If you want to fix the credibility of the media, bring back the assiduously agnostic newsroom.
I say this as a semi-retired journalist who got my start by the generosity of editors who hired me on a hunch rather than any real qualifications. At 19, I started covering cops, courts and car wrecks for my community weekly newspaper in the drowsy bayou town of Houma, Louisiana. Having lucked into my life’s work, I went on to an adventurous four-decade-plus career that included 24 years as a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal and stints at the Miami Herald, Conde Nast Portfolio and Bloomberg News.
One thing I learned from the start is that journalism isn’t a popularity contest. Yes, you can write reader-pleasing features about puppies, gifted students and hometown heroes. “But fundamentally, we’re the watchdogs, and watchdogs bite and bark and annoy people,” I recall John B. Gordon, the editor-in-chief of my old Louisiana weekly telling me.
But with that watchdog role came a tall responsibility, what Gordon framed as our “compact with our readers.” It was the standard stuff that should be taught in newsrooms and journalism schools—accuracy, fairness, an eagerness to quickly and fully correct errors, and an ironclad obligation to give the people, companies or institutions you were writing about a honest chance to comment on matters of contention.
Oh, and this one: “Always let the facts get in the way of a good story.” This was an admonition that, while we probably have a “narrative” in mind as we approach a story, we need to remain open to the possibility that our reporting might dispel the narrative. It could lead us in an entirely different direction or to even kill the story outright.
I accept that no person or institution is 100% bias free. But the best reporters and editors that I worked with over all those years strived hard to live up to this code even as we sometimes fell short. We thought of ourselves as honest brokers, not beholden to or enamored of special interests, political parties, big business, protest movements or cultural trends or fads. We covered these things—we didn’t join them.
We may have been registered to vote but we didn’t wear our political affiliation on our sleeves or, in the spirit of neutrality, bring our politics into the office. (And our editors would likely have sent us packing if we did.) We didn’t believe the dominant political parties were intrinsically evil or good. We knew enough history—and had enough humility—to understand that each party over time had produced its share of rogues and do-gooders, heroes and scoundrels. Following the money in the name of keeping an eye on the public’s purse was always going to be a better path to uncovering stories of malfeasance and corruption than political affiliation.
The same rules applied to big business. Steel and oil companies and banks had in the course of history done wondrous things and committed colossal blunders, the same as the tech and fashion companies that made our gadgets and clothes. Geniuses could turn out to be bad bosses and crooks. Bad bosses and crooks could turn out to be geniuses. Life is complicated, and issues are almost never black and white. We felt we had to be open to all possibilities. The best stories became the best stories because they were often full of nuance reflecting reporting that dug into and admitted complexities.
We were in no way anti-government, understanding as per above that government institutions were capable of doing great things and bad things. But we maintained a healthy and necessary skepticism toward government because we understood the power imbalance between government and its citizens. The police could arrest you, the IRS could sue you, the board of health could shut down your restaurant. For citizens wrongly in the government’s crosshairs, the press—when it took seriously its historic role as watchdog—often proved the only defender that citizens had.
We also refused to be part of anyone’s “resistance” but our own resistance to those who would attempt to pressure us to change or even kill stories they didn’t like. If the reporting was solid we’d hear them out and tell them, politely, to get lost.
As a result, we often irritated—well, sometimes outraged— people on all sides of the political and cultural divide. But irritation or outrage wasn’t the goal. Enlightenment was. We played the long game, trusting that our discerning readers—the great middle of our audience looking for relevant, honest, unbiased information on matters that affected their lives—would come to invest their trust in us.
No one would dispute that somewhere along the line, something has gone terribly awry. You’ve likely read this year’s Gallup poll that found that 63% of Americans give the media more or less a vote of no confidence. And this erosion was across the political spectrum of people identifying as Democrat, Republican and independents.
Companion polling may explain these bleak numbers. A 2022 Knight Foundation/Gallup poll similarly found that three in four respondents believed media companies and the reporters working for them were pushing an agenda.
This erosion predates the first election of Donald J. Trump but let’s be honest that the political earthquake that Trump set off in 2016 and whose tremors continued this November has greatly exacerbated it. Once respected elements of the media rushed to declare themselves part of the “anti-Trump resistance” — signaling that traditional standards of fairness and objectivity no longer applied. And they meant it.
Outraged and shocked progressives—that is, much of the Democrat Party and many people in media—framed Trump as the Great Satan come to destroy democracy. With a few notable exceptions the press has bought into this narrative. As the Gallup poll shows, the public has been paying attention and a large majority don’t like what they see.
To be clear, few could dispute that Trump is an incendiary and divisive character with a penchant for hurling crude analogies and verbal bombs at his detractors. But more sober minds also might recognize that half of the country sees him as a counterweight to liberal stances on issues such as the border, climate, crime, transgender rights, pandemic lockdowns and the economy.
So imagine, instead of embracing the Great Satan narrative, we covered Trump—warts and all—as an extraordinary American political phenomenon perhaps not seen since the populist presidency of Andrew Jackson. Do not mistake this as a call to absolve Trump of any actual wrongdoing or to go soft on the reporting. Instead it is a plea to instill some sense of balance and fairness in the coverage. Surely, I’m not alone in believing this approach would have given readers and listeners a far more nuanced and valuable view of the American mood and Trump’s appeal and staying power—and perhaps helped to stanch the public’s corrosive loss of trust in our craft.
And at any rate, if the lopsided coverage of Trump was, in fact, a strategy to destroy him, well, it’s proved a huge flop. Trump won. Much of the media was or should be embarrassed.
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As further support for the benefits of agnostic journalism, I would point to Nicholas Wade’s contrarian reportage of the origins of the covid virus. Recall that from the moment Trump mused that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese-government lab doing bat-virus research, the vast majority of the mainstream media went into overtime to either ignore the possibility or openly mock it. Some leading government scientists (who, it would turn out, had conflicts of interest) chirped up in the prestigious journal, The Lancet, that any conclusion other than the Chinese government’s assertion of a natural origin was a “conspiracy theory.”
The media tended to accept this uncritically and ranks closed around the cynical meme that any suggestion of a lab leak was not just “fringe” but “racist.” Or as Wade wrote, “The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.” How did it come to be that so many in the media, the nominal watchdog of government, behaved more like a lapdog–in some cases censoring and mocking contrarian voices at the urging of bureaucrats and political potentates? Journalists in bed with the government? This is not how we should roll.
Wade—who previously served as a science writer for the New York Times—entered these roiled waters with the clear eye of an old-school agnostic journalist. His reportage points out what’s obvious: The lab is down the street, metaphorically speaking, from the epicenter of the outbreak. The lab was doing so-called “gain-of-function” research whose goal is to make it easier for animal viruses to cross into human hosts. The idea—not uncontroversial—is that we ought to know what these viruses could do, and how to combat them, if they ever got loose.
He writes about a strange tick in the molecular structure of the virus that some virologists say is a clear indication of lab manipulation. He also reported that some of the signatories to the dismissive Lancet article were themselves doing gain-of-function research and therefore deeply conflicted. Moreover, emails would later surface that showed their assertion of certainty to a natural-origin theory was untrue. They were not of a single mind.
Wade has dutifully reported the opinion of virologists who continue to think that the virus originated from natural animal mutation. He admits we may never know. Yet now, even the U.S. Department of Energy has opined that the lab-leak hypothesis is very likely the right one. That’s the power of agnostic journalism. Wade flipped the narrative by simply doing what journalists should do: maintain a healthy skepticism about the sweeping assertions of government authorities and so-called experts. He assumes readers are adults and are not harmed by facts that disturb their assumptions or their political leanings.
Moreover, the truth is essential. If the virus that rained misery, death and economic devastation on the world escaped from a lab, we ought to know that and hold China accountable. And if the lab-leak theory turns out to be true—against a backdrop of a media rushing, with sparse exceptions, to write it off as fringe and racist—then you can see why narrative-driven journalism isn’t just wrong.
It’s dangerous.
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Let me acknowledge the most common critique of the agnostic journalism I’m advocating. It’s dismissed by critics as “he-said/she-said journalism.”
The argument goes like this. We should be pursuing the “truth” instead of finding and quoting advocates in the name of “balance.” Why should we be giving voice to people that are clearly on the “wrong side” of not just the narrative but the wrong side of history itself? Such “fake balance” distorts journalism, not improves it.
Well, on one hand I suppose I take the point. As a matter of balance, would you interview a Nazi to get their opinion on whether the holocaust was real or a Klansman to get the “other side” of the civil rights struggle? No, of course not. But these are extreme examples that the anti-agnostics extrapolate to give cover to people who insist their narratives on contentious contemporary matters—race, climate, gender, politics, you name it—are unassailable. They already know how the world works and for them journalism simply means cherry-picking facts that support the narrative. There is no other side.
The problem with that is that it’s all too easy to find examples of why trading journalistic agnosticism for ideological dogmatism is a recipe for disaster. We have in recent years been stumbling through a veritable landslide of discredited narrative-driven stories: the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players whose lives were shattered by months of stories assuming their guilt; Rolling Stone’s egregious, reckless and wrong coverage of a supposed rape at a University of Virginia frat house; the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax; the Covington Catholic High School student accused of racism, to name a few. In each case, these corrosive narratives were flogged ceaselessly by certain media outlets whose judgment had been blinded by their inability—or worse, unwillingness—to see past their biases. This is not journalism. It’s propagandism.
This is why I invite journalists to re-embrace our agnostic roots. We need to return to being the adults in the room, unabashedly reaffirm our role as the honest broker. No political party, business interest, government entity or activist group owns the truth. Everybody has a motive and an agenda, sources and leakers especially. Truth-tellers can sometimes lie and liars can sometimes tell the truth. Our job is to sort through the noise and bickering, the claims and counter-claims, the data and the chaff, to parse issues honestly without regard to whom it may offend or please or what the dominant narrative insists upon.
I do not expect this advice to be warmly received in certain precincts of contemporary media where journalists strive to be social-media influencers and think their job is to mold the story or even become the story. But I think I have stats on my side. In 1976, the first year of that annual Gallup poll showing this year’s dreadful erosion in media trust, pollsters found that 72% of those polled had “a great deal/fair amount” of trust in the press. This year a mere 31% felt that way. If we ignore this slide, Elon Musk will be right about our irrelevance.
Ken Wells lives most of the year in Chicago. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and during his tenure as an editor on Page One of The Wall Street Journal two of his writers won Pulitzers.