The Intercept
By Glenn Greenwald
August 26, 2015
The
Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump,
recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human
beings residing in the U.S.
without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born
in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted
last week, “Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than the
wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese
descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical
police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11
explosion. And that’s to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments
that Trump’s advocacy of this plan, far before its
implementation, is predictably unleashing.
Jorge
Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant
from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Yesterday at a Trump press
conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration
views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking
without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to “sit down,” then
told him: “Go back to Univision.” When Ramos refused
to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically
removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos
returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two
mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump
about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: “This
is personal. … He’s talking about our parents, our friends, our kids
and our babies.”
One
might think that in a conflict between a journalist removed from a
press conference for asking questions and the politician who had him
removed, journalists would
side with their fellow journalist. Some are. But many American
journalists have seized on the incident to denounce Ramos for the crime
of having opinions and even suggesting that he’s not really acting as a
journalist at all.
Politico’s
political reporter Marc Caputo unleashed a Twitter rant this morning
against Ramos. “This is bias: taking the news personally, explicitly
advocating an agenda,”
he began. Then: “Trump can and should be pressed on this. Reporters can
do this without being activists” and “some reporters still try to
approach their stories fairly & decently. & doing so does not
prevent good reporting.” Not only did Ramos not do journalism,
Caputo argued, but he actually ruins journalism: “My issue is his
reporting is imbued with take-it-personally bias. . . . we fend off
phony bias allegations & Ramos only helps to wrongly justify them. .
. .One can ask and report without the bias. I’ve done
it for years & will continue 2 do so.”
A
Washington Post article about the incident actually equated the two
figures, beginning with the headline: “Jorge Ramos is a conflict junkie,
just like his latest target:
Donald Trump.” The article twice suggested that Ramos’ behavior was
something other than journalism, claiming that his advocacy of
immigration reform “blurred the line between journalist and activist”
and that “by owning the issue of immigration, Ramos has
also blurred the line between journalist and activist.” That Ramos was
acting more as an “activist” than a “journalist” was a commonly
expressed criticism among media elites this morning.
Here
we find, yet again, the enforcement of unwritten, very recent,
distinctively corporatized rules of supposed “neutrality” and faux
objectivity which all Real Journalists
must obey, upon pain of being expelled from the profession. A Good
Journalist must pretend they have no opinions, feign utter indifference
to the outcome of political debates, never take any sides, be utterly
devoid of any human connection to or passion for
the issues they cover, and most of all, have no role to play whatsoever
in opposing even the most extreme injustices.
Thus:
you do not call torture “torture” if the U.S. government falsely denies
that it is; you do not say that the chronic shooting of unarmed black
citizens by the police
is a major problem since not everyone agrees that it is; and you do not
object when a major presidential candidate stokes dangerous nativist
resentments while demanding mass deportation of millions of people.
These are the strictures that have utterly neutered
American journalism, drained it of its vitality and core purpose, and
ensured that it does little other than serve those who wield the
greatest power and have the highest interest in preserving the status
quo.
What
is more noble for a journalist to do: confront a dangerous, powerful
billionaire-demagogue spouting hatemongering nonsense about mass
deportation, or sit by quietly
and pretend to have no opinions on any of it and that “both sides” are
equally deserving of respect and have equal claims to validity? As Ramos
put it simply, in what should not even need to be said: “I’m a
reporter. My job is to ask questions. What’s ‘totally
out of line’ is to eject a reporter from a press conference for asking
questions.”
Indeed,
some of the most important and valuable moments in American journalism
have come from the nation’s most influential journalists rejecting this
cowardly demand
that they take no position, from Edward R. Murrow’s brave 1954
denunciation of McCarthyism to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 refusal to treat
the U.S. government’s lies about the Vietnam War as anything other than
what they were. Does anyone doubt that today’s neutrality-über-alles
journalists would denounce them as “activists” for inappropriately
“taking a side”?
As
Jack Shafer documented two years ago, crusading and “activist”
journalism is centuries old and has a very noble heritage. The notion
that journalists must be beacons
of opinion-free, passion-devoid, staid, impotent neutrality is an
extremely new one, the byproduct of the increasing corporatization of
American journalism. That’s not hard to understand: One of the supreme
values of large corporations is fear of offending
anyone, particularly those in power, since that’s bad for business. The
way that conflict-avoiding value is infused into the media outlets that
these corporations own is to inculcate their journalists that their
primary duty is to avoid offending anyone, especially
those who wield power, which above all means never taking a clear
position about anything, instead just serving as a mindless, uncritical
vessel for “both sides,” what NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has
dubbed “the view from nowhere.” Whatever else that
is, it is most certainly not a universal or long-standing principle of
how journalism should be conducted.
The
worst aspect of these journalists’ demands for “neutrality” is the
conceit that they are actually neutral, that they are themselves not
activists. To be lectured about
the need for journalistic neutrality by Politico of all places — the
ultimate and most loyal servant of the D.C. political and corporate
class — by itself illustrates what a rotten sham this claim is. I set
out my argument about this at length in my 2013 exchange
with Bill Keller and won’t repeat it all here; suffice to say, all
journalism is deeply subjective and serves some group’s interests. All
journalists constantly express opinions and present the world in
accordance with their deeply subjective biases — and
thus constantly serve one agenda or another — whether they honestly
admit doing so or dishonestly pretend they don’t.
Ultimately,
demands for “neutrality” and “objectivity” are little more than rules
designed to shield those with the greatest power from meaningful
challenge. As BuzzFeed’s
Adam Serwer insightfully put it this morning, “‘Objective’ reporters
were openly mocking Trump not that long ago, but Ramos has not reacted
to Trump’s poll numbers with appropriate deference . . . . Just a
reminder that what is considered objective reporting
is intimately tied to power or the perception of power.” Expressing
opinions that are in accord with, and which serve the interests of,
those who wield the greatest political and economic power is always
acceptable for the journalists who most tightly embrace
the pretense of “neutrality”; it’s only when an opinion constitutes
dissent or when it’s expressed with too little reverence for the most
powerful does it cross the line into “activism” and “bias.”
(Ramos’
supposed sin of being what the Post called a “conflict junkie” —
something that sounds to be nothing more than a derogatory way of
characterizing “adversary journalism”
— is even more ridiculous. Please spare me the tripe about how Ramos’
real sin was one of rudeness, that he failed to wait for explicit
permission from the Trumpian Strongman to speak. Aside from the
absurdity of viewing Victorian-era etiquette as some sort
of journalistic virtue, Trump’s vindictive war with Univision made it
unlikely he’d call on Ramos, and journalists don’t always need to be
“polite” to do their jobs.
Beyond
that, whether a reporter must be deferential to a politician is one of
those questions on which people shamelessly switch sides based on which
politician is being
treated rudely at the moment, as the past liberal protests over the
“rudeness” displayed to Obama by conservative journalists demonstrate.
That Ramos is not One of Them — Joe Scarborough appeared not even to
know who Ramos is and suggested he was just seeking
“15 minutes of fame,” despite Ramos’ having far greater influence and
fame than Scarborough could dream of having — clearly fueled the
journalistic resentment that Ramos’ behavior was out of line).
What
Ramos did here was pure journalism in its classic and most noble
expression: He aggressively confronted a politician wielding a
significant amount of power over some
pretty horrible things that the politician is doing and saying. As
usual when someone commits a real act of journalism aimed at the most
powerful in the U.S., those leading the charge against him are other
journalists, who so tellingly regard actual journalism
as a gauche and irreverent crime against those who wield the greatest
power and thus merit the greatest deference.
UPDATE:
Caputo, while noting that he disagrees with many of the views in this
article, objects to one phrase in particular and sets forth his
objection here. I quoted
and/or linked to all of his referenced statements and am happy to allow
readers to decide if that one phrase was accurate. I am quite convinced
it was and stand by it.
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