[jauntywundrkind]

Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.

The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.

[MarkusQ]

> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.

> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.

Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.

But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.

If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.

[amiga386]

Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions.

Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.

Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.

The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.

[alwa]

I guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem, anything important enough to have a constituency gets reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by somebody.

The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.

That, I think, is the loss.

[MarkusQ]

Sadly, this is true.

Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.