“We pull no punches: when the weight of the objective evidence is clear, we must not conceal the truth through euphemism; rather, we should employ direct language. Our aim is not to be perceived as impartial by the people we imagine are our readers, but to accurately inform them about the world they live in.” 

—-Reporter Wesley Lowery, Journalist in Residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in his essay, “A Test of the News”

When I encountered the essay titled “A Test of the News” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I foolishly anticipated a careful diagnostic analysis of why American journalism was so ethically wretched, and a perceptive prescription for fixing the problem. Boy, do I have a flat learning curve. Why would I ever think that, knowing what I, what you, what anyone who has been paying attention knows from observing the carnage unethical, incompetent, biased journalism has inflicted on American democracy over the past decade? My delusion was especially unforgivable since 1) Lowery is a journalist, 2) he’s a Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist, and you know what kind of journalists the Pulitzers like, and 3) he’s also an college instructor. Education is running neck and neck with journalism as our most thoroughly unethical profession, though journalism is clearly the one most likely beyond repair.

The first three paragraphs of Lowery’s screed were bad enough, but I didn’t reach the point where I normally would have stopped reading until paragraph #4:

“To this day, news organizations across the country often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). Such decisions, I wrote, are journalistic failings, but also moral ones: when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

When a police officer shoots an arrested suspect who tries to take his gun from him and then charges him with his 300 pound bulk, that is “government violence, “and the “weight of evidence is clear”—you know, as in “Hands up, don’t shoot!” That recycled Black Lives Matters mythology pretty much reveals all I need to know about Wesley Lowery, and he confirms my conclusion with the egomaniacal quote at the beginning of this post. He believes, as do so many editors and reporters echoing the same arrogant delusion, that journalists, narrow as their education and experience is, are capable of explaining to the public the true nature of the world they live in. This means the world view journalists want them to live in. Yet reporters do not know when the “weight of objective evidence is clear”; they don’t have the depth, wisdom or intellect to know what the “truth” is (don’t make me list examples again), and what ideological propagandists like Lowery call “accurate” includes shading, spin, soaked with bias, and the strategic omission of facts that undermine their narratives. The delusion is that having an outsized bullhorn automatically confers the ability to use it responsibly.

Perhaps the funniest part of the essay, if something this sinister can be called funny, is the 850 word middle section in which Lowery appeals to the authority of reporter/pundit/journalism guru Walter Lippman, who, Lowery says, “wrote his most famous press critiques at a time much like our own. A bigoted president had worked to reverse strides toward Black equality. Technological advances and waves of new immigrant workers were seismically altering the nation’s demographics and economy. Citizens felt financially perilous even as industry titans became the richest men ever to roam the planet.” Sure, Wesley, the 1920s were just like the 2020s. Woodrow Wilson was like Donald Trump, legal immigration then was like illegal immigration now. You know: objective truth! After essentially letting Lippman’s writings do all of his work for him, Lowery admits, “Lippmann himself …never practiced the methodical journalism he had advocated.”

What should that tell Lowery? Never mind: Lowrey’s not paying attention: soon he’s back to appealing to the authority Walter Lippman again for another 300 words or so, while pointing out that journalists know best, and the public must be herded like goats:

“The ideology and theory of change taken as gospel by many American journalists—the belief that the public can be provided with enough reliable factual information by a protected free press that its individuals can make logical choices for both themselves and the society as a whole—is one Lippmann himself quickly abandoned. The average citizen, he observed, has a perspective hopelessly morphed by their own experiences and will simply contort the available facts until they correspond with what they already believe true….In later writings, Lippmann called the very concept and wisdom of popular democracy—taken as a given in his early press criticisms—into question.”

As the essay proceeds, Lowery reveals himself as a journalist with an ideological agenda, and extols his colleagues to work to inculcate the public in “values”—his values, naturally; “diversity,” but not diverse points of view that challenge the right values, of course, the right values being those he holds dear; to report “truth,” which he is positive that journalists are inherently qualified to identify, and “the equal and fair treatment of all people,” which, if I correctly identify the odor wafting from his piece, means a government managed socialist state with some groups being favored over others.

[My internet was down when I wrote this post. I was unfamiliar with Lowery, but the biases in his article seemed to be such blatant, standard issue black activist social justice cant that I became certain that he was black—but I couldn’t check out my theory until this morning. Of course he is. My reference to the Michael Brown episode was written before that conformation, and sure enough, Lowery wrote a book about Ferguson.

Similarly unsurprisingly, Lowery’s conviction that he is qualified to decide what is “truth” is based on no broader educational background than his journalism studies and activities. Competent, trustworthy, ethical journalists’ race, ethnicity and sex should not be obvious to readers from what they write (Lowery argues at one point that the reporters’ CVs have no relevance to the validity of his reporting, which is nicely self-serving, and then his own essay goes on to prove that the assertion is false.) He is a one-trick pony insisting that good and responsible little one-trick ponies (like him) know what the public should and should not be informed about and how. The arrogance is staggering, but hardly unique to Lowery.]

Far from offering a path to a more trustworthy, responsible and and humility-based journalism, Lowery’s essay is an invaluable piece of evidence showing just how perverted, corrupt and alienated from its own ethics his profession has become. “A Test of the News” is not a cure for the disease that now infects the marrow of our democracy, but the disease itself, which the Columbia Journalism Review is actively spreading.