CNN’s Reliable Sources featured a number of notable claims this week from guests regarding the state and purpose of contemporary journalism. President Donald Trump was also cast by virtually all guests as uniquely mendacious relative to his predecessors, supposedly placing journalists in a historically unprecedented situation.
Charles Blow of The New York Times said the coin of the news media realm is veracity:
“Everyone in journalism, because what our business is, is truth. Without truth, without credibility, we don’t have anything to sell. There is no business. There is no journalism enterprise without truth. And when we see that the truth itself is being attacked, then we must defend the truth from whomever.”
Blow accused Trump of regularly undermining the truth: “We have to continuously say that the President is actually lying, and that is an assault on the truth itself.”
Watch Blow’s remarks below.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of neo-Marxist news outlet The Nation, implied that the news media landscape was overly objective and non-partisan in its conduct (emphasis added):
“Media malpractice played a role [in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency]. We need to find a way now to restore a blueprint of integrity and independence and trust in the media… The role of the journalist should be to cover fearlessly, fairly, accurately, and remind people why the media is called the Fourth Estate. There’s a role we play.
Trump has debased our political sphere and discourse with trafficking in conspiracy theories and his use of Twitter. We should cover his tweets less. It degrades and debases our work… He wants to destroy the infrastructure of democracy and media information… I think you need to jettison Olympian neutrality.“
Watch vanden Heuvel’s comments below.
Brian Stelter, himself an alumnus of The New York Times and current host of Reliable Sources, asked professor of communication Kathleen Hall Jamieson if journalism was somehow damaged by Trump’s presidency (emphasis added):
“Kathleen, how do you view this from the perspective of a communications professor. Does Trump essentially break journalism by saying something that’s outlandish, that has no evidence backing it up, and then calls in journalists to report on it like it’s any other claim by any other president?”
Watch Stelter’s inquiry below.
Jamieson praised left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets such as The New York Times for inserting phrases such as “without evidence” into its headlines regarding the president’s allegations of the Obama administration improperly surveilling Trump Tower’s communications.
Despite presenting himself as an objective and non-partisan analyst of the news media, Stelter regularly ignores and denies widespread left-wing and partisan Democrat political biases across his industry.
Last month, Michael Wolff of The Hollywood Reporter warned Stelter against his weekly sermonizing advocacy on behalf of the “virtues of the media.” He described Stelter as regularly bordering on becoming “quite a ridiculous figure” during his weekly monologues on Reliable Sources.
Stelter recites the following introduction for every episode of Reliable Sources: “This is our weekly look at the story behind the story. About how the media really works, about how the news gets made.”
CNN presents itself as an objective and non-partisan news media outlet. It markets itself in its promotional materials as “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
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