George Orwell Identifies the Main Enemy of the Free Press: It’s the “Intellectual Cowardice” of the

[rangerrebew]

George Orwell Identifies the Main Enemy of the Free Press: It’s the “Intellectual Cowardice” of the Press Itself

in Media, Politics | July 17th, 2018 1 Comment

Tucked away in the style section of yesterday’s Washington Post—after the President of the United States basically declared allegiance to a hostile dictator, again, after issuing yet more denunciations of the U.S. press as “enemies of the people”—was an admonition from Margaret Sullivan to the “reality-based press.” “The job will require clarity and moral force,” writes Sullivan, “in ways we’re not always all that comfortable with.”

Many have exhausted themselves in asking, what makes it so hard for journalists to tell the truth with “clarity and moral force”? Answers range from the conspiratorial—journalists and editors are bought off or coerced—to the mundane: they normalize aberrant behavior in order to relieve cognitive dissonance and maintain a comfortable status quo. While the former explanation can’t be dismissed out of hand in the sense that most journalists ultimately work for media megaconglomerates with their own vested interests, the latter is just as often offered by critics like NYU’s Jay Rosen.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/george-orwell-identifies-main-enemy-free-press-intellectual-cowardice-press.html

[goatprairie]

The idea of the "unbiased" press/media has always been a myth. Honest media outlets would admit their bias and let the readers go from there.