Thoughts on the Munk Media Debate

The recent Munk debate on whether the mainstream media can be trusted was, in my view, a missed opportunity. Despite the participation of four seasoned journalists from across the political spectrum, all of whom have reflected on and written about the media, what ought to have been an insightful discussion often descended into nitpicking about news coverage of U.S. politics, or petty point scoring and vindictive asides. What I would like to do here is focus on what I consider to be certain weaknesses in the argument of Matt Taibbi and Douglas “Doug” Murray in attacking the mainstream media; not because I particularly want to defend the media with respect to the cases they raise, but because I think their framing of the debate served to obscure what I take to be a central issue when it comes to trust in the mainstream media: the role of journalism in civil society.

In arguing for the position that the mainstream media cannot be trusted, Taibbi and Murray had a simple and effective line of attack: the mainstream media have made a number of significant mistakes over the years in covering American politics and national security (the debate was almost entirely U.S.-centric), and that these mistakes were the result of systemic political bias. This line was effective not because Taibbi and Murray proved their thesis — Michelle Goldberg on the opposing side did a good job of showing that many of their examples were neither obvious mistakes by the press nor obviously the result of bias — but because these two elements, error and bias, are inevitable features of the media in general. Even without showing that the bias they alleged was systemic across the mainstream media, let alone that it was as skewed towards the left as they made out, Taibbi and Murray had little trouble winning the audience over to their position.

The problem is that by this standard, no media, mainstream or otherwise, ought to be trusted. No media can avoid the problems of error and bias. I think Taibbi tried to anticipate this point (which as it turned out, no one thought to make) by suggesting in his opening remarks that there was a time when the media was largely free from political bias and the errors that flow from them. He cited polling which showed that Walter Cronkite elicited the trust of a majority of the American public in the 70s, a result that couldn’t be replicated in today’s “bifurcated” media environment. This trust, Taibbi argues, was a result of the fact that journalists didn’t take sides. Malcolm Gladwell, arguing against Taibbi and Murray, was quick to point out just how prejudiced this golden age of journalism really was. (Although Gladwell kept referring to the 1950s, he was clearly talking about 20th C. American news media up until the 1980s or so). It was a time when journalists were almost entirely white and male, and the opinions of minority groups were rarely given due consideration. What we call civil society was very narrowly defined with respect to race, gender and class during this period. Unfortunately, Gladwell went on to suggest (repeatedly and without foundation) that Taibbi was nostalgic for the discriminatory environment of that era, an absurd and defamatory allegation which completely distracted from the significance of this critique.

Taibbi did not address the matter of the exclusive nature of civil society during the Cronkite era, which is understandable given the way Gladwell decided to personalize the point. Pursuing this idea, however, was the key to breaking through the reductive framing of the topic imposed by Taibbi and Murray. For as soon as one acknowledges that journalists are participants in civil society, and that it is perfectly legitimate for them to pursue questions of exclusion and injustice, and to defend democracy against those forces which threaten it, then the notion that journalists ought to be judged simply on how accurately they observe and report the facts and nothing else goes out the window. (Taibbi goes so far as to compare journalists to scientists in a laboratory attempting to reproduce results.) This isn’t to deny the importance of objectivity, which of course is fundamental to the journalistic enterprise. But this demand has to be understood within the context of the civil role of journalism, and its interest (bias if you will) in the ideals of civil society. Both Goldberg and Gladwell would occasionally gesture towards this broader concern, e.g. Gladwell quoted Dunne that the job of the newspaper was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but it was too little too late.

The first point to make in rectifying this is that Taibbi’s early attempt to draw a hard and fast line between “facts” and “narrative” is hopelessly naive, and I’m surprised nobody jumped on it. Indeed, it was undermined almost immediately by Taibbi’s own attempt to illustrate what a concern with the facts would look like, namely whether it was Republicans or Democrats (or both) to blame for some outcome. “Blame” of course implies a moral judgment. It is something that entirely depends on constructing a narrative in order to make sense of the facts from a moral point of view. Taibbi’s entire journalistic career, both as a “mainstream” and “independent” journalist, has been about constructing narratives highlighting injustice and corruption, most famously characterising Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

Later in the debate Taibbi talks pejoratively about “selecting the facts to fit the narrative.” Now, as a general principle, the news media can’t be anything but selective regarding the facts, because it isn’t possible to present all the facts on an issue. The media constructs its own reality as it were; not because there is no such thing as an independent reality, or the media doesn’t care about objectivity, but because reality is too complex to be presented as such (“the map is not the territory”). At the same time, this reduction of complexity is also influenced by the imperatives of the news market, which influence the selection of facts even before these decisions come before editorial boards or is subject to the political preferences of journalists. These imperatives include the need for novelty or surprise, the preference for conflict and scandal, and so on. Goldberg makes this point (specifically that the more surprising the story, the more likely it will get printed) when challenging Taibbi’s and Murray’s claim that the mainstream media is guided primarily by political considerations.

Does it matter whether the press gets things right? Of course it does. The professional norms and procedures which exist within the mainstream media, emphasised by Gladwell in his opening remarks, as well as the legal and reputational consequences of getting things wrong, ensure that this remains a requirement. But listening carefully, most of the examples cited by Taibbi and Murray of the media’s failings are not cases of the media getting facts wrong, but of choosing to report certain facts rather than others. It is the choice of narrative that they primarily object to, rather than the veracity of what is being reported.

The issue, then, isn’t whether facts ought to fit a narrative. Facts have to be made sense of and selected out of all the possible facts. The issue is whose interests does that narrative serve. Is it for the good of society as whole, according to the civil ideals of democracy, freedom, equality and justice? Or is it in the service of narrow institutional or elite interests? The issue of media ownership was brought up. It is worth noting that historically, commercial success allowed the press to become more independent, not less, with respect to their owners and institutional readers. This in turn allowed them to facilitate the emergence of a civil sphere independent of the economy and the state. Today the mainstream media derives its legitimacy from its claim to represent the interests of civil society. And far from this being a controversial point, I don’t think any of the participants in the debate would actually dispute this. Taibbi in effect defines the mainstream media in these terms, as the media which ought to be for the widest possible audience, even as he argues that the “bifurcation” or segmentation of the media market has undermined the mainstream’s capacity and willingness to represent civil society. Even Murray, the most conservative of those on stage, invokes the moral authority of civil society when he talks about the fundamental importance of the mainstream media to liberal democracies.

What their misleading emphasis on “facts” obscures is that the real dispute, what was really at stake in this debate, is whether the political right’s preferred narrative around issues such as Brexit, the pandemic, the so-called Canadian truckers’ protest, Trump’s presidential campaign and Hunter Biden’s laptop (all examples specifically raised by Taibbi and Murray in the debate) deserve special treatment, either in the sense that the right’s viewpoint genuinely represents the interests of civil society against elite interests, as Taibbi and Murray frequently imply; or to the contrary, whether they represent threats to civil society itself, as the mainstream media’s treatment of it at times seemed to suggest. Murray for one argues that it is illegitimate for the press to marginalise these right-wing narratives, and that doing so betrays the mainstream media’s political bias. Taibbi is a little more circumspect, arguing that in the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the media isn’t obliged to cover it, but that the narrative the press offered instead represented the interests of the national security apparatus and Democratic political elites. The question of which narrative best serve the interests of civil society is something that is certainly worth raising and arguing about. What I object to is that, rather than having a debate about the right’s interpretation of these issues on its merits, Taibbi and Murray seem to think it is not up to the mainstream media to decide what counts as civil or uncivil. That rejecting certain narratives in favour of others is a betrayal of trust. But that is absurd. The mainstream media has no obligation to promote the views of uncivil, let alone anti-civil, actors.

The only reason Taibbi is able to present the Cronkite era as apparently neutral with respect to questions of civil legitimacy is that, as Gladwell points out, civil society at that time was so narrowly construed that its interests, as represented by a narrow segment of society, and those of institutional elites were closely aligned. It was possible for a single man to embody the social good because civil society quite literally looked like him. Today, in an age of massive wealth disparity, growing ecological pressures, and the expansion of civil society through multiculturalism, the question of which narratives serve civil society and which pose a threat are more contested than ever. Taibbi’s claim that the bifurcation of the media today is the result of commercial decisions is too simple.

Should we trust the mainstream media? In recent years, we have seen a series of social crises such as the Global Financial Crisis, child abuse in the Catholic church, sexual harassment in the workplace, and so on, in which the mainstream press played a central role in highlighting deep-seated and ongoing injustices which had been protected from scrutiny by institutional boundaries. The news media, together with other actors in civil society such as activists, lawyers and politicians, helped spearhead efforts to successfully challenge the elite interests which had prevented these injustices from being addressed.* The idea that the press is untrustworthy merely because it takes sides in these conflicts, to claim that it ought to act merely as neutral observer, is to completely misrepresent the role of the mainstream media in a liberal democratic society.

*See Jeffrey Alexander’s What Makes a Social Crisis?