What do words like objectivity and impartiality even mean any longer?
Wallace is transgender, and asserted, “Obviously, I can’t be neutral or centrist in a debate over my own humanity. The idea that I don’t have a right to exist is not an opinion, it is a falsehood.”
“The people consuming news are savvy. They know that news is curated and complex; that the editorial choice of what to report and how to report it is always a subjective one; that facts are real, but so are priorities and perspective.”
Last Wednesday, Wallace, in New York, talked by phone with his managing editor and executive producer in Los Angeles; they told him to take the post down and suspended him. On Friday he e-mailed them to say he’d had a change of heart: he didn’t think his post said anything that couldn’t be said on Marketplace, so he was putting it up again. So Deborah Clark, Marketplace‘s senior vice president and general manager, flew to New York, and on Monday, she fired him.
These are commonplace sentiments whose practicality has long been questioned by journalists. Since Donald Trump rode into town, it hasn’t been clear that they provide any guidance at all. In a world of facts, fake facts, and alternative facts, does a reporter’s preference for actual facts betray his or her political views? Sorry to say, but it appears that sometimes it does. And when a statement is manifestly untrue, does a reporter suffer a lapse of objectivity in calling it false or even a flat-out lie? In mounting numbers, reporters are recoiling from the deceit of calling it anything but.“What Lewis was arguing for,” Worley wrote, rising to his defense, “was an ethics of courage in journalism: Don’t be cowed by people who are brazenly full of shit, as the Trump regime is—and this is not an opinion but a richly, empirically verifiable fact.”
