of us. Now it’s time they raise their standards to match.”

Tim Ward is co-author of The Master Communicator’s Handbook.