NBC’s Lester Holt is wrong: Journalists don’t do ‘truth’

On this Good Friday, perhaps a line from Pontius Pilate in the Good Friday epic Jesus Christ, Superstar helps explain the attitudinal errors now so common among today’s mainstream media.

Jesus says this to the Roman governor: “I look for truth, and find that I get damned.” To which, Pilate responds: “But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?”

That last line was a subversive camel’s nose under the tent of normative ethics — the philosophical position that some actions or attitudes are inherently, by their very nature, right, and some wrong. The post-modern “progressive” approach, the version voiced by Pilate, contradicts this idea frequently, with the hideous expression “my truth” (rather than merely “truth” or “the truth”) becoming commonplace, as if truth were merely a point of view.

Even for those of us who are traditionalists, though, “truth” in the indivisible sense is not something to be lightly determined. Because humans are fallible, we must take great care, often with searching inquiry, before we pronounce something to be “the truth.” Truth is not merely an opinion but a near-sacred constant – but because it is in the realm of the sacrosanct, we should hesitate to claim it, lest we are unintentionally misguided or mistaken.

With that in mind, cue Lester Holt, the anchor of NBC Nightly News. Given the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award this week, Holt made the deliberately provocative statement in his acceptance speech that “fairness is overrated.” He went on to explain that what he meant was that the supposed “fairness” of giving equal time and weight to all sides sometimes would entail giving equal time to claims or beliefs that are demonstrably false.

“Our duty is to be fair to the truth,” he said, emphasizing the word. And, later: “Regard for truth must regain a foothold in our society, so that we can weather the storm of tomorrow’s calamities, tomorrow’s pandemics.”

He said that in the context of asserting that it is part of the media’s job to “help our audiences understand what our role [the role of journalists] is in a healthy democracy.”

What Holt really was doing was saying that the media should be the arbiters of truth. But that’s wrong. Especially because so many within that selfsame media are so intent on the idea that there is a “my truth” and a “your truth,” what this means in practice is that the media herd takes its own “truth” and attempts to make it conventional wisdom. From there, it further confuses “its truth” for the truth — the real, unalterable kind.

Holt is wrong. The journalist’s job is not to determine what the truth is, in the ideal sense. The journalist’s job — or at least the “straight news” journalist’s job, the one that is not supposed to represent the reporter’s opinion — is to present accurate facts with evidence. Facts and truth are not the same things. Reporters should be tradesmen in the trenches relaying facts, within reasonable and indisputable context, not professional ethicians divining truth of any kind, whether “their” truth or “the” truth.

Sure, truth is not truth if it is based on falsehoods rather than facts. But facts are much more quotidian, basic things than truth is. Tradesmen should be in the service of the reader, providing facts so that the readers themselves can consider all the facts and try to apply reason to figure out what the truth is.

And while Holt is right that it is not the reporter’s job to be “fair” in the sense of giving equal time and weight to falsehood as to fact, that idea of formulaic “fairness” never has been considered part of a journalist’s job. Fairness has never meant an arithmetical form of bean counting to the effect that if one quotes, say, 40 words from one side, one must quote 40 words from the other. Fairness in the journalistic sense means giving an initial respect to all sides, meaning a certain assumption of earned credibility, while presenting facts as unearthed by a process that is studiously neutral and transparent. Sometimes, those facts themselves dictate a less-then-equivalent amount of print (or cyberprint) space for one “side” than for the other – but that has always been the case in journalistic ethics, and is thus nothing new.

The problem is that so many reporters these days aren’t content with that. Instead, they think they are the very arbiters of truth. That conceit leads them to jump the gun, to assume too quickly that “their” truth, the herd’s truth, is “the” truth.

So – to finally get to concrete examples – they decide, without a single fact to justify it, that Hunter Biden’s laptop is merely “Russian disinformation,” when in reality it was, yes, Hunter Biden’s laptop and it did, yes, contain material unambiguously from Hunter Biden of a tremendously embarrassing nature. They were wrong about what the truth was, and in their arrogance they presented to the public the major, now provable, untruth that the laptop was a Russian plot.

They collectively decide, without a single fact to justify it, that if Georgia codifies for the first time ever the available of drop-boxes for voting – an expansion of voting opportunity beyond any non-pandemic availability in the state’s history – that the expansion is actually a “suppression” of the vote. They present this not as opinion, but as fact. The idea that Republicans are engaged in “voter suppression” is their truth, so they proclaim it to be the truth.

Well, true fairness would mean that they don’t act as arbiters of truth at all, no matter what Lester Holt says. True fairness would mean “just the facts, ma’am,” and let the body politic, made up of hundreds of millions of individuals, decide how to interpret those facts. The truth is not the media’s cross to bear.

Tags: Opinion, Beltway Confidential, Lester Holt, Journalism, NBC, fact check

Original Author: Quin Hillyer

Original Location: NBC’s Lester Holt is wrong: Journalists don’t do ‘truth’

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