Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.” (Hear it here.)
One institution, above all others, should instill that idea into the minds of each generation: journalism. Instead, the industry has become a toxic, rage-inducing machine desperate for your attention.
Recently, a prominent figure in the field unintentionally exposed one of the biggest reasons: News executives have lost sight of the whole point of journalism. They even took a satirical warning about the media gone wrong and turned it into a marching order. Hear all about it in the latest episode, including how a classic movie factors in.
Weapon of affliction
I wrote previously about an attack piece by Margaret Sullivan, director of a “center for journalism ethics” at Columbia. She violated journalistic ethics in a screed for The Guardian. One line in her column summarizes the rot at the heart of Big Media:
“Journalism is supposed to ‘afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.’”
Huh? No. Here’s the world’s easiest quiz.
She put those words in quotes, without attribution. Unlike, apparently, Sullivan and the editors at The Guardian, I looked up where the quote originates: a 124-year-old joke at the media’s expense.
In 1902, Chicago humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote a piece criticizing the media for having too much power. According to Quote Investigator, Dunne wrote:
The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterward.
Later, those six words were laundered by media figures who presented them as a good thing without apparently bothering to learn where they came from. The idea was mentioned in the film Inherit the Wind.
Journalism schools churn out activists
A “comfortable” person might be comfortable hearing the truth; an “afflicted” person might not be. It doesn’t matter. Journalism’s job remains the same.
But that false idea is at the heart of what’s wrong with today’s media: a belief that the job is to “comfort”those deemed “afflicted” and “afflict” those deemed “comfortable.” It’s why victim narratives have overtaken everything else.
Mike Pesca and I discussed this in Episode 81. (It’s definitely worth listening, if you haven’t yet.) Executives gave free rein to activist-oriented young people “the journalism schools were pumping out,” he said.
I explained how Qatari investments played into that, recasting Islamist terrorists as afflicted victims. Meanwhile, Trump’s first election, following a campaign of extreme lying, shocked the media. News agencies responded by putting activism on behalf of the political left (“the resistance”) first, over pursuing the whole truth wherever it leads.
“It was seen as the right thing to do,” Pesca said. He explained that many news organizations decided, “This is an exceptional time, and we have to make exceptions… Or it wasn’t even debated. It was like, ‘Of course, to the ramparts!’”
At They Stand Corrected, I have a different mantra: The job of journalism is to tell truths that matter, always. Not to afflict, comfort, or play games with anyone’s emotions. And certainly not to act out an old joke. See my response to Sullivan on X here,
MLK also warned that, “Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths.” Instead of giving lip service to his memory, news agencies should take heed and end their failures.
JL
P.S. On this MLK Day, the founding membership for this newsletter is discounted to a rate celebrating his birthday. And here’s a reminder of where he stood on another issue: