The world of reporting has become an opinion jungle, especially as this country splits in two increasingly hardened political groupings. News writers used to assert that all they did was “report the facts.” Or, as the New York Times still says, cover all the news that’s fit to print.
You can still find reporting that is relatively neutral, especially at places like the Associated Press (though too often it consists of competing quotes on “both sides” of an issue, as if there were two sides and only two sides to every issue). Once FOX News decided any lie could work if it snagged clicks and viewers and exacerbated public tension and conflict, the media seems to have decided it was fine to blend opinion, propaganda, and news reporting. The Times appears to have made the same decision, though it takes careful reading to detect.
I am a Times subscriber. They still do the best job of any US media company in breadth, depth, and detail of coverage. But my hunger for more unbiased reporting is increasingly being starved by their tendency to preach to the choir. Articles do so in a way that both pontificates – “we are the Times; we know best” – and cheer-leads for a particular interpretation of the news.
This struck me last week when I read two sentences in a New York Times piece about Asian security issues written by Edward Wong. His news focus was the joint Russia-China fighter/bomber flights that happened while Biden was in Japan. Here was Biden working hard to strengthen US-Australia-New Zealand-Japan relations. And those pesky Russians and Chinese upstaged the effort by flying their bombers and fighters – together!! – through the Japanese and South Korean air defense zones.
The sentences that stuck out were:
“Chinese and Russian officials have been strengthening their military ties in recent years, and the two nations have been growing closer in part because of the highly personal bond between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin. Both men are autocrats who harbor hostility toward the United States and aim to weaken American power.”
So, let’s parse these sentences for a minute. They only sound true. How does Wong know that these two leaders have a “highly personal bond?” Do they hold hands, share dates, complement each other on their personal beauty, charisma or taste for power? Do they look into each other’s soul and like what they see? Use the same hairdresser, swap recommendations on nail salons? No, really, what does “highly personal bond” mean here? It suggests an intimacy that may have nothing to do with the actions these leaders are taking.
If we take a closer look at what Xi and Putin are actually doing, it is not a bromance or lovefest. Like all political leaders – autocratic or democratic – that I have seen, and I have seen a few, they are not too concerned with personal bonding. I am all for “chemistry” between leaders, but I don’t think Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin relied on it; they probably disliked each other (easy in Churchill’s case) and everyone disliked DeGaulle.
No, they are in the business of governing and leading their countries in the international jungle. They are more likely to be focused on what they see as the interests of their countries, just as Biden does.
That means what they are doing reflects those interests, as they see them. They could be right or wrong, dangerous or not; that is not Wong’s business. This is what heads of state and government do and the interpretation should be on the editorial side of the paper.
Which brings me to the really objectionable and unobjective part of what Wong wrote: “Both men are autocrats who harbor hostility toward the United States and aim to weaken American power.” This is editorial cheerleading in disguise, seeking to pass for wisdom and insight.
I’ll accept “autocrats.” Seems to fit with the singular, personal power each of them has over his internal political system. It’s the power to say “frog” and watch everyone else at home jump.
Then come the words “harbor hostility.” Collin’s dictionary defines “harbor” as holding a feeling “you have…in your mind over a long period of time.” The word has an undertone; it suggests that there is no reason for these two men to feel any kind of hostility toward the US. After all, the US is the global good guy, so hostile feelings could only be explained by some emotional quirk each man has. Maybe they need to let go of these feelings, the sentence argues, instead of harboring them.
Really, NATO expansion was so yesterday with no implications for how Putin might view the world, US intentions, or Russian security. And US efforts to contain China, well, that was Trump or someone else, right, certainly not the Biden administration. Get over that, too; there is no reason for either leader, autocrat or not, to think the US might be behaving like a country with interests, asserting them in the world, with implications for Russian or Chinese security.
And then the last part of the sentence. These awful men want to weaken “American power.” How dare they harbor such thoughts?! Or just maybe, Xi and Putin are two leaders who seek to expand their own nations’ power. Put that way, it would sound more normal, more realistic. Maybe that kind of language would objectively reflect the shifts in the global balance of power that have been happening for some years.
Xi and Putin may have less a deliberate intention to weaken someone than the goal of asserting Russian and Chinese interests in a global power game. How normal is that? And how biased is Wong’s reporting, planting his editorial opinion in the middle of the piece, using the kind of soft and subtle language that sounds knowledgeable and objective?
The sentences are cheerleading or, to use another metaphor, putting the reporter’s finger on the scale. They mislead the reader down one road.
I am not saying one cannot have an opinion on the Russian and Chinese overflights. The major powers in the region do these things pretty regularly. The US military has flown aircraft and sailed ships through the air and waters between Taiwan and China for decades. It’s part of the power game.
I am saying that an opinion about the intentions of a country has no place in a news story and opinion masquerading as news is creeping into Times reporting regularly.
So, I tried a thought experiment. How might I rewrite that sentence to be more neutral and objective?
Biased sentence #1: Wong’s version: “Both men are autocrats who harbor hostility toward the United States and aim to weaken American power.”
Biased sentence #2: “Both men are strong leaders who resist the renewed American effort to continue to dominate the Pacific region.”
More objective version: “Both men are autocrats who seek to rebalance global power against a still powerful United States and to rewrite some of the international rules.”
The objective version is not perfect. Some readers will want to take sides and want reporters to take sides too, using one of the two biased versions.
Version three tries to put what Xi and Putin did in context. It resists using the authority and apparent objectivity of a Times reporter to bias the reader’s understanding. It tries to describe the actual power balancing efforts as neutrally as possible.
You try it. I am concerned that the Times increasingly doesn’t try. FOX doesn’t bother to try. As a result, the public is ill-served. Policy makers are corrupted, too, because many of them, especially in the Congress, echo the reporter’s bias as fact.
The downside is bad decisions, decisions that reflect bias. Bad decisions increase the risk of bad outcomes because they were not based on an understanding of what leaders intended by their actions, whether one loves them or not. In the end, America’s and the world’s best interests are not well served.
Thank you! I subscribe too and I've been increasingly pissed off by embedded prejudices in their reporting. And don't get me started on their headline writers, who often add spin to fairly clean articles, even sometimes changing the entire meaning of the article.
I have noticed this trend widespread in print and broadcast journalism as well. The NYT and WP used to label analytical pieces as News Analysis to make clear they were not straight reportage. They seem to have dropped the practice several years ago, perhaps causing reporters to be less aware of when their reporting was reflecting their own biases. I started souring on the PBS Newshour a couple of years ago when it began increasingly seemed an echo box of my own perspectives, not offering me anything that would challenge them. It’s reporters sometimes seem unaware of their own lack of objectivity. In the last year of the Trump presidency, one young Newshour reporter presented a summary of what she said was what Trump thought, not realizing that unless she was quoting him, her summary was her interpretation of what he thought and needed to be presented as such.
Being constantly aware of one’s own inherent biases is difficult, but we see now where the failure to make the effort is leading us. Journalists in particular need to try harder. Perhaps in print journalism bringing back the News Analysis label, formalizing the distinction between straight news reporting and analysis which usually reflects an particular perspective will help raise case consciousness of the distinction.