standards

From a while back, Charlie Warzel: 

There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets. 

I think Warzel’s framing of the issue is telling. Anyone skeptical of contemporary American journalism would instantly flag the phrase “the rigor and standards of traditional outlets”: “Hey Charlie, I think you mean ‘the rigor and standards that traditional outlets claim to uphold but in fact do not.’” 

Similarly, later in the piece, a conversation with the journalist Judith Angwin, Warzel addresses Angwin thus: 

You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t. 

But aren’t you? For instance, was there not a concerted effort on the part of many MSM outlets to hide the diminishment of Joe Biden, a diminishment painfully and relentlessly documented in this long WSJ piece? 

Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself. 

And this is true of all of us, isn’t it? Which is why a blog post from eleven years ago still repays our attention: Scott Alexander’s “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.”