“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.”

—–Retired Wall Street Journal editor Ken Wells in A Retro Proposal to Restore The Public’s Trust in Media,” his guest column in “Ethics and Journalism.”

The “retro proposal”? Journalists have become “blinded by their inability—or worse, unwillingness—to see past their biases. This is not journalism. It’s propagandism.” Therefore, he says, “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 think Wells means what used to be called ethical, responsible journalism. Gee, what a concept!

Read it all, but here are a few more excerpts from an excellent essay:

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “This erosion [of trust]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.” 

That’s enough; Wells is a superb writer as well as a perceptive one, and he deserves his entire article to be considered as he wrote it. Right now I’m wondering when Ethics Alarms first compared Trump’s election to the paradigm-shifting election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. I guarantee that it was before that comparison was ever whispered in the pages of the New York Times.