Don’t Be Neutral, Be Truthful
The Evolution of the American Press Under Autocracy
My father was a journalist. My mother was an activist. It made for interesting dinner table conversations when I was growing up.
My father was the young copy editor who, in 1971, was left in charge of the New York Times’ Foreign Desk while his superiors—the senior editors in charge of both foreign and domestic news—were meeting behind closed doors to put together what turned out to be The Pentagon Papers. He did a great job holding down the fort, and his long-term career at the Times was thereafter assured. But that was Dad’s closest brush with anything resembling activism.
Meanwhile, my mother was taking my brother and me along with her to civil rights marches, anti-war demonstrations, and door-to-door canvassing for progressive political candidates. My father never joined us, claiming that he couldn’t take a stand on the important issues of the day because as a journalist (or what was then called “a newspaperman,” at a time when there were very few women in the newsroom), he had to maintain strict neutrality.
Listening to Jim Acosta today, in a conversation with Norm Eisen, I was reminded of how even as a child, that stance struck me as a cop-out.
Jim Acosta is the CNN anchor and former White House correspondent who became an object of Trump’s ire during Trump 1.0 when he dared to press Trump on his many lies. (I don’t think Trump ever called Acosta “nasty,” however; that was, and is, reserved for uppity women, especially women of color, who dare to try to hold Trump to account.) Now Acosta has stepped down from CNN, after the network essentially exiled him to a midnight to 2:00 a.m. “graveyard shift”.
Like many others, Acosta has found a new home here on Substack, which is quickly becoming a safe harbor for independent journalism and scholarship.
In his live Substack video with Eisen, Acosta quoted the great Christiane Amanpour, who in her four decades as a celebrated journalist and war reporter, always abided by the credo that a journalist’s job is to be truthful, not neutral. Indeed, my brother and I are fond of saying, about our father’s former employer, that it’s not our father’s New York Times. In the wake of the Times’ support of the Iraq war, its relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails, and its failure to call out Trump’s lies in both campaign 1.0 and campaign 2.0, the Times has a lot of blood on its hands—all in the name of purporting to maintain some kind of “neutrality.”
I call bullshit on that definition of neutrality
You can’t speak truth to power if those in power can crush the truth.
As Acosta says in the video linked above, “There are not two sides of a story when it comes to what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes you just have to call it out. There is such a thing as the truth…. You can’t speak truth to power if those in power can crush the truth. And that is why it is incumbent upon us … to insist on the truth…. We are not going to give into lies in this country. It doesn’t matter how big [Trump’s] megaphone is … there is still ‘we the people.’ And we the people demand the truth. Full stop.”
In his farewell remarks before leaving CNN, Acosta said, “It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I have always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account…. Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth, and to hope.”
Wise words.