It is true that once upon a time Superman’s day job was that of a journalist, and now the public ranks that job on par with that of shyster lawyers and buy-here-pay-here used car salesmen.
Some people have even claimed that true journalism is as dead as Edward R. Murrow.
I beg to differ.
This week, our Executive Editor Debbie van Tuyll changed the designation of a story I wrote about the history of the Masters Tournament from an article to a column.
The policy of The Augusta Press is that any story that contains even the hint of opinion or assumption cannot be labeled a news article. It has to be published as a column. That’s because it should be easy for the reader to determine if they are reading a factual article or whether , in any way, the reporter inserted personal opinion.
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Bias of any kind is not allowed in news articles, and plenty of stories get kicked back to the writer if the editor feels that there might be another side to the story that is not being presented.
Debbie is a bit of a hardliner when it comes to any form of bias appearing in an article, and with good reason; no matter how many citations and quotes are present, someone is always going to take issue and make an accusation of “yellow journalism.”
While that may seem unfair, the national media, overall, has earned public cynicism for, at best, slanting the news and, at worst, outright lying.
Rather than ask Debbie why she changed the designation of my piece, I went back and reread it.
Two phrases immediately stuck out: “No one could be sure if the tournament would ever return,“ and, “due to the fact that the land was dirt cheap.”
Both of those phrases are assumptions.
Now, I could have gone and pulled the original deed and found out what the Augusta National actually spent to purchase the land in 1931. Running that number through an inflation calculator would tell me if the land was really “dirt cheap;” but, I felt that was overkill and getting somewhat into the weeds. Everyone who paid attention to history in school knows that hardly anyone was building anything in the Great Depression, much less a golf course.
So, Debbie was right; even though the story did not contain bias or misinformation, the story did contain assumptions and could not be published as anything other than a column.
Where journalists really do find themselves in quicksand is reporting on stories of a political nature.
It is true, in my opinion, that the national news media, all of them, are biased. Many times, journalists must bow to the corporate ownership or find themselves unemployed.
Recently, longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, an avowed liberal, castigated the organization for having 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans on its editorial staff.
My reaction is, so what?
Writers are creative types, and creative types are often more liberal.
People try to make the case that NPR accepts National Endowment of the Arts funding and therefore the broadcasts should contain no bias at all. In a perfect world, NPR would be totally unbiased; but, regardless of the funding sources, NPR is protected by the First Amendment.
As someone who identifies as a conservative, I do not believe that the media overall has a bias towards the left or right. Bias exists across the spectrum and we should all be aware of that.
Sure, MSNBC refused report deeply on the Hunter Biden laptop story, but, at the same time, Fox News has consistently refused to acknowledge many of Donald Trump’s foibles.
Meanwhile, it is no wonder that people who read the “Drudge Report” are prepping for the apocalypse after reading all the stories there about how World War III has already started and no one knows it yet.
All of these national media outlets put commentators on-air and label them experts, when really they are only experts at being narcissistic babblers.
People lost their minds when a liberal talking head made the ridiculous statement that the recent eclipse was caused by climate change. However, people forget that the media in the 1970s had a love affair with rabid homophobe Anita Bryant until she totally proved herself to be a lunatic.
Those with an agenda also use subliminal tactics to manipulate. Virtually every time CBS News and their ilk post a photo of Donald Trump, they choose a photo of the former president where the freeze-frame appears to show him in a spittle-laced scowling rant.
At the same time, Fox News tends to superimpose a pride or trans flag into every picture they use of President Biden, even if the story has nothing to do with LGBT people.
Ultimately, the First Amendment protects bias that does not contain libel; therefore, freedom of the press requires some responsibility on the part of the public to read what is being presented as news with a critical eye.
The practice of freedom of the press is relatively new in human history; it did not come about with the invention of the printing press, though people started theorizing about it about then because leaders started shutting down presses for publishing information they didn’t want the public to know.
In extreme cases, printing material that angered others could get one killed.
In 1633, renowned astronomer Galileo was labeled a heretic for writing that the Earth orbited the Sun; he was forced, under the threat of torture and death, to get on his knees and recant what he had documented to be the truth.
The pendulum does swing in the opposite direction, don’t forget that prior to becoming a vicious dictator, Benito Mussolini was a journalist.
The First Amendment is part of the bedrock of American society.
The Civil Rights Movement in the South might have been squashed by the likes of George Wallace, if the media had not aired and printed photos of Wallace’s police officers unleashing dogs on and spraying non-violent protestors with high-pressure water hoses.
Most of the journalists I know are deeply committed to exposing the truth, but journalists are not robots. We are human and we err. That is why having a strict editorial policy is important.
Some might think that Artificial Intelligence might one day offer completely bias-free reporting; but keep in mind that even AI can disseminate misinformation; after all, according to Google’s Gemini, George Washington was a Black man.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
